As one of the matte painters on the film, ( painted the afternoon Leaving Rivendell 14:59 and morning Entering Rivendell 15:31 ), it's painful to see such degradation - pun intended - in the colour and tones of LOTR. I had my own 'war' with PJ in regards to the colour of the sky in the 'entering Rivendell' scene. It was meant to be warm, morning light and he wanted me to paint in a bright blue sky with two puffy white clouds, just like a Simpsons sky. I refused at first but then cartoonised, like the Simpsons, the entire shot and sent it for film out to be viewed in the screening room. They were NOT happy! He ended up getting the compositors to grade the sky blue. Everyone, including Elijah Wood told him to leave it alone and he relented... halfway. I love PJ for making the films but by God he made some stupid decisions at the time!

Stuff like this is exactly why I fear physical media becoming obsolete.

Going from that brooding ending to those shitty upscaled credits made me burst out laughing. 10/10 editing mate.

Thanks for the shoutout! Glad you’ve enjoyed the HD color restoration. I agree with your analysis here 100%. All I want is the same version of LOTR that I saw in the 2000s, but in a higher resolution than a DVD. Pretty simple idea, but apparently Peter Jackson just doesn’t care to offer that, unfortunately. I was initially pretty happy when the 4K Blu-rays first released, because even though it wasn’t a 1:1 color restoration, at least the Blu-ray’s ugly green tint problem had been fixed. But after the rose-colored glasses came off, it became really obvious to me that the 4K remaster wasn’t handled nearly as well as it should have been. The digital noise reduction is especially egregious, and the fact that it has less highlight detail than the DVD is straightup absurd. Hoping that one day we’ll finally get a proper 4K restoration that preserves the original color grade.

These movies are classics and made billions, but it's too expensive to rescan the original negatives? Hollywood is so cheap!

My version has a Cerveza Cristal commercial about every half hour or so.

"So instead of a magical elf gliding through her enchanted realm, she looks like a beautiful woman in a beautiful gown on a beautiful set."

I always felt the film grain added to the effect of viewing an old forgotten world.

He remembered the password

Aw, what are you doing to me?! I had _zero_ idea any of this was even a thing. I have a blue ray copy of the extended edition that I watch every Christmas. I was happy! I was perfectly content with what I have! I didn't know all these other editions had all these other qualities and that my copy has problems. But now that you've pointed it out to me, **shaky screen yelling** _I'LL NEVER UN-SEE IT!_ So, thanks for that. Now, I'll be obsessed with finding a perfect version before I'm happy again. Ugh. This is exactly the kind of thing my pedantic brain will obsess over for a year.

Aragorn’s bow tapping the screen is so thing I’m strangely attached to. Seeing the “corrected” shot literally filled me with rage.

From the bottom of my heart....thank you for making this video. I always thought there was something off about the 4k release. I am not trained in editing or colour grading so I would have never been able to figure it out. Sincerely, out of all the many LOTR KZfaq vids, yours has been most helpful for my soul. Lol thanks

The color grading for flashbacks is truly unforgiveable. Genuinely on par with George Lucas or James Cameron revisionism.

Nice Touch at the end! You upscaled your "DVD" credits!

"What if I like to annoy people by pointing out creepy masks in the background" -- wise words, wise words my friend.

Thank you, I knew I wasn't crazy about my DVD looking radically different from my HD and 4K editions. Thank you.

The silly thing about the upscaling of the Fan Club credits is that they could have easily have had a computer read it and re-write it these days.

jesse shows up like a godsend dropping the best content on youtube but just whenever he feels like it lmao.

Dunno if this'll be seen but I want to say as someone who noticed literally all of this when the 4ks first came out and got shouted down and insulted for daring disrupt the hype train... I appreciate this video so much. Like, on a deep level it makes me happy that someone is putting this out here and people are actually listening/caring and the previously-unassailable rep of these remasters is maybe finally changing. You're a real one.

