Info Wanted: 'LOTR - FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING': Green tint removed?

Hey gang, I am just wondering if anyone ever color corrected and restored the Extended Blu-Ray LOTR FOTR to its proper non-Matrix look? When the boxed set came out I was so completely disgusted with the obvious super green tint error on FOTR that I sold the set and never looked back.

I know it’s an error because I saw the Extended cut in a theater during the special marathon run and the very next day watched the BD on a huge screen. All of us who attended the screening the night before were shocked at how screwed up FOTR was on BD.

Never mind all the evidence posted online over the past two years. It’s clear as day. Even worse than the Teal Terminator. Much worse, actually.

Anyway, there are 720p torrents out there of corrected versions, but I would much rather have it done right without compressing it down.

Color correction is not my bag. Not my thing. I’m just curious if anyone here has done it.

Thanks

Look for kk650's version on tehparadox.

This post might interest you.

You_too also made an avisynth script, which you can re encode your bluray with: http://fotrfix.blog.com.

nirbateman said:

Look for kk650's version on tehparadox.

No offense against that guy but he only removed the slight green tint, he didn't fix the rest of the color errors like the dark teal everywhere.

And actually I think I could improve on that fix I posted as a blog back then. I didn't have colourlike for avisynth when I made it. That plugin would allow even more control.

I won't do this now though but maybe sometime in the future.

You_Too said:

nirbateman said:

Look for kk650's version on tehparadox.

Don't. No offense against that guy but he only removed the slight green tint, he didn't fix the rest of the color errors like the dark teal everywhere.

And actually I think I could improve on that fix I posted as a blog back then. I didn't have colourlike for avisynth when I made it. That plugin would allow even more control.

I won't do this now though but maybe sometime in the future.

You_Too, you really don't like me or my releases very much do you lol I jump from thread to thread in this forum and all I see if you crapping on my releases from on high.

If you are capable of doing much better than I have, please go ahead and do so, i'll be the first in line to check it out. I would love for someone to go ahead and create an even better version of a film I love. The reason I created my version in the first place was because I could find nobody else that had stepped up and done their own version.

Please try to show me and my releases a little more respect though, I implore you. Colour correction is not my profession, i'm just an amateur that does this in my spare time. It'd be nice to be able to read threads on this forum without constantly running into your posts denigrating my releases and scaring people off, its really poor form. Let people decide for themselves by creating your own version so everybody can compare. I'll be the first to admit if your version is superior. Until then, please stop scaring people off checking out what i've done.

lol, he is not scaring people off, he is informing them, You_Too is 1 of the nicest guys on this forum and is always around to help and answer questions, he is also a huge asset to our Team, and I know at least when I read his comments, I fully agree with him, he is that damn good.

Scaring people off, since when is giving information or an opinion a bad thing? some of those files of yours are pretty large to download just to find out that what You_Too said is 100% correct.

1 more thing, You_Too and I have discussed doing this, but for right now we just do not have the time with everything else going, but we will look into it when we are ready.

dark_jedi said:

lol, he is not scaring people off, he is informing them, You_Too is 1 of the nicest guys on this forum and is always around to help and answer questions, he is also a huge asset to our Team, and I know at least when I read his comments, I fully agree with him, he is that damn good.

Scaring people off, since when is giving information or an opinion a bad thing? some of those files of yours are pretty large to download just to find out that what You_Too said is 100% correct.

1 more thing, You_Too and I have discussed doing this, but for right now we just do not have the time with everything else going, but we will look into it when we are ready.

I know You_Too is a nice guy, I have been reading his posts since before I signed up here, so that's why i'm surprised to find him telling people not to check out my releases. I find that to be very poor form. If he doesn't like my releases of course he's free to state that opinion but explicitly telling others not to bother checking my releases out for themselves is very out of order IMHO.

If he's so good, all the more reason to create a definitive version of Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition, as I said before I'd love to check that out and see the film looking the best its ever looked. Until then though, people aren't able to see his release because he hasn't created it yet so let them check mine out in peace, mine is definately an improvement over the blu-ray IMHO and many others on tehparadox think so too. There's just no need to poo on anybody elses releases like that, its poor form and beneath him.

On a sidenote dark_jedi, I'd love to check out your regraded release of Conan the Barbarian, I was just wondering why you don't put it up on tehparadox or usenet where more people would be able to check it out and enjoy the work you and You_Too have done?

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

@kk650: before starting my "The Matrix [spoRv]" project, I downloaded your Matrix regraded; and it was one of the best attempt I've found it at that moment, even if not so close to DVD colors, it's really better than greener-than-green BD.

