Info Wanted: 'LOTR - FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING': Green tint removed? — Page 3

I pretty much stopped posting at AVSforum.com because of all the personal attacks launched at me for talking about this obvious green tint error. The bile thrown at me was insane. Such is life. 

When I meet Peter Jackson I'll give him a piece of my mind. Right after begging for a job. :)

Most of the comments were deleted by mods. It became huge warfare and I stopped posting in that thread and rarely posted in the forum. I really have no wish to go back through two years worth of posts and find the relevant postings. Ugh. Much better things to do with my time. 

@Matt_Stevens: The worst thing about forums like that (yes there are more where people fight over the same thing) is that not only does people deny the green tint even though we have technical proof that is very understandable, but they also deny the horrible changes to the color timing done to FOTR. The most obvious one for me is that they made a lot of neutral grey colors into dark cyan/blue, which also changed the balance since those colors weren't supposed to be so dark.

Turisu said:

You_Too said:

...That's also probably why I didn't notice it in the cinema.

I'd love to know whether the green tint was present in the theatrical prints or just added for the BD. If the green was there in the cinema then that's the way I want it on BD. I don't care which looks better.

Everyone is gonna have to pay REALLY close attention to the colour timing on Desolation Of Smaug. ;)

You know, it's kinda funny that you say "prints". :)

Are there actually any theaters that screened The Hobbit on 35mm? Would be interesting to know! The cinema in my city get all their movies delivered on harddrives.

And I actually did look a lot at the colors when I watched it in the cinema. I'm almost sure it was identical to the blu-ray because the thing I remember the most is how dim the highlights were, and that's typical when they're a bit more green because they become warmer and less bright. But in the cinema I didn't know if this was because of a tint or if they were really white and just dim, it's tough when you can't compare with anything, or just take a color sample in photoshop!

EDIT: As for The Desolation Of Smaug, I'm gonna check the trailers for that one and see if they're as clean as the ones for the first film were.

The green tint (for the hobbit) was present in the theatrical version, or at least I remember it being there. I don't think they changed the bluray or anything like that.

I just checked all trailers for The Desolation Of Smaug and took samples of the whites in Photoshop. All of them had the green tint already.

But I gotta add that I also checked both trailers for An Unexpected Journey and it was only the first one, the "teaser", that didn't have the green tint. The second one has it.

Turisu said:

That's interesting about movies being delivered on HDDs. I had no idea that's how things were done nowadays. :)

I didn't know anything about it either until I read an article in my local newspaper about a month ago.

You see, I live in a small city in Sweden where we've had the same cinema running since 1940! It was rebuilt in 1989 though so since then everything has been very modern and pretty top notch, or so I thought. Next year, they will open a new cinema in my city with Sweden's largest projection screen and all new equipment. This means they will close the old one.

So the newspaper had interviewed a projectionist who had worked many years at our cinema and there were some photos of him with the harddrives, and he said that it's much easier than having to change film reels!

I guess the reason for the harddrives is also that digital cinema has a different colorspace than blu-rays and maybe 4K resolution too? Wouldn't fit on a disc.

Asaki said:

...and who's to say that skies aren't greenish on Middle Earth?

*clears throat*

J.R.R. Tolkien said (in  The Hobbit  Or There And Back Again):

"At your service!" said Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur standing in a row. Then they hung up two yellow hoods and a pale green one; and also a sky-blue one with a long silver tassel. This last belonged to Thorin, ...

The next morning was a midsummer's morning as fair and fresh as could be dreamed: blue sky and never a cloud, ...

:)

The next morning was a director's morning as dim and sick as could be dreamed: cyan sky and green clouds, ...

:D

Well, as you've already spilled the beans, I hope they don't come after me for revealing this well-guarded secret (after all, we have already bought all their movies, multiple times), so just keep this photographic evidence between you and me:

-->  It's New Zealand which is teal!   <--

The problem was the budgets were getting tight and they skipped the correction needed to bring the colors back to Middle Earth (and the rest of the world). Here's the hidden-camera proof!

                  on location in New Zealand                                     Middle Earth pre-vis correction

You_Too said:

Turisu said:

That's interesting about movies being delivered on HDDs. I had no idea that's how things were done nowadays. :)

I didn't know anything about it either until I read an article in my local newspaper about a month ago.

You see, I live in a small city in Sweden where we've had the same cinema running since 1940! It was rebuilt in 1989 though so since then everything has been very modern and pretty top notch, or so I thought. Next year, they will open a new cinema in my city with Sweden's largest projection screen and all new equipment. This means they will close the old one.

So the newspaper had interviewed a projectionist who had worked many years at our cinema and there were some photos of him with the harddrives, and he said that it's much easier than having to change film reels!

I guess the reason for the harddrives is also that digital cinema has a different colorspace than blu-rays and maybe 4K resolution too? Wouldn't fit on a disc.

