Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Theatrical Versions) - April 6, 2010

[neo78956]

Originally Posted by mredman

What the hell is your problem man. i am just posting 2 positive reviews about the set!

Forget about it, it's the blu-ray.com boards, man.

[somchair1]

disappointing. I was looking forward to this series on blu ray and I am very let down. I was watching the DVD the other day and I was amazed how great the DVD looked. I was hoping the BluRay would blow that version away. Thanks a lot New Line.

[Stinky-Dinkins]

If you're amazed by the way the DVD looks then likely this version won't let you down, it's a substantial improvement over the DVD.

Most videophiles thought the original DVD's were pretty lackluster, Fellowship especially, so if you thought those were great the BD should be fine for you.


There's a sticky up top by the way... for LotR stuff.

[somchair1]

thanks Stinky...that does make me feel a little better...but a 3.5 for video quality is disappointing...

[Fighter]

Never put your faith in critics or reviewers...trust your own judgement & instincts!

[toef]

Originally Posted by somchair1

thanks Stinky...that does make me feel a little better...but a 3.5 for video quality is disappointing...

Well if I learned one thing from the reviews on this site, it's that they're all over the place with the scoring.

One reviewer's 5 is another's 2, and everything in between.

If I'm ever bored and feel like looking up reviews of movies, I'll look them up on other sites as well. You'd be surprised at the variance between AQ and PQ scores by the reviewers here with ones from other sites like High Def Digest.

I say rent it for yourself. Maybe it'll actually seem like a 5 to you, and that's all that matters.

On a sidenote... some of the lingo that the reviewers use really makes me scratch my head. Maybe these people are experts, I don't know, but in most cases it seems like they're trying to throw around words to sound like they know what they're talking about, but it ends up sounding like a bunch of nonsense, and in the process they make a mountain out of a molehill.

And then there are times where the reviewer just seems to be hyperbolic for hyperbole's sake, like this:

a persistent instability leaves the credits and other elements looking as if they're going to dislodge from the screen and clatter to the floor

But just in case he's not lying, I'll be sure to move any valuable breakables away from my TV, in the event the credits start falling out of my TV, and some Tylenol nearby to handle the shaky-credit induced headache.

[ryoohki]

Most New Line release suffer from DNR, if not all of them. Check the screenshot at AVSFORUM the Bluray is barely better than the upscaled DVD..

[Ken Brown]

Originally Posted by SellmeyourDVD

if you're basing this on screenshots then I suggest you watch it while in motion! The reviewers in my crystal ball are telling me the pq is at least a 9/10, so you HAVE to be wrong. I suggest you take your banter else where or I'll give you what for!

I reviewed it in motion

[Tempest]

Originally Posted by ryoohki

Most New Line release suffer from DNR, if not all of them. Check the screenshot at AVSFORUM the Bluray is barely better than the upscaled DVD..

You mean Warner Brothers right? Because New Line is no more.. Warner owns it now. It is Warner Brothers that are cheap and do crap work.

[MattW]

I have some Blu ray's that were rated 2 for video on this site and I think they look great. I'm not worried about how LOTR will look. I'm not going to search every frame for problems. Just put it in and enjoy the dam movie people.

[SellmeyourDVD]

Originally Posted by Ken Brown

I reviewed it in motion

I was being goofy and talking about Avatar III (look at the quote in my post )

Unless you also have a crystal ball? In that case... I'll be Gandolf and you can be Saurman; we can battle over the Avatar III release review.

[Ken Brown]

Originally Posted by toef

And then there are times where the reviewer just seems to be hyperbolic for hyperbole's sake.

Here's a fun challenge: find three reviews -- any three reviews for any three titles on any three sites -- that don't have an instance of hyperbole in them. I was criticized for using intermittent hyperbole once upon a time, and genuinely tried to eliminate all hyperbole for a review or two. Sadly, the reviews in which I did sounded as if they had been written by a robot

But seriously, any time we use a term that isn't familiar to anyone, feel free to PM us and ask. Oftentimes, the terms we use allow us to address an entire issue in a few words instead of three or four sentences. I'd be more than happy to explain a term and, if I realized enough people didn't understand the meaning of a word, I'd probably stop using it (or, at the very least, explain it better from time to time in my reviews). Anyway, the long and short of it is this: we're available so feel free to ask us anything. You may not agree with an assesment -- especially since AV reviews are subjective -- but at least you won't be left confused by what a reviewer is saying.

Thanks as always for posting! Just keep in mind, after writing hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of reviews, it's easy for a writer to get bored (and lapse into hyperbole just to mix things up) or fall into a rut (and use terms casual AV enthusiasts may not have heard before). For what it's worth, I'll keep everything you said in mind the next time I write a video review

[mjbethancourt]

Originally Posted by Stinky-Dinkins

There was an HD broadcast back then, and it was on Dish PPV, and those are the caps from it.

So, what... are you saying that someone captured those 8-years ago, and have been sitting on those captures all this time, waiting to compare them to a future BD release? Besides being highly improbable, do you not understand how such circumstances would introduce a great deal of "contamination" to the data? That's eight years worth of software and hardware updates, do you really believe a capture taken eight years ago would be a fair comparison? That is why I call BS... the claim doesn't even make sense, you could not have possibly captured an image off of cable in 2002, with 2002 equipment, that would be superior to a modern BD50 release, unless the blu-