Keep on going, color regrading is not a science, it's more like magic... (^^,) and we are a little bit sorcerers, aren't we? Well, I'm more like the mad scientist you could find into my signature, though...

Cheers, I'm glad you enjoyed my Matrix release! I agree completely about it being like magic, that's probably why I enjoy doing it so much! It still amazes me how the feel of a film can change completely just by changing a few colours. It does feel a bit like being a tinkering mad scientist now that you mention it. As for stopping, not a chance! I'm having too much fun! :)

I'd love to check out your The Matrix [spoRv] release, is myspleen the only way to get my hands on it? If it is only on myspleen right now, have you considered putting it up on tehparadox or usenet as well? I'd imagine that the interest for this release would be great.

@kk650: I'm sorry. What I said might've looked like I'm trying to bash you but it was simply what DJ said: Informing.

I looked at your screenshot of the snow scene from Fellowship and saw that you had balanced out the green but hadn't done the rest that I tried to do, so I simply thought I'd inform people that was the case, so they knew what they had to choose from. And I swear it was no harm intended, same with Terminator.

I think it's very difficult to express emotions with text on a forum, but a good thing to keep in mind is that nothing I ever type here is meant to harm or offend anybody.

You're obviously talented and respect films the way they were originally intended and I understand you're doing your best to fix what's bugging people about some releases. I actually got interested in checking out your versions of The Hobbit and The Matrix sometime.

EDIT: I removed the word "don't" from my previous post since that did actually seem a bit inappropriate. Everybody's free to check out your releases if they want to.

You_Too said:

@kk650: I'm sorry. What I said might've looked like I'm trying to bash you but it was simply what DJ said: Informing.

I looked at your screenshot of the snow scene from Fellowship and saw that you had balanced out the green but hadn't done the rest that I tried to do, so I simply thought I'd inform people that was the case, so they knew what they had to choose from. And I swear it was no harm intended, same with Terminator.

I think it's very difficult to express emotions with text on a forum, but a good thing to keep in mind is that nothing I ever type here is meant to harm or offend anybody.

You're obviously talented and respect films the way they were originally intended and I understand you're doing your best to fix what's bugging people about some releases. I actually got interested in checking out your versions of The Hobbit and The Matrix sometime.

EDIT: I removed the word "don't" from my previous post since that did actually seem a bit inappropriate. Everybody's free to check out your releases if they want to.

Apology accepted You_Too, I know you're a nice guy from all your posts, thats why your use of 'don't' jarred me a little. I'm sorry if I came across a little defensive myself.

You can't base my regrade of fellowship of the ring off that single snow scene though because I regraded the films using many scenes in the film as colour references and striking a balance between all of them to try to make them ALL look good, not just that snow scene.  In fact, if I remember correctly, I was not able to make that snow scene white like it was in the theatrical blu-ray because it messed up the rest of the film's colour grading, so I had to settle for that scene having a blue tint which I thought was probably intentional by PJ because that scene is meant to be very cold.

If you haven't actually checked my version of Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition in full, please do before you pass judgement, I spent a great deal of time striking a balance in the colour grading across the whole film, not just scenes that are meant to be white. You can't fairly judge the release based off that single screenshot in the snow.

Yeah, it sure is a tough one to do with only one setting.

I remember there's one scene where the Fellowship walks up in front of the camera and there was some weird very strong blue shadow on a shield or something. And in the introduction of the Shire, there's some shot of a pig, where the pig is green even after the tint being removed if I remember correct. The movie is full of weird things they've caused by their new and very strange color timing.

You_Too said:

Yeah, it sure is a tough one to do with only one setting.

I remember there's one scene where the Fellowship walks up in front of the camera and there was some weird very strong blue shadow on a shield or something. And in the introduction of the Shire, there's some shot of a pig, where the pig is green even after the tint being removed if I remember correct. The movie is full of weird things they've caused by their new and very strange color timing.

It certainly is a very tricky one to do with one setting, no argument there. Easily the most difficult release I've ever done in terms of settling on a single regrading setting for the whole film. The amounts of times I encoded this only to still be unsatisfied with certain scenes and have to reencode it again with a different setting, too many times to count...

So the theatrical version Blu's look better than the Extended Blu's?  Or is it just color differences here.

Chewtobacca said:

This post might interest you.

Thanks for referencing that! All these techniques are definitely worth a look to correct the "damage".

kk650 said:

It certainly is a very tricky one to do with one setting ...