Hi! I was directed here by a friend, namely Dwalin who is one of the guys behind the two most common preservation projects for FOTR. (Fellowship of the Ring) First of all: HUGE thanks for making more people aware of this. It's a nightmare. While I only saw FOTR on DVD back then, I saw TTT and ROTK in the cinema on 35mm film. And unlike many, I pay notice to things like colors in quite high detail. I have a clear memory of the color of the battle at Helm's Deep, as well as the battle at Minas Tirith. They looked very close to the way they're presented on the extended blu-rays. And while you don't like the Hobbit trilogy, and yes, I agree they shouldn't be "bridged" to LOTR, the whole parts with Frodo and old Bilbo shouldn't have been there either since they assume whoever is watching has already seen the LOTR trilogy which they consider this one bridging into... (?) Anyway, I saw the first Hobbit movie in the theater and tried hard to remember the colors, and indeed, it had a green blanket tint both there and on blu-ray. But we're here for LOTR now! I was among the first to present a way to battle the green tint when the FOTR extended blu-ray was released. Sadly, it had more problems than just a green tint. Colors that were actually green in the original had been darkened, and that's just one example. There was simply no way to make it look like the original colors without doing what 44rh1n and Dwalin did. Anyway, some facts that are not presented here are: The HDTV broadcasts of all three movies in their theatrical versions, before their release on blu-ray, had all the dirt and grain intact. The theatrical blu-rays had DNR on all three, completely unnecessary in TTT and ROTK if you ask me. I understand if they wanted to clean up FOTR since it had lots of dirt spots and flares and things appearing all the time, but they also scrubbed away the grain along with it, and it could've been cleaned from dirt while still preserving the grain instead. Now, like most, I prefer the extended editions. I was horrified when I saw FOTR on blu-ray for the first time and ended up watching the good old DVD instead. The other two are true to the DVD releases. The reason people think the colors changed in TTT and ROTK in the first extended blu-ray releases was the color space conversion. Convert the DVDs' color spaces to Rec709 and they look the same as the blu-rays, except FOTR of course. There are a few more facts that are missing in this video and I'll list them: The 1080p blu-rays of the 2020 "remaster" of ALL THREE actually have more detail and grain in it than the 4K versions! The 4K versions are upscaled, DNR'd versions of the new 1080p versions which is insane. Here are some good comparisons from each on caps-a-holic: FOTR: caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=15006&d2=17668&s1=156523&s2=198551&i=13&l=0 TTT: caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=15008&d2=17673&s1=156546&s2=198561&i=6&l=0 ROTK: caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=15009&d2=17674&s1=156561&s2=198576&i=5&l=0 Mouseover is the 1080p blu-ray of the 2020 "remaster". The master has grain preserved and is the same master they used for the first extended blu-ray, just color tweaked to oblivion once again instead of going back to the negatives to faithfully restore the original, and more "fixes" than anyone can count, like closeup shots where they've removed a pimple on Frodo's face or "fixing" the visible hobbit feet in one shot where Frodo falls on the mountain and drops the ring, where Boromir picks it up. (The "fixes" are some findings of Dwalin) There's another thing with the first FOTR extended remaster: Aliasing. It's there all the time but only truly visible when there are thin dark objects against a bright background, like in this shot, mouseover is the 2020 "remaster": caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=5240&d2=17668&s1=48914&s2=198533&i=2&l=0 Look at the thinnest branches of the trees against the bright background. Another thing in the first FOTR extended remaster is some shots are oversharpened on top of the aliasing, like the closeups of Aragorn telling Frodo he would've followed him to the fires of Mordor. Another huge fact is about The Two Towers. It was DNR'd already in the CINEMATIC TEASERS! Which means that it's the one of the trilogy that would benefit the most from going back to the camera negatives. Watch the original teaser shots of Frodo and Sam walking in the bog and then watch all blu-ray versions. Another time when it's very visible is when "Gimli falls behind", the running scenes of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, especially when they run into the sunset you can see trails of them left behind from the previous frame. This is applied to the entire film, it was on the 35mm prints and like I said, even in the teasers so it was done very, very early in production. Either way, my preferred versions remain the fan version(s) of FOTR as well as the first release of the other two extended versions on blu-ray. I won't get started on George Lucas but Peter Jackson has pretty much turned into him. James Cameron is bad too, not as bad but close. What hit me the hardest about the disrespect for the original colors of FOTR the first time I saw the first extended remaster was that I used to watch ALL the documentaries included with the extended DVD boxes and I knew that they paid huge respect to Tolkien's descriptions of colors of everything. Now they just threw all that work in the garbage bin as if it meant nothing. I had so much respect for everyone working on the movies back then when realizing how close to an infinite amount of work was put into it all. Now I hope "Peter Lucas" never touches them again but that a proper restoration will happen one day, but sadly, the vast majority won't care, they're blinded by all the "HDR 4K ULTRA HD blah blah"... I can't count how many movies have been oversaturated in 4K just to make people think everything looked like that originally when in reality the DCI-P3 colorspace should be used only to be able to capture all colors/hues a 35mm film can hold, which Rec709 can't. It's supposed to look more realistic since every film could, in theory, be presented the way they originally looked but oversaturation wins the audiences. And I have nothing against high saturation on new works by filmmakers where it's the intent. PS. The Hobbit trilogy's new "remasters" also have more detail in their 1080p versions and the 4K versions are upscales of those. For the record, they should only have removed the blanket tints then stayed away from the colors but they messed them up badly. The originals look like they did in the theaters, like I said earlier, the first one had a green blanket tint even there and I've ever heard a rumor that it's the reason FOTR extended also got it, to "make it look closer to the Hobbit" which doesn't make any sense either since the Hobbit didn't suffer from dark greens or aliasing as far as I know. Thanks again for the video and I hope these facts are useful. And thanks for not accepting the fact that they ruin our favorite movies by doing this. I remember when The Terminator remaster was released and one guy on a certain forum where I was very active argued that the cyan blanket tint was "the original look and it's there because they could now scan it properly"... Just now, James Cameron did it again with The Abyss and Titanic before it. No cyan in Titanic but green and altered all the way beneath it. I think the Indiana Jones trilogy is an example of a few done right? I doubt we'll ever see LOTR treated like that. They can make money anyway and that's all some of them care about.

