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The Lord Of the rings on 4K BluRay.

Suffolk Tony

Aim low, achieve your goals, avoid disappointment.
The LOTR and The Hobbit are one of my favourite series of films, and even though I've got umpteen different releases, I just had to lash out on the 4K versions. It was believed that, given the age of the special effects, 4K would expose the relative creakiness of these. We received our copy on Monday, and have just finished watching the Fellowship Of The ring, Director's Cut.

Without wishing to lapse too much into hyperbole, I can report these new releases are gobsmackingly wonderful. The jump up from standard BluRay to HDR 4K is quite amazing, likewise the Dolby Atmos soundtrack - absolutely reference standard. Detail and colours are just phenomenal. This isn't just a quick upscale from 2K job, the film's been lovingly transferred with great care.

Highly recommended!
 
Interesting.

The visual effects industry at the time could work on nothing bigger than 2k and any effects would have been shot back to film or kept digitally with a reduced dynamic range compared to the original negatives. That all the VFX work stands up to this amount of rescaling and, presumably, HDR treatment means they have some nice tricks up their sleeves or Peter Jackson went back and re-rendered half of the scenes. I wouldn't put it past him.

2k Cineon/DPX format was the de-facto industry standard at the time. Quantel did it alone at 3k because it was a multiple of PAL dimensions and could be accomodated very cleverly on video drives and saved to D1 videotape. Sadly it was limited to 8 bit linear colour space and needed grading before VFX work, whereas the Cineon format was logarithmic in nature and tried to capture more of the dynamic range of the negative and could be graded on print like any other pice of film. Scanning and recording was very laborious. It used to take around 45 seconds to record a single frame back to film on a CRT film recorder. The Arri Laser sped things up considerably. I don't miss those long nights and sending film to a bath at midnight so that we could view the results in the morning.
 
"The Fellowship of the Ring was shot on 35mm film using an array of cameras including Arricam ST, 35IIC, 35III, 435, 535, 535B, Moviecam Compact, S, and Mitchell Cameras. The source for this Ultra HD Blu-ray release was made from the original camera negative which was recently scanned and cleaned up, with colour correction, at 4K resolution resulting in a new 4K DI. The disc presents a native 4K 3840 x 2160p resolution image in the widescreen 2.4:1 aspect ratio, and uses 10-bit video depth, High Dynamic Range, and is encoded using the HEVC (H.265) codec for both HDR10 and Dolby Vision"
 
The effects are the same, but they were airbrushed and the colours corrected.


Got to get a copy of this I think!
 
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Interesting.

The visual effects industry at the time could work on nothing bigger than 2k and any effects would have been shot back to film or kept digitally with a reduced dynamic range compared to the original negatives. That all the VFX work stands up to this amount of rescaling and, presumably, HDR treatment means they have some nice tricks up their sleeves or Peter Jackson went back and re-rendered half of the scenes. I wouldn't put it past him.

2k Cineon/DPX format was the de-facto industry standard at the time. Quantel did it alone at 3k because it was a multiple of PAL dimensions and could be accomodated very cleverly on video drives and saved to D1 videotape. Sadly it was limited to 8 bit linear colour space and needed grading before VFX work, whereas the Cineon format was logarithmic in nature and tried to capture more of the dynamic range of the negative and could be graded on print like any other pice of film. Scanning and recording was very laborious. It used to take around 45 seconds to record a single frame back to film on a CRT film recorder. The Arri Laser sped things up considerably. I don't miss those long nights and sending film to a bath at midnight so that we could view the results in the morning.
That post wins pfm for the day. As a descendent of mine will one day say: Fascinating!
 
Interesting but I think I'll pass... he didn't airbrush Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Wights, Merry's barrow blade and Glorfindel into the first of the trilogy did he?
 
Interesting but I think I'll pass... he didn't airbrush Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Wights, Merry's barrow blade and Glorfindel into the first of the trilogy did he?
I would doubt it, if it had of all be covered it probably would have needed another movie, I loved the LOTR Trilogy, I have the extended edition but just on plain old DVD, I found The Hobbit trilogy mediocre at best. One of my kids is big into Blurays, 4K and has a very big fancy TV, I'm pretty sure as the LOTR are some of their favourite movies that if there's a new release I'll hear whether they're a vast improvement on the originals.
 
Some good information there. Although I would have re-done some of the CGI effects where the actors look too game-like in their movements.

This is seriously big business now and very lucrative given the amount of archive material out there are the demand for more UHD/HDR content. Where shows like Dallas etc were originally shot and edited on 35mm film they lend themselves to being rescanned in 4k really easily. Not so anything from the late 80s to about 2008 where everything was standard definition from source to viewing. Some were shot on 35mm and edited on videotape but these are being rescanned and effects and transitions re-done in HD and above.
 
I worked at weta workshop on lotr and can only speak for the physical effects, but
the passion of the crew working on those films was like nothing I've seen again.

Everyone put their all into it. Nobody knew it was going to turn out as huge as it did, but everyone wanted to make the films as cool as they possibly could. The large number of Tolkein fans helped.

For each army we made 10 hero outfits and 100 background outfits. The background ones were more detailed and better made than the hero outfits in other major films.

I've worked in film on and off since then, and there's never been anything like that atmosphere. There's always a significant portion of people who just do the minimum they can get away with. It's disheartening to hear "that's not my job" or "that's above my pay grade".
 
Working in film can be very rewarding - especially on something as grand as LoTR, but if you get the wrong boss, work environment, or shat on at every opportunity then you only think once about leaving. Doing technical support instead and never going home was somehow preferable.

I got to work on some truly dire film and TV series and just one or two good ones. However I did composite Pater Capaldi before he was Doctor Who, and got patted on the back by Ewan McGregor.
peter4.jpg
 
I've worked in film on and off since then, and there's never been anything like that atmosphere. There's always a significant portion of people who just do the minimum they can get away with. It's disheartening to hear "that's not my job" or "that's above my pay grade".

Sadly I was the guy who who got to do all their jobs because they couldn't be trusted. o_O
 
The LOTR and The Hobbit are one of my favourite series of films, and even though I've got umpteen different releases, I just had to lash out on the 4K versions. It was believed that, given the age of the special effects, 4K would expose the relative creakiness of these. We received our copy on Monday, and have just finished watching the Fellowship Of The ring, Director's Cut.

Without wishing to lapse too much into hyperbole, I can report these new releases are gobsmackingly wonderful. The jump up from standard BluRay to HDR 4K is quite amazing, likewise the Dolby Atmos soundtrack - absolutely reference standard. Detail and colours are just phenomenal. This isn't just a quick upscale from 2K job, the film's been lovingly transferred with great care.

Highly recommended!
Really liked LOTR but found the Hobbit disappointing. Great cinematography and soundtrack though.
 
I'm holding out for the Laserdisc Super Deluxe Pallet Set.

We have LOTR/Hobbit/Dark Night/Harry Potter 4K lined up over Xmas and have a Black Friday OLED TV due soon.
 
I don't think anyone will argue that The Hobbit's as good as LOTR, but it's still better than 90% of most other stuff out there.
 


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