What was/is your technique/script/program?

@ _,,,^..^,,,_

Your sample thumbnails [for example: 1st picture properties = "http://s16.postimg.org/7rol9stv7/image.jpg"] are not showing, at least for me. But clicking on them do show the full-sized pictures [link = "http://postimg.org/image/5zvmewai9/full/" and properties = "http://s16.postimg.org/6peer9b1v/image.jpg"]. Is something wrong with the thumbnails?

On this first picture, the ColourMatch V4 script failed on the upper-right third of the sky, even though it looks like it should've worked. (I checked for crush & blow-out and there is none in that area.) Any thoughts on what happened here?

@ Jetrell Fo

Amazon - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Extended Edition 5-Disc Set) [Blu-ray] (2012) - reviewes
Mateo said:

The Green Tint was not intentionally added!
I have the extended DVD set- no green tint!
I have the itunes digital copies of the extended movies (that actually came free with the boxed bluray set)- no green tint!
Bluray extended towers & return- no green tint!
Bluray extended fellowship- horrible green tint!

Oh, and the extended edition of TFOTR is better in this respect:

Altered color timing aside, The Fellowship of the Ring has, quite frankly, never looked as strong, confident and capable as it does here. ... the kind of sweeping, post-theatrical-release DNR that reared its head on the Blu-ray edition of the theatrical cuts is nowhere to be found. (At least that's one debate settled: the Blu-ray release of the theatrical cut does indeed suffer from unnecessary noise reduction and aberrant smearing. It's only taken us more than a year to put that argument to bed.) -Blu-ray.com review

So, a color-corrected extended edition would make for a superior release all around.

I still think the HDTV broadcast, if it could be found, would be the best source.  Why approximate the original colors when they are present in a good source?  Any glitches could be fixed, and the extended scenes (for those that want them) could be color-corrected and inserted.

The HDTV rips were pretty good at the time. I remember when the BD came out a few people people were disappointed with it, and thought it was a downgrade from the HDTV rips.

@Andrea

I imagine that someone somewhere still has the HDTV caps, but I have only a 720p re-encode of FotR.  Overlaying the chroma might work.  I'm not sure that the cropping is necessarily the same, but you could work round that.

www.nzbclub.com

search:    fellowship hdtvrip

-----------------------------------

TPB:    

The Lord of the Rings 1 (Extended) - HDTVRip 1080p x264 DTS-ES

(The Lord of The Rings - The Fellowship Of The Ring (Extended)2001 HDTVRip DTS-ES 1080p.x264-CHD)

The HDTV cap is definitely better than the TC BD.  The question is whether or not it looks better than the EE BD with the TC BD's chroma applied.  That depends on whether the DNR on the TC BD was applied to both the chroma and the luma or just to the luma.  I assume that the luma of the EE BD is fine and that it's only the chroma that is problematic.

rockin said:

The HDTV rips were pretty good at the time. I remember when the BD came out a few people people were disappointed with it, and thought it was a downgrade from the HDTV rips.

haha, those were the good old days. Indeed, I was one of the people on avsforum and blu-ray.com kicking up a stink about that. Compared to the hdtv transport stream of fotr extended edition I had (and still have), the massively DNRed theatrical blu-ray release was inferior in every respect. I'm sure some of my screencap comparisons are still there on both forums.

I certainly kicked up a fuss as well about the green tint on the fellowship of the ring extended edition blu-ray, posting lots of comparisons. Here's a youtube video even crediting me in the details as being the first person to point out the green tint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwcm-73kZE8

It was the studios continuously messing up fellowship of the ring that got me started on regrading films in the first place.

Unfortunately the framing between this hdtv version (which i'm pretty sure has the same framing as the theatrical blu-ray and extended edition dvd) and the extended edition blu-ray is pretty different. There is more image on the top and right on the extended edition transfer and the left side has been cropped a bit. I don't know if that will cause problems with the colour compare program. That said, I do believe that in many instances the fotr ee transfer (after having the green tint removed) looks better colourwise, the colour grading is more subdued and in line with the other two films. Looking at the colour grading of Rivendell on the hdtv transport stream is now pretty *wow* its so strong and overwhelming compared to the more subtle extended edition grading of Rivendell.

I believe Fellowship of the Ring was only partly regraded digitally for the theatrical release while the last two films were 100% graded digitally so maybe that's why they changed the colour grading so much for the fotr ee transfer, to make its colours more in line with the others that had been regraded digitally from the start.