Finally watched the 4k remastered versions of Lord of the Rings. Definitely a mixed bag. They took full advantage of the HDR for the colors to pop (shots of fire, lava, the green at Minas Morgul) but at times it seemed to artificially colorful, compared to what I remembered. The high saturation also caused some unintended colors to show up such as Theoden's blonde beard turning green. A few other shots that stood out like sore thumbs: an extended edition shot of the corsair ships in the bay (the colors were cartoonishly oversaturated) and some extreme DNR on Theoden's face after the warg fight in the Two Towers. Even my partner noticed the waxy face then and he usually isn't looking out for that kind of thing. And yes, the flashbacks with the desaturation and iMovie-level vignette effect are probably the worst offenders. At the end of the day, though, the cosmetic changes may be distracting but they can't ruin the storytelling of these amazing films.

Grain does add value in the "Silent Hill Fog" sense. Its immersive when your mind naturally fills in the gaps. Its a weird kind of stylisation.

Annoyed me too when the 4K came out with none of the bonus discs and if you wanted those then you needed to get the regular blu-ray edition, which i already own from the previous remaster.

I'm really bummed they didn't do a full rescan... hopefully one day. I would love that higher resolution, but maintained film grain. would truly be perfect.

I love that I had to go through this since 97 with Star Wars and now, a new generation of fan of another franchise will do too!

Masterful work, my good sir. The upscaled credits at the end were the cherry on top

Nice to see you back, Jesse. Your videos are some of my favorites.

I've been watching and rewatching your House videos over and over again....and now this? this is christmas.

I always fucking KNEW the green tint in the Blu-ray set was bullshit. It did NOT look like that in theaters. And yes, it CAN be remastered. It just WON'T for the reasons you mentioned. Nobody wants to pay $10M (I guess) to do it all from scratch.

beautiful ending. reminds me of the story of the Warner Bros producers having truck loads of silent era film reels thrown off the Santa Monica pier to make room in their archives for the talkies. Film remains an ephemeral, fading art form we can’t seem to capture in its place. Even if a film is saved from a toss off a pier, every format we have degrades and decays in time. In many ways, it’s our most living, human expression. It’s our mirror, even in its mortality.

