Hardcoded in the TE bluray but not the EE bluray, I believe there are EE only scenes that are softsubs only, IIRC.
My EE Blu-ray collection has hardcoded Elvish subs.
Are the elvish subtitles hardcoded?
Yes. They were already hardcoded in the official Blu-ray.
44rh1n, spectacular restoration from horrid greenish tint blu-ray. Blutopia fan edit invite only?
Just PM’d you.
UPDATE: All 3 versions are now available!
I think you are a true professional in the field of color correction.
I can neither confirm nor deny any details without the secretary’s approval. 😉
It’s a pity I won’t see your restoration. I can’t download from private torrent trackers Spleen and Blutopia.
Just sent you a PM.
No this was like last month. My guess is…when a DCP was asked for they just gave them what they had because of lazyness.
Oh, I see. I guess I just thought it would have been an original DCP back from the original release, but I guess not? Was this a special screening held at your local theater? That’d be cool. I wish they would do that where I live. The last one for me was back in 2011 for the 10th year anniversary.
Chewielewis said:
Another fun note, I recently saw the DCP of the theatrical edition, and on either side of the frame you could see the edges of the film gate stick out around 5% from the edge of the frame. You could tell it was the film gate edges as you could see the dirt and crud stuck to it. You could see it shift in and out between shots that were composited differently. In some shots, like the crows flying towards the fellowship on that hill, you could see where the live action plate ended (with the exposed gate edges) and the CG sky replacement began (which extended out to the edge of the frame). Very very distracting. But what it showed was how rough this work was, the full 2K master would have been done for the Bluray release and not really done for theatrical presentation.
That’s interesting! I didn’t even know that theaters projected DCPs back in 2001. I thought everyone was still projecting actual film back then. Since a DCP is digital, I wonder why they wouldn’t have just cropped those edges ever so slightly before mastering it…
List of all tracks found in V2 and V3:
Audio 1: English DTS-HD 6.1
Audio 2: English DTS 5.1
Audio 3: Spanish DD 2.0
Audio 4: Portuguese DD 5.1
Audio 5: Commentary: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Audio 6: Commentary: Richard Taylor, Crew
Audio 7: Commentary: Barrie M. Osborne, Production & Post
Audio 8: Commentary: Actors
Subtitle 1: English
Subtitle 2: Spanish
Subtitle 3: Portuguese
Subtitle 4: Commentary: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Subtitle 5: Commentary: Richard Taylor, Crew
Subtitle 6: Commentary: Barrie M. Osborne, Production & Post
Subtitle 7: Commentary: Actors
All 48 Original Chapter Markersadd german audio and sub?
I would be happy to add additional audio tracks and subtitles to future releases! I just need the audio files. If you have them, feel free to send them to me. The official US Blu-ray only has English and Portuguese audio tracks, so I don’t have any other languages.
Incredible workmanship, 44rh1n, this is awesome news! I am not familiar with the Spleen. Doesn’t it require you to be invited by someone already a member? Is it not possible to offer this anywhere else that is more accessible than there? Many thanks!
The 'spleen is closed to new members for the forseeable future, so hopefully this project will be made available via other means as well.
Thanks, guys. What avenues would you prefer? The project needs to remain private, which is why I thought spleen would be best. Let me know if there are other great private options.
Dwalin said:
I don’t know why the first movie of the greatest film trilogy in a genre of a fantasy suffered. About the shortcomings Blu-ray the Extended Edition of Fellowship of the Ring you can talk endlessly, but one advantage it has is the frame contains more detail than the Blu-ray Theatrical Edition. I’ll try to fix the colors of the Blu-ray Extended Edition of the Fellowship of the Ring with Dr Dre’s Magical Color Matching tool. You can rate the first 20 minutes of the film right now: https://yadi.sk/mail/?hash=ntlkYS9kaZIEKwxBya4rR2gldzhM8ZKESkVt1od1qEU%3D.
I apologize if something was unclear, I do not know English and translated in the online translator.