Art Houses are probably the exception when it comes to actual film being played.  Most every other theater is doing digital and they are doing it this way.  It's been like this for awhile now here in the states.  35mm is out there but it is a tad dead to the industry that once supported it.  Winds of change I guess.  :( 

You_Too said:

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.

The bottom one looks like a badly done HDR image to me.  The shadows look way over-brightened.  Is this really what the blu-rays look like?

guiser said:

The bottom one looks like a badly done HDR image to me.  The shadows look way over-brightened.  Is this really what the blu-rays look like?

Yeah the blu-ray looks like this. But the reason you think the shadows are overbrightened is because you have the shot from the trailer to compare with, which is darker. When simply watching the blu-ray you'll think it looks nicely balanced.

Hollywood no longer believes skies are blue.

Asaki said:

But if you color correct the film so that fire is orange instead of red, then the blue sky would be...

After a smile, I gave it some thought. What if we took Tolkien's red fire ..

J.R.R. Tolkien said:

The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches biased with light.

.. and made it orange? Would we also end up with a teal Middle Earth?

Guess not.

Well the thing with these movies is that I think most of the adjustments might be done with curves, not hue/saturation/luminance. (They did this in FOTR though, since grey and blue was made cyan and then the luminance was dialed down a lot) Anyway, I'm not an expert but here's an example of using curves.

I take this Christmas fireplace photo from wikipedia:

First I reduce red and increase blue in the shadows up to the midtones. Then I increase green in all the picture, as well as reduce red and blue in the whites, just like they did with those films. Then some vibrance/saturation to make the colors "pop" a bit more.

Tadaa! Modern Hollywood film color timing.

EDIT:

I'll add something about Hobbiton too.

Take this natural photo of the shooting location:

In The Hobbit AUJ, when color timing the scenes in Hobbiton it looks like they changed the curves a bit to make highlights less bright and also added some green tint, resulting in something like this:

When you have nothing to compare to, and watch the movie like that you might not even notice the green tint.

In FOTR they used HSL to make cyan/blue dark and boost the rest and the result was a bit like this:

Bottom line: There's many aspects to color timing and of course changing fire to orange doesn't automatically change skies to cyan, but they just like doing it that way these days.

You_Too said:

Are there actually any theaters that screened The Hobbit on 35mm? Would be interesting to know! The cinema in my city get all their movies delivered on harddrives.

35 mm prints existed; I've seen one. I wasn't paying attention for green tint though!

You_Too said:

Well the thing with these movies is that I think most of the adjustments might be done with curves, not hue/saturation/luminance. ... When you have nothing to compare to, and watch the movie like that you might not even notice the green tint. ... but they just like doing it that way these days.

No need to sell me on R-G-B -- that's my speciality (http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-OT-1997-Special-Edition-Blu-rays-Info-by-Team-Blu/post/630232/#TopicPost630232).   :)   Asaki's point was how changing the picture hue for the fire's color might effect the sky's color ... to support his original contention.

But this universal trending towards teal requires a conspiracy theory -- new-world-order conspiracy, and color theory.  I'll submit the latter, here.
Could it be that these film companies are trying to expand the colorspace of their HD releases to mimic the distribution of 4K/8K UHD? (Of course, in that case, I would think it is wrong-headed and wrong-applied.) Notice the "D65" white-point is centered in the UHDTV triangle while off center in the HDTV:

If they tried to reposition that point to center it in HDTV, it would decrease Red content while increasing Green and Blue ... precisely what would make for a teal tint. Hmmm ... food for thought.

Whatever the reason, Peter Jackson (and company) did it too late, and too strong, and too wrong in TFOTR. By the time TH:AUJ rolled around, they corrected the "too late" (now done in production), corrected the "too strong" (if we're willing to accept the blanket tinting in the first place), and corrected the "too wrong". This last part is shown by comparing the 2 movies for TFOTR's wrong overall darkness and black crush:

              TLOTR: The Fellowship Of The Ring EE                            The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey

Comparing similar locations from blu-ray.com's review caps, the R-G-B crushed values (R/or/G/or/B=0) are luminance-inverted to expose the damaged areas with maximum color/brightness. TFOTR is riddled with them. TH:AUJ has few if any. However, PJ is still not keeping the black points and the white points their proper shades of grey, resulting in green snow & clouds, and a fog-of-darkness in bright sunlight!

Properly adjusted, it might've looked unobtrusively acceptable [TOP = theatrical; MIDDLE = extended edition; BOTTOM = theatrical properly adjusted]:

For the proper adjustment, the blacks & whites remain at their original points by adjusting only gamma and midtones (here in a paint program). Adjusting the Red channel downward, the Blue channel less downward, and the Green channel unaltered, will produce a teal tint but it will also darken the picture. Instead, Red is adjusted down, Green is adjusted up, and Blue is unaltered. This way, the average of the channels is still the original brightness, while the relative proportions of the channels is still the same to produce a desired teal.