Thank you SO much for this video! It drives me up the wall that such great movies are so badly butchered in re-releases, and then nobody notices since that's all the studios let you buy! Not just LotR, tons of famous movies have been messed with in various ways over the years they've been on home video, especially those that are "older" and famous. If you think you're remembering something wrong from a film you love after rewatching it, chances are you aren't! And to anyone reading this comment, remember: there's nothing ethically wrong with watching a movie through less legitimate means if you can't watch the original legitimately. Don't let corporations rewrite art!

This was the best and most well made video ive seen for weeks. Very good job! Thank you!

This is perfect, and verbalizes my feelings about the various releases better than I ever could have. Thanks for making it.

What’s weird is, from what I’ve seen, they’ve ALSO DNR’d the hell out of the Hobbit even though it was shot in 5K… because the film and the VFX were finished in 2K, they upscaled that as well, and because those films are EXTREMELY VFX heavy, the CG looks far worse than it used to and the in camera stuff also looks waxy as well. It’s horrendous-and I say this as someone who likes the Hobbit a lot. They even brightened up the Smaug sequence in the second movie for “continuity” and it baffles me-not only are the images DNR’d to hell but they’re brightened up so we can see the imperfections clearly. Like, HUH??? I’m good with the original 1080p Blu-Rays for all six movies, thanks.

LMAO, I was just rewatching your videos and was wondering if you would make another video. Glad you're back Jesse.

Amazing video, Jesse Tribble, thank you for making it!

I finished the trilogy today for the first time.... U couldn't have timed thid vid vetter, thnx so much 😭

You are back. I have missed you.

*I did not expect this high quality analysis of my favorite films ever. You did an outstanding work here, loved it!

This was one of the best analysis videos I've ever seen. Well done.

Now this is high effort content, great work

This video is an Eye Opener, make no mistake! I came into it already knowing about the green tint, messy DNR and artificial look of the VFX. But while I assumed it to be technical bugs, you make clear that remastering itself is a dilemma between going with time, and losing the original spirit. I am so proud to still own my normal 2K Blu Rays. Because to me, it's currently the best balance between going with time, and being authentic.

Brilliant video essay on an important topic I knew little about

Love the video, missed you dude

This is genuinely why there are many older films in my collection that I love that I'll PURPOSEFULLY never upgrade. Among these are the six OG crew Star Trek films (all on DVD), the 1995 Ghost in the Shell (on DVD), The Tuskegee Airmen (on DVD), the OG Star Wars trilogy (which I have on VHS before Lucas "perfected" them), and, of course, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (on DVD) among many others. Sometimes, when films are translated to more modern resolutions that the original creatives never accounted for, not only do the films loose something in the presentation during transference with the loss of celluloid's imperfections and visual noise. It looses character. To parrot your essay, "I like film grain". Then, once again, as you pointed out, shortcomings that otherwise would have gone unnoticed like being able to see an actor's face through the prosthetics in the 90's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the black filler paper and cardboard on the bridge of the Enterprise in ST: The Next Generation, suddenly take center stage and it sours the experience. What really bothers me about this however is the fact that with today's level of technological progress, these are all issues that could be scrubbed during the upscale process given the time and the extra funding. These are things that FANS do on their personal computers at HOME and upload to KZfaq all the time (which you touched on with the de-specialized fan edits of SW). But unfortunately, studios are far more interested in their bottom lines than they are about proper film preservation. And because of that, 90% of the 4K and beyond upscale/remasters that we get commercially will always be sub-par when they don't have to be.

I agree with everything you have said 1000%! Maybe someday we will get that remaster and some additional bonus footage.

This is fantastic work. Thank you.

Great video - thank you for making it and the sharp eye! ✨

That was good man, I liked it

Maybe somewhere down the line we'll get a new anniversary release that isn't just an upscale or compromised by studio greed, but faithfully scans the original film negatives and preserves film grain and the soft, fairy-tale look. Hard to say how the CGI will look, but I doubt it would be worse than trying to "modernize" the look of the films. And BOY do those desaturated flashbacks suck. (Also, I believe the only new release material for The Hobbit films should be the M4 Cuts on 4K or the trimmed Chris Hartwell fan edits that remove so much of the crap we all hate.) Edit: But, dude, did you really have to end it on such a bitter note?? You're still alive and talking about the subject, with your audience engaging with it and some with their own nostalgic experiences. That's better than the potential net zero of people who still don't learn about these sorts of things.