Link to my group where you can see frame comparisons: https://vk.com/public167345612
Looks like we’ve been operating on the same wavelength, Dwalin! Just goes to show that restoring the original color is important. I just completed my own restoration. What do you think? https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952
http://blogcritics.org/video/article/color-grading-lord-of-the-rings/
It looks like for the BluRay release of the extended editions, PJ tweaked the colors a bit for Fellowship of the Ring. The result is a very minor green shift that ultimately isn’t obviously detectable, according to. The idea behind the shift was to get the color grading in line with the next two films, by the end of which they had far greater experience doing this. I saw Fellowship Extended in theaters three weeks ago, and didn’t notice any huge change. Anybody who has the set here wanna comment?
I personally hate the green shift, among many of the other color issues in the Blu-ray release. For that reason, I decided to completely restore the original color. If anyone’s interested, feel free to take a look: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952
kk650’s regrade has been the source of much delight. However, while it removes the nasty green tint, it doesn’t restore the original DVD’s color timing. If any of you are interested, I just completed a full color restoration of “The Fellowship of the Ring” Extended Edition. Feel free to take a look: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952
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
Hey Matt, I just completed my full color restoration of “The Fellowship of the Ring” Extended Edition. Figured it might be something you’d be interested in. https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952
Ok, so the idea is to use the theatrical version of the blu ray and the Extended Edition DVD as reference for color correcting the Blu Ray release of The Fellowship Of The Ring, using Dr.Dre’s color correcting tool.
This will be a jump into the deep end as I have little to no experience in these projects.
Doing Color correction completely manually would seem like an endless task, but after seeing some sample results of Dr. Dre’s tool, the task at hand might be a little more straight forward than it first seemed.
These are VERY early stages though, as I have yet to purchase a theatrical version of the blu ray first.
Hey Lasz, I just completed a full color restoration of “The Fellowship of the Ring” Extended Edition. Feel free to check it out. https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952
NOTE: Don’t bother PM’ing me and asking for this if you don’t own the official Blu-ray release. You must own the official Blu-ray release beforehand. It’s important to support the filmmakers and studios who make the films we love. If you want to watch their film, then they deserve to be compensated. This is a preservation, not an excuse for you to be a pirate.
Some screenshots are scattered throughout the article where context is given, and the entire library of screenshots can be found at the end of this article.
As many of you are very well aware, Peter Jackson’s beloved adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” received an abysmal HD release back in 2011. Both the official Blu-ray and Digital-HD releases are affected. Not only does this new master suffer from an ugly green tint throughout the entire course of the film, but it lacks important visual details in the bright highlight and dark shadow areas as well. In addition to these problems, it appears that the original color timing, in many instances, has actually been completely tossed aside; in several areas there are stray power windows (masks used in the color grading process to select certain areas of the frame), and the lack of HSL qualifications (custom selections of specific hue, saturation, and luminance values) that result in a muddier color grade than the original DVD release. Fortunately, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” don’t suffer from these same issues. But the official release of “The Fellowship of the Ring” is simply unacceptable. Its release was poorly supervised, and was not given the love and care it deserves.
I am not the first to bring up this problem. Many have discussed these issues extensively in the past. In fact, a few years back, forum user kk650 did an astounding job removing the film’s green tint in his regraded release of the film. So if all you’re looking for is the removal of the green tint, go check out his wonderful release! However, kk650’s regrade is just that: a regrade, as opposed to a proper restoration. The green tint wasn’t the only problem that needed to be resolved. So I decided to take upon myself the task to bring back the true, original colors found on the good ol’ DVD.
Along the way, I came across some hurdles, and I had to make a few compromises. But all in all, I think it’s safe to say that this is currently the best way to watch “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Feel free to check out my process:
ORIGINAL GOAL:
A shot-for-shot regrade of the entire film, using only the official extended Blu-ray release as a source, and the official DVD release as a color reference. This goal, however, quickly proved to be too time-consuming for me. I also discovered that many shots simply don’t have the detail necessary to perform an exact match to the DVD. It became clear to me that I needed to use an additional source in order to make this restoration happen.
