You_Too said:
Boobafett2 said:
Holy shit this extended edition scan is absolutely amazing.
I can’t imagine ever watching another version of Fellowship. The quality is stupendous, probably because it wasn’t used as much as the theatrical scan.
Many, many thanks. Maybe one day we het TT and ROTK in extended as well, but the most important extended film has now successfully been restored!
I just came back to OT to take a look what was going on. It’s very interesting to see all these 35mm scans that are being preserved. I’m sad to say that having worked a lot with Fellowship in the past, I know with 100% certainty that this is, sadly, the 2011 master. That’s why the quality is so good. I remember reading somewhere, I think it was on OT, around the release of the first Hobbit movie in late 2012 that “there had been a screening of the new master of Fellowship Extended”. I guess they made some prints for the theaters who hadn’t gone digital at the time.
It also makes me especially sad since I’m pretty sure I read somewhere around the time I saw The Two Towers in the theater that there had been screenings of Fellowship extended, which would of course have been the original master that we got on DVD, grain, dirt and most of all the original colors!
And don’t get me wrong, all your work is very much appreciated! The theatrical versions never got proper releases on blu-ray either, just like Fellowship Extended. But in their case they added additional DNR to them instead of using the DVD masters. I remember around that time there were some HDTV version circulating that didn’t have the DNR but they seem impossible to find these days.
And shame on Peter Jackson forever for the “4K” releases. They’re all upscales, and they even used additional DNR. (The Two Towers had DNR already in the original teasers…) Not to mention all the awful tiny changes here and there and the colors that are all over the place.
How hard is it for multi-million dollar companies to properly treat our favorite movies with proper releases?! When you do a 4K release you’d go back to the negative, have a team of people who clean up any dirt and similar by hand, not run it through a frickin DNR algorithm. Then you make sure you restore the exact original look of each frame. If fans can do that, so can the rich companies but all they care about is quick cash-ins.
I’ve lost all respect for George Lucas, Peter Jackson and James Cameron because of their “re-imagination” or complete indifference about their work, every single release.
Long live the fan restorers!
Can confirm, I’ve watched a good chunk of the extended scan now and based on the strong (albeit less extreme than the Blu-Ray release) green tint this is definitely a print from the 2011 master. Certainly interesting to see that new prints were struck for a re-release as late as 2012.
In any case, I like almost everything about this print except for that tint and am considering going about a regrade/color correction to match the DVD version more or less. Any advice from those with experience in that area for how to approach such a task?
