Info Wanted: 'LOTR - FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING': Green tint removed? — Page 2

The HDTV cap was the theatrical.  People upscaled scenes from the DVDs and inserted them.  It's the cap that I want to get my hands on.

kk650 said: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.

I don't think the FOTR EE BD's colors look like the other two films though.

Chewtobacca said:

The HDTV cap was the theatrical.  People upscaled scenes from the DVDs and inserted them.  It's the cap that I want to get my hands on.

kk650 said: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.

I don't think the FOTR EE BD's colors look like the other two films though.

Compared to the hdtv stream i'm looking at that has very strong colour grading all over the place it does IMHO. The EE blu-ray transfer seems more consistant overall in terms of colour to me, like TTT and ROTK, whereas the hdtv stream has most locations with a completely different colour grading to each other. It certainly makes for a very varied film colourwise but consistant in terms of colour its not. I can't think of a single scene from The Two Towers or Return of the King that has anywhere near as strong colour grading as the council of elrond scene in Rivendell on this hdtv stream.

You're right about all the extended bits, they're clearly dvd upscales but whoever did it has done a pretty good job, they flow fairly seemlessly with the rest of the footage

kk650 said:  Compared to the hdtv stream i'm looking at that has very strong colour grading all over the place it does IMHO. The EE blu-ray transfer seems more consistant overall in terms of colour to me, like TTT and ROTK, whereas the hdtv stream has most locations with a completely different colour grading to each other. It certainly makes for a very varied film colourwise but consistant in terms of colour its not. I can't think of a single scene from The Two Towers or Return of the King that has anywhere near as strong colour grading as the council of elrond scene in Rivendell on this hdtv stream.

I think we've misunderstood each other.  If you mean that the EE BD of FotR is like the other two in terms of consistency of color, I agree.  If you mean that the colors themselves are alike, I disagree.

I wonder if the whole of your HDTV version was recompressed or if only the parts that were upscaled were.  If it's the latter, it could be useful.  Unfortunately, the alternate takes from the theatrical will have been lost e.g. the approach to Rivendell.

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

Here you are some screenshot comparisons; I used .png images taken from caps-a-holic.com; top BD, middle ColourMatch'ed BD, bottom DVD (click for larger images):

...now you know why they call it BLU-ray... the snow scene reminds me someTHING... (^^,)

Are results perfect? No, of course. But a really good compromise, and a decisive improvement over the BD colors, do you agree?

OK, time to sleep now, 1 a.m. here. Good night!

Damm. That is fantastic. ColourMatch creates some great results.

Chewtobacca said:

kk650 said:  Compared to the hdtv stream i'm looking at that has very strong colour grading all over the place it does IMHO. The EE blu-ray transfer seems more consistant overall in terms of colour to me, like TTT and ROTK, whereas the hdtv stream has most locations with a completely different colour grading to each other. It certainly makes for a very varied film colourwise but consistant in terms of colour its not. I can't think of a single scene from The Two Towers or Return of the King that has anywhere near as strong colour grading as the council of elrond scene in Rivendell on this hdtv stream.

I think we've misunderstood each other.  If you mean that the EE BD of FotR is like the other two in terms of consistency of color, I agree.  If you mean that the colors themselves are alike, I disagree.

I wonder if the whole of your HDTV stream was recompressed or if only the parts that were upscaled were.  If it's the latter, it could be useful.  Unfortunately, the alternate takes from the theatrical will have been lost e.g. the approach to Rivendell.

Yeah, I agree that the colour schemes of the three films are different. Using the colour corrected fellowship and comparing to my colour corrected The Two Towers and my colour corrected Return of the King, I would say the first film's colour scheme leans towards green, the second leans towards blue and the third leans towards yellow. All three have their own unique feel.

I don't know what you mean by recompressed but the image quality of the theatrical parts on the hdtv stream are very solid indeed, easily superior to the DNRed theatrical edition blu-ray for whatever that's worth. The theatrical parts are definately HD and not simply uprezed from the extended edition dvds. It's size is 26.8GB overall. The image quality of the extended edition is definately superior though, it doesn't have the lovely fine grain of that release.

Recompressed means re-encoded.  Thanks for the information on the grain structure.

Chewtobacca said:

Recompressed means re-encoded.  Thanks for the information on the grain structure.

In that case it doesn't appear to have been reencoded. It still has the black bars on the top and bottom and its been encoded with mpeg-2 like all transport streams.

kk650 said:

In that case it doesn't appear to have been reencoded. It still has the black bars on the top and bottom and its been encoded with mpeg-2 like all transport streams.

Not all transport streams contain MPEG-2 video, but thank you again for the information.  It appears that only the upscaled scenes have been re-encoded.

If I may... In my view, the only proper way to do this is with the Extended Blu-Ray, no other sources, keeping it spread across two blu-rays. 