REVISED GOAL:
A shot-for-shot regrade of the entire film, using the official extended Blu-ray release as the source for the extended scenes, and the official theatrical Blu-ray release as the source for all other scenes, with the official DVD release as a color reference. This goal proved to be much more realistic. However, the theatrical Blu-ray also suffers from many problems (although very different problems from the extended Blu-ray). This release, unfortunately, suffers from the overuse of both digital noise reduction (DNR) and artificial sharpening. But I decided to compromise in that I’d rather put up with these issues than the color degradation found in the extended release. While the DNR and sharpening problems did cause some concern, as you’ll see below, I was able to address these issues to some extent.
PROCESS:
1. Using Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool
I created a custom LUT for each individual shot in the extended portions of the film. I then imported each LUT into DaVinci Resolve Studio to use as a starting point for the color restoration.
2. Custom Grading
While Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool is an amazing resource that gets you about 95% of the way there, I still needed to give each shot a bit more love. So I did quite a bit of custom color grading in DaVinci Resolve Studio. I used custom power windows and HSL qualifications in almost every shot. I also cleaned up a bit of noise that was sometimes introduced by the LUTs. Here are some full-res screenshots, compared to previous releases of the film.
3. Addressing Problem Shots
In some instances, the extended Blu-ray simply doesn’t contain enough chrominance detail to pull out the colors necessary to restore the image to its original form. This problem mainly occurred in dark scenes. In these cases, the only thing I could do was completely remove the Blu-ray’s color altogether, extract the chrominance from the DVD, and lay it on top of the luminance of the Blu-ray. In other words, I literally placed the DVD’s color on top of the Blu-ray’s grayscale image. This method was tricky and time consuming because the framing of each shot is actually quite different between the DVD and the Blu-ray. So I had to do a lot of custom resizing. In some instances, these shots are slightly cropped due to the subtle reframing of the DVD. The chrominance in the resulting images are also technically only 480p while the luminance is 1080p. But since our eyes are far more forgiving of chroma detail than luma detail, I doubt most people will even notice that the chroma is lower resolution than the luma. This overlay method, albeit imperfect, produced much better results than the LUTs for these darker scenes. Here are several examples.
4. Addressing Issues with Theatrical Footage
In areas where the DNR and artificial sharpening are most apparent, I applied some custom corrections using DaVinci Resolve Studio. I first addressed the artificial sharpening by applying a custom mist effect, which softens the edges of the image without losing detail in the image (thus reducing the effect of artificial sharpening). I then applied some custom film grain designed to emulate the original grain throughout the rest of the film. While these repairs to the theatrical footage aren’t the perfect solution, the result is still far superior to the official theatrical Blu-ray.
5. Mastering the Film
I first created two ProRes masters (one for part 1 and part 2). I then used MKVToolNix GUI to create a non-standard ProRes MKV file of each part, containing all the original Blu-ray’s audio tracks and subtitles. In addition, I extracted the Spanish audio from the film’s iTunes release and included that in the master as well (seriously, why wasn’t this already included in the Blu-ray??). I then merged the two parts into one and produced multiple H264 deliverables from these masters.
RELEASE:
There are 3 versions of this 1.0 release. Descriptions of each version are below. All are available now! You MUST own the official extended Blu-ray in order to obtain a copy of this version! This masterpiece of cinema only exists because of the filmmakers and distributors who worked so hard to bring it to us. Please support them.
V1. One H264 MKV file (Parts 1 and 2 merged together). This version is a lower bitrate and only contains English audio and subtitles for English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The letterboxed area (black bars) are also cropped, which is great for those of us who use services such as Plex. I imagine this is the version most people will want/need. 23GB.
V2. Two higher bitrate H264 MKV files: Parts 1 and 2, synced to the original Blu-ray release. Each part contains all audio and subtitle tracks, including commentaries and the iTunes Spanish audio. Part 1 = 21GB, Part 2 = 22GB.
V3. Same as V2, but merged into one continuous file. 43GB.
FUTURE:
There is a chance I’ll be updating this project in the future, and you can help! While I have no intention of regrading any more of the extended footage that already exists in the theatrical cut, there are still some huge improvements that I can make. The Netflix version of the theatrical cut is something that I would love to get my hands on. In terms of detail, it is far superior to the theatrical Blu-ray. (Check out my post from a few months ago over at fanres if you’d like to learn more about the Netflix version). I’d be happy to replace the shots from the theatrical Blu-ray with shots from the Netflix version if someone can get me a high bitrate 23.976fps capture! I’ve been trying to capture it myself but my hardware is only capable of 24fps, which is not the same as 23.976! If anyone wants to help improve this project, I think this is the route to go!