Great video sir. Hope you upload more of them :D

You're presentation is phenomenal!!!!!!

Okay I don't romanticize the original versions as much but I'm really just a layman here.... but that horrible text making an appearance for your own credits is brilliant. Great video!

he's back!!

I only recently(~18 months ago) saw all the extended editions for the first time. I had just always had the theatrical dvds so 🤷🏻‍♂️ but, I could tell something was off immediately. I really felt this video, thank you for it

lol the warped credits at the end was the icing on the cake. Great video essay!

yea thank you for documenting this, this is tragic, i started crying at 11:00

Just in time for the 4K release of the trilogy in US theaters next month! I never knew about the extent of the changes they made in the 4K version especially swapping the stunt double with a CGI’d Elijah Wood! But the biggest offender for me really are the flashbacks. Arwen’s flashforward scene in TTT is far more better in its original bluish gloom color grading in the original than the black and white version in 4K. Sadly, the next time we will get a remaster is probably on the anticipated 25th anniversary release or maybe when 8K content is the norm.

This is a technically excellent video! Please make more videos like this about troubled home video histories!

Thank you, videos like yours are literally saving my dwindling hope for KZfaq.

Aside from the DNR the only thing I found super annoying was what they did to the flashbacks. On the whole I prefer watching the 4K versions whenever I want to watch the trilogy, but they were so close to making them almost perfect but they fumbled it over the dumbest things.

As someone who has watched the Extended Editions pretty much every year since they released, I have just gone and found REMUX versions of the original HD theatricals... alongside NVIDIA RTX VSR upscaling and RTX HDR + watching on an OLED... I think I just had a bloody religious experience. Can't wait to watch TTT and ROTK!

That end credits joke was hilariously on point. XD Also, completely agreed about the removal of film grain. As a painter I have to deliberately add grain in sometimes to add a certain feeling to the composition. Having grain is not a flaw, just an artistic choice. It's just odd removing it, especially when it is an excellent way of blending imperfections in the image like in those examples.

Amazing video. Thanks for opening my eyes.

BRO WHERE WERE YOU?! your videos are some of the best on youtube please dont leave us hanging like that man

I see jesse I click

Brilliant! You have my like, and my subscription!

Holy Crabs I did not notice these details - gotta love the niche programming in KZfaq- great work here

It’s a pet peeve of mine to call them “camera negatives.” They are scanning completed positives. Prints of the completed and edited film. The negative has to be processed before it can even have light shone on it. Silliness.

Contraversially, I actually like the grade on the EE of Fellowship. It's a shame about the crushed shadows and the dim highlights, but more often than not, I really like the colours. Plus, it's still the best version of that film overall - the Theatrical blu ray and the 4k blu ray have DNR, but the EE blu ray is clean and full of lovely grain.

I've just been to a marathon of the extended editions and the beginning of your video explained to me why something I've always thought was white was suddenly green, so thank you, my memory is not so bad after all :D

Yooooo!! You are back!!!

Maybe one day the criterion will get to make a Lord of the Rings remaster, without PJ's involvement... They usually prioritize loyalty to the original in their remasters.

I noticed the smoothing in theaters when I watched the 4k rerelease of fellowship, the backgrounds out of focus were extremely blurry and were off putting. The smoothing took a lot of deltal out of the backgrounds

Fantastic Video. I just felt something was different but I couldn't tell because I never watched the Theatrical HD and the DVD is just so long ago.

Your videos are very good bro, keep posting if you can. Loved your Dr House vids

How do you find a fan version? What do you google for?

