I’m just thinking about making this recut of the 2nd and 3rd film in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, so I thought I’d bring it up to see what people thought:
I love FOTR and I don’t think that needs improving.
Now, I’m sure many of you will disagree, but I was quite dissapointed with TTT because for my taste there was too much redundant action and not enough story to justify it. And I thought ROTK would have been really good if there wasn’t so much cheese in the end and if it was a bit shorter.
So I came to a simple solution. Cut some of the action from TTT (namely the whole scene with the hyenas and the subsequent Aragorn subplot, at least half of Helm’s Deep battle etc.) and add all the Frodo scenes from ROTK up till Shelob (the spider) and end TTT in the moment where Sam thinks that Frodo’s dead and takes the Ring, so that it seems like Frodo died and Sam has to complete the quest.
And then ofcourse recut ROTK so that those scenes wouldn’t miss there and cut on the cheese in the end maybe even remove an ending or two (last time I watched the movie I counted them and there’s no less than seven).
I haven’t even started yet, just wanted to know what you guys thought.
Is this still on?
Loved the first movie, but the next two were woefully under edited. One long movie or two tighter ones would be much better. I myself, would take all the best footage and make two movies that would each run about two and a half hours.
Well, I'm still planing on doing this eventually but I'm occupied with other projects right now.
OK, my STAR WARS project is nearing completition and I think I will start working on this afterwards. I must figure out some technical problems first, I'm gonna be working in HD, although it will probably only be 720p as I'm gonna be using a lot of the extended editions footage, which is only available on DVD. I'll split both movies into the three separate storylines first and then start intercuting between them in a different order then it is in the film. In TTT I will be cutting some of the action scenes and replacing them with some Frodo scenes from ROTK up to the spider scene, like it is in the book. This way I'll make TTT a more story based movie and ROTK a shorter movie.
This sounds like an interesting project. I shall keep an eye on it.
Harmy said:
I'm gonna be working in HD, although it will probably only be 720p as I'm gonna be using a lot of the extended editions footage, which is only available on DVD.
PM sent.
I have the whole trilogy EE in HD, I just always assumed, that someone just put in the EE scenes from an upscaled DVD (which is definitely true for FOTR as you can clearly see the drop in quality, but it did always seem to me, that TTT EE scenes were natively HD, I just couldn't get my head around where would anyone get those scenes in HD. So TTT was broadcasted in EE? That's good, because IMO that it is a far superior version (unlike for the other two, where the EE scenes are just a nice addition).
And these HDTV captures are actually superior in quality to the recently released Blu-Rays, as they are the same transfers but the Blus suffer from heavy DNR and edge enhancement and other nasty digital "enhacement" artifacts, which were not present in the broadcasts. I'm dreading we might get something like that for STAR WARS on Blu-Ray.
Yes; TTT was broadcast in HD. If you do not have the original broadcast I suggest you join newsgroups and download that rather than working from an encode.
The Blu-rays have their problems, but the DNR and EE mainly affects the FOTR. TTT and ROTK are not too bad, and have better overall picture quality than the HDTV captures, which, though good, have problems of their own. Bill Hunt offers a balanced perspective on the issue.
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviewshd/bdreviews032310.html#lor
I recommend using the Blu-rays as your main source and adding in the HD scenes from the EE of the TTT. For ROTK, you will have to upscale the PAL DVDs, as you have said, or be patient and wait for the EE Blu-rays to come out.
Well, I'll have yet to see about that. I'm still definitely encoding in 720p as I want to make it no bigger than a DVD9 AVCHD and these films are just too long for that being good in 1080p.
And that's interesting about TTT being broadcast in the Extended Edition. How come Warner allowed that? Or was it just some kind of a mistake, like when some TV in UK broadcast the 97 version of SW SE recently?
Yes; I have heard that the extended edition was broadcast by mistake, but I do not know for sure if this be true. Did someone cap the recent broadcast of the 1997 SE of SW?
I agree with you about encoding 720p to DVD-9. 1080p is usually too much for a DVD-9.
I don't know, it think Adywan wrote about it somewhere, but he said he only caught it about halfway through so he didn't record it.