Thanks everyone. Hope you enjoy this release.
All screenshots mentioned earlier in this post, plus more, can be found here.
List of all tracks found in V2 and V3:
Audio 1: English DTS-HD 6.1
Audio 2: English DTS 5.1
Audio 3: Spanish DD 2.0
Audio 4: Portuguese DD 5.1
Audio 5: Commentary: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Audio 6: Commentary: Richard Taylor, Crew
Audio 7: Commentary: Barrie M. Osborne, Production & Post
Audio 8: Commentary: Actors
Subtitle 1: English
Subtitle 2: Spanish
Subtitle 3: Portuguese
Subtitle 4: Commentary: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Subtitle 5: Commentary: Richard Taylor, Crew
Subtitle 6: Commentary: Barrie M. Osborne, Production & Post
Subtitle 7: Commentary: Actors
All 48 Original Chapter Markers
Since they say this was a completely photochemical restoration, do you think these colors can partly be explained due to fading? The yellow tones in the second shot bring this to mind.
I’m honestly not convinced that it was all done photochemically (at least in this trailer), even if that’s what they claim. The teal/orange look doesn’t feel natural nor does it look like an actual film stock. Instead, it looks like a crappy OSIRIS LUT that wannabe filmmakers apply to their garbage DSLR footage. It looks AWFUL. The highlights are all brown and poopy. White is supposed to be white, not diarrhea brown. There’s NO way Kubrick would approve of how his movie looks in this trailer.
I honestly just hope that this is something that was done to the trailer to make it seem more like a “modern” sci-fi film, and that it’s not actually this way in the film itself. Fingers crossed…
Also, I am a professional colorist, so maybe I’m just really sensitive to this kind of stuff. To me it just really seems like not much care was put into this edition.
Guys… This is bad. Really bad. At least with this trailer, the original color timing of 2001: A Space Odyssey has been severely altered. It looks like someone just threw on a super crappy teal/orange LUT! 😦
New trailer: https://youtu.be/oR_e9y-bka0
Color comparison: https://imgur.com/TUf1M38
I really hope it’s only like this in the trailer and NOT in the actual Blu-ray release.
Guys, this is amazing. I love it! It’s fantastic quality!
Would you mind if I put it on MySpleen?
kk650 said:
…Compared to the hdtv transport stream of fotr extended edition I had (and still have)…
Hey kk640, is there chance you’d be willing to send me a copy of that old transport stream? I’ve been looking for one all over the internet and can’t find anything! There are a couple old torrents out there, but they’re so old that no one’s seeding them.
By the way, love your work!
How can I get a hold of this? It looks amazing!! I checked for it on MySpleen, but the torrent has been disabled… 😦
EDIT: I also found the demonoid version, but there are ZERO seeders. 😦
Is there any way I can get a link as well? I own a legit copy of the movie, if that makes a difference.
jimbotron235 said:
Status update on version 2 -
I should have the original laserdisc mix in the next few weeks, at which point I will sync it and upload the final version (version 2). Another member of OT has kindly offered to acquire the laserdisc and transfer the audio for me.
I have made numerous small tweaks to what was version 1. I went back and compared the Blu-ray to the DVD pretty much shot for shot and made edits accordingly so that the DVD mix could more easily sync to the HD footage. I noticed that the director's cut had shots here and there with a few extra frames, so I trimmed them.
I plan on dropping the lossless 5.1 mix from the Blu-ray and going only with the 5.1 mix from the DVD and the original mix (I forget if it's mono or stereo).
I was literally JUST thinking about making my own HD theatrical cut restoration of Amadeus. So I looked up on Google to see if by chance someone else already had the idea and BAM, I found you guys! Is it getting pretty close to being finished? And if so, how can I get a hold of it? (I have a MySpleen account, if that's where you're hosting it).
You guys are awesome!