4K Dremastered version by Dr.Dre is the best version. It's the sharpest version with proper colors. Second best is Extended Edition blu ray because it's sharp, has original grain. Yes, color grading isn't the best but still looks better than 4K. Bluray has that magic fantasy look. And the most important thing about blu ray : It has all the that brilliant bonus behind the scene dvd discs and many audio tracks with cast and crew commentary. 4K is missing all of that. If some of you still own that extended edition bluray : Keep it secret, keep it safe.

I remember the main aesthetic disappointment I noted when I saw the Hobbit part 1 in a theater was the uncanny visual crispness and colorful saturation. Since I thought of The Hobbit as an older fairytale backstory in relation to the more mature trilogy set a generation later, I imagined a MORE soft, vintage feel. But the 48 fps 3D movies arrived with none of the hazy blooming atmosphere that textured the LOTR films. And now I'm realizing the lack of film grain, in addition to the high frame rate and impossible CGI camera moves associated with video gaming, made it all feel like the most finely polished digital turd. Not a bit of nostalgia was conjured.

Such a great video, putting into words my feelings with the remasters.

THE RETURN OF THE KING

I have the extended version and I can say that even though it is in 1080p the image retains more details than the UHD version which removed all the small details from the image.

This is a great video and makes me sad. Thanks for this, sir 😢

Hey there! Literally like 4 mins into this video writing this comment but the struggle to define what the ‘artistic intent’ is or was very real. Everyone has different perspectives and preferences for what preserving the intent of the original piece of art means depending on what their experience with it was. This is such a cool video and I’m doing a thesis project right now that tries to tackle the challenges of preservation of artistic intent in remastering from SDR content to HDR and visa versa. Very challenging stuff and a very cool vid!!!

So what's the best version to watch that respects the films the most? This was so much info it was hard to conclude that haha

Ok so what would be the best recommended version then? 'Cause honestly, shit like this, is why I gave up on Star Wars. I saw all three (LOTR) films at the cinema, so have fond memories, but if they have been tarnished in this way, I just, I don't know what the point for me would be to go back to them. What do others think?; what would be the "definitive" versions for you?

Any hints as to where i can download the HD fan version of fellowship of the ring extended? Thanks

Amazing work

I haven't upgraded since my DVD set. I don't think I'm missing much especially given these touchups that are now standard. I have a HD and rarely see anything in HD. YT, streaming sites says they're HD and it looks good but pop in a BluRay and I see what real HD is. Remember before definition was even a term? From it's invention all the way up to mid 2000s, tv was just tv. Bigger or smaller were the only options. You watched it and it was what it was, never thought about level of detail.

It bears mentioning that the extended edition blu-rays were re-released with the green tint fixed years later and the new set looks far better than the original bluray release.