I just finished a rough cut of TTT. Although I removed a lot of action, with the added Frodo scenes it'll run about 3hrs 50mins at 23.976 fps, which is a bit too long. Problem is, there isn't really anything else I'd want to remove anymore :-(
You could split it onto two discs. If you want suggestions for further cuts, make a big SD XviD as a preview and upload it. I would be happy to give it a go. :-)
It's not so much about the size as about sitting through a 4 hour film, which is what bothered me about the EE version of ROTK, it was just too long.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, about the preview, I think I will do that.
Sorry, didn't get round to encoding the SD workprint to post but TTT is basically finished, I managed to cut it down to 3hrs 30m in PAL, so after returning the framerate to 23.976fps it should be around 3hrs 40m, which is about the original lenght of the EE, so that's fine. I hope to watch it today or tomorrow and if everything's OK, I'll be encoding and uploading soon.
OK, TTT is finished. In the end I managed to cut it down to 3hrs 30min 28sec at 23.976 fps (10 minutes of which are the ending titles).
I decided to encode two DVD5s insted of one DVD9. That gives me about 700MB extra space over a DVD9 and it will also cut the burning costs as 2 HQ DVD5 are still much cheaper than 2 HQ DVD9.
There may still be some very minor glitches in the sound (I've always said I'm not much of a sound editor) but I'm quite satisfied with the outcome and to me it is a better version of the movie.
One problem of course is that as of now it can't be watched as a part of a trilogy until I make ROTK, because there are many scenes from ROTK put in TTT.
Another thing I'm thinking about and would appreciate some suggestions on is how to name these edits. TTT is definitelly closer to the book now, but ROTK probably won't be, so I really don't know...
Have you seen my LOTR edits? They were done in conjunction with Lord Phillock, who posted the original "book cuts" a few years ago.
It seems like we had similar design goals, and I'd be interested in seeing your versions as well.
It seems a difficult thing to have TTT end with Shelob, unless the intercutting between story strands gets way out of chronology.
Hal 9000 said: It seems a difficult thing to have TTT end with Shelob, unless the intercutting between story strands gets way out of chronology.
It probably does (to be honest, I don't remember the chronogy from the books and there both story strands are separate anyway.) The only time thongs are definitely happening in both strands at the same time is the Minas Morgul scene and I just cut out the Gandalf part out of that for TTT and will have to cut around it somehow in ROTK. I tried to keep some day/night chronology of the scenes in TTT though...
Titles from volumes of The History of Middle Earth that you might use are:
* The Treason of Isengard
* The War of the Ring
The title from another volume The Return of the Shadow would make a great title for a Fellowship of the Ring edit, but I know you like the FOTR as it is. I do too, though I only like the theatrical cut of FOTR.
I shall try to think of more titles.
I thought about editing the EE of FOTR down a bit too, because I like some of the aditions but some were admitedly rather redundant. And then it would be a complete trilogy, to put on my shelf and watch as a whole rather than watch the orig. FOTR and then TTT and ROTK edits... :-) Also I removed most of the Aragorn - Arwen storyline from TTT with the intention of putting some of it to ROTK as that storyline is more drawn out in that movie, but I might put some of it to FOTR (the parts which were a flashback to FOTR)...
A for the title, I was thinking something more of an under title, I'd like to keep the name The Two Towers as that is the title of the book it's based on - I was horrified when I'd heard they considered calling it something else back in 2002, because of 9.11. So I'd like it to be:
The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers - Something.
I am sure you know, but Tolkien thought of the work as one book. The publishers decided to split it into three, so I think you could lose The Two Towers. Three headings comes across as a bit of a mouthful to me. What do you want for the something? A label like Revisited or Remixed or another full subheading?
Yeah I was thinking something along those lines, like the PARTLY DESPECIALIZED EDITION, you know...
Reforged?
Sounds really good, I think I'll go with that, thanks :-)
I regret to say this but I can't seem to manage to upload TTT because there's something wrong with my connection and the upload keeps failing, so I'll have to wait until mid september, when I come back to uni and I'll have a better (and also a lot faster) connection there.