And for me, TTT and ROTK are fine. They are not correct to the original theatrical releases, but they are correct to the special marathon run digital release, which I saw. LOTR was not correct. That BD is clearly screwed up. Something went wrong in the process of crating that encode.

I'd say so – more or less.  They look slightly different, but there's no great change in color timing as there is with FotR.

I don't think TTT and RotK are worth the time.

Could somebody explain what exactly is wrong with TTT and ROTK?

The way I got it they look the same as on DVD, both the theatrical and extended cuts. I know the theatrical blu-rays have DVNR though.

Maybe there are any comparisons floating around? I googled it but couldn't find anything.

It's not that there's something wrong with TTT or TROTK (theatrical v. extended), but that they're mostly similar in quality (w/o the green-tint difference of TFOTR). Therefore not worth the major effort for such a minor improvement.
Too bad for us, 'cause what we're here to do.  :)

Check out Caps-A-Holic for up-close, comparative examination. Get started with TFOTR then search there for the others: http://www.caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/index.php?&vergleich=lord_of_the_rings_1_bd1

RE: TFOTR-EE green tint:
If true that Peter Jackson commanded that hideous green tinting ("source confirmed ... Peter Jackson and Andrew Lesnie not only approved the transfer but dictated the new color timing" - http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=4841029&postcount=2596), then he's just another George Lucas ... talent mostly lying in others who made the films.
(Nothing wrong with that, BTW. Just that he, too, must step down from the genius-filmmaker pedestal.)

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

@Spaced Ranger: thumbnails here works - look at this picture.

Thanks for checking into that. It looks like the thumbnails are just not getting through to this system (settings must be too secure).

What about your avatar? "This 3 hour .GIF movie has been moved or deleted" is intended to be as it is? (^^,)

Yes, it is a mocking of these services, which clearly know whether something has been moved or deleted.  :)

FOTR has an error somewhere along the chain that caused the huge green shift with no pure whites. But for Warner and Jackson to admit that would kill all the profits made on that set because it would be expensive as heck to recall and replace. So it was left alone. 

TTT and ROTK have no such error. Therefore they are in no need of restoration.

Yeah I had actually already checked caps-a-holic because I thought I remembered seeing comparisons there but it seems they had put them in something they call "the vault".

Now that I've checked them I agree with Matt, there's nothing wrong with them. Maybe there are some green tints here and there that people don't like but they look exactly the same as they did on DVD. And compared to the theatrical cut, it seems TTT has just a slightly different color timing in some scenes, like Treebeard's leaves being greener in the extended cut.

Anyway, I do find it horrible that Peter Jackson, who I respected greatly after seeing all the documentaries on the bonus discs in the extended cut DVD boxes, went the George Lucas-way and did something like that to FOTR. It's true that FOTR wasn't fully color timed like the other two when it was released, but the other two were professionally done. Skies were blue and not cyan, mountains were grey and not blue etc. If they wanted to re-do the color timing for FOTR they could have done it a lot better, even I could have done it better myself. I truly hope we'll get a better release someday, maybe along with the release of all three The Hobbit films, or maybe as a 4K resolution release.

And, unfortunately, PJ has subjected The Hobbit: AUJ to the same/similar distortion as was done to TFOTR-EE. kk650 addressed this in his regrades-- kk650's Regraded The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 1080p and kk650's Regraded The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Extended Edition 1080p.

More info in OT thread kk650's Lord of the Rings: Regraded http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/kk650s-Lord-of-the-Rings-Regraded/topic/15638/ .

Peter Jackson used a green tint for TTT and ROTK theatrically as he wanted the films to have a darker feel.  I personally thought it ruined the look that he established in FOTR.

I know kk650 showed that there was a green tint even in The Hobbit.

I checked it out and he was right, all the way from the MGM logo until the credits start there is a green tint. Even the hardcoded english subs aren't white!

This made me interested in seeing whether or not the theatrical trailer looked like that. Here's the same shot (different takes though, obviously) taken from the trailer vs the blu-ray.

Seems Peter Jackson has started to love cyan skies and green clouds.

I don't own the BDs, so I was never aware of this problem, but boy, those screencaps make it look brutal. I don't think I would be able to sit though the whole film like that. I just have the EE DVDs of each, and, as you can see from the images _,,,^..^,,,_ posted, the picture seems fine, and is a vast improvement over the BD. I also don't understand how anyone could look at that comparison of The Hobbit and tell me they were improving the appearance by shifting the colour timing.

This whole discussion is turning me off Peter Jackson more and more. I am a big LOTR fan, but the films were what they were. But him shadowing Lucas in so many ways now is really making me feel sad for filmmaking.

@ultrakaiju: Actually, sitting through The Hobbit was easier than you'd think. Right away from the start your eyes will adjust to what you'll think is white and your brain is fooled. Even when I grabbed that screenshot it was only first when I compared it to the trailer that I really saw the difference. That's also probably why I didn't notice it in the cinema.

With FOTR it was another thing though since it was applied a bit heavier.