Great video! I would just like to add a few things. I am pretty sure they actually went back to the film vault and scanned the original negatives. Dı back in the day was one at 2K, a bit higher res than HD. A true 4k remaster requires them to scan the original camera negative from scratch, making a new 4K digital master. Most big budget blockbusters in the 2000s were using the digital intermediate process. In the old days, you had to achieve the best result you can on camera, because you could only do so much when printing the film photochemically: you could control the brightness, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Not much else. Of course, cinematographers came upon with very clever processes to achieve different results. However, you were mostly stuck to what you got. There was no "let's make that tiny blue object in the corner of the frame yellow". Any adjustments you made diffused into other parts of the image, so you could only control the general tone of the shot. This process might sound limiting to us, but timing can be very effective if you had a good timer. You could make the whole movie look completely different. Anyways, with the digital intermediate process, the whole "color timing" process could be skipped in favor of color grading digitally. You could essentially do anything you want and, when done, laser record back onto film. Movies like LotR abused this process to its limits, just type "peter jackson digital intermediate" and you'll see how much of a difference there was between the captured footage and the final image. While this process is a great tool during the actual filmmaking. It might not be great when doing a remaster 20 years later. This means that they had to do the color grading from scratch when doing the 4K remaster. Unless the grading metadata from 2001 was still in some hard drive, they had no way of exactly copying the same result as the theatrical edition. Remember color is subjective and one's perception of color, changes aggressively even in the span of a day, not to mention the opinions of the director. An alternative decision could have been to scan the color internegatives (these are the printouts after DI) and overlay the color information of that onto the new 4L original camera negative scans. The issue with graininess comes from the mindset of the time. Kodak really improved the fidelity of their stocks in the early 2000s. The Kodak film line from the 90s were called EXR, which stand for expression. Starting with 1997, Kodak introduced their Vision line which had reduced grain, higher sharpness, more highlight and shadow detail, and exposure latitude. However the stocks were still a bit biased for color saturation. particularly the first generation of 500T was very saturated and contrasty, especially in the reds. The upcoming Vision 2 line completely upped photochemical imaging to a new level with remarkably reduced grain, amazing compatibility, and unrivaled sharpness. LotR came out in a time when these new stock were deemed to be too sharp, too modern, too "life-like". Directors and cinematographers tried to introduce grain, and "character back into the image using different methods. In case of LotR, they decided to use the older EXR stocks for most of the movie. They are great stocks but with coarser grain and a bit more softness. They also didn't want the look of the film to be too sharp, so they used special filters that reduced the sharpness of the images while softening fine detail. Most of the blooming effect you speak of comes from these filters. Lastly, LotR used the Super35 method to achieve a 2.39 aspect ratio which means that they exposed the negative using spherical lenses and got a negative that had an aspect ratio of 1.33. During editing, they chopped off the top and the bottom of the image to get a 2.39 aspect ratio. While this process improved immensely in the span of just a few years (to see the difference just compare Gladiator (2000) and PotC: Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)) thanks to finer grained stocks, it still means enlarging a small image, thereby enlarging the grain structure. fun fact: If you ever had your picture taken on film and had a chance to look at the negative. You'll notice that the image is 8 perforations long. After cropping, the negative of LotR is only 2.3 perforations long. Which means your photo negative is almost 4 times bigger!

It makes me glad I'm older than you and saw the movies in the threatre several times at the original threatrical run and even went to a marathon of the extended editions (which is the longest time I have ever (and will ever) spent in a movie theatre in my life). 🤩

Very interesting. The idea that they ‘dulled’ the palette of Rings to match Hobbit is disgraceful. Remastering or upgrading is always tricky-vintage Doctor Who being a good example

The 1080p remastered blu rays have less DNR than the 4k HDR version.

Devil is in the details and I liked that you've put attention to it, very spot on! FHD is still pretty good, just sit a bit more further or use a smaller a tv lol. This 4K HDR thing, if it would be all in for the technologically inspired visual improvement, I'd love it, but as you've framed it perfectly: it's all about the them NZDs lol

So glad to view this video essay. When I first watched the “upgraded” versions of lord of the rings I thought am I missing somethin, is my vision going bad or is my tv not working properly?? No, it was just choices made by the creators n editors. Just shows u how rare rare rare the making of the original release of those films, especially the first film. I doubt we will ever see that kind of filmmaking again in our lifetime.

This is sadly an issue with lots of classic films. Best case scenario, that movie from your childhood gets remastered by a very good boutique company like Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Criterion, but even they aren't exempt from sometimes changing things (Criterion's remaster of Memories of Murder is sickeningly green compared to previous releases, supposedly at the approval of Bong Joon Ho himself), but the big studios lately have been pushing out some miserable remasters. Sadly, Peter Jackson and James Cameron are far and away the worst offenders when it comes to denoising and butchering their old films. True Lies, The Abyss, and Titanic all recently came out on 4K and Blu-ray, and there was a big outcry over the extremely obvious use of heavy denoising paired with AI upscaling! True Lies looks like weird smeary garbage now. And guess what - all 3 of those remasters were also handled by Park Road Post. They're like a horseman of the apocalypse when it comes to ruining film remasters, I wish them a very Go Out Of Business And Stop Ruining Things Forever

Headphone warning 8:43

I’m kinda glad that over the years I have been drawn more and more towards the source material. The box set of the film trilogy we bought in 2005 stays at my parents house and we’ll watch them at Christmas, but I read the books every year, and often I’ll listen to a few chapters of the Andy Serkis Audiobook for fun on occasion, but then when we return to the movies (which were my original introduction to Middle Earth) nowadays I think “oh, I forgot the movies changed that part!”

Brilliant observations, I wish you would make your version and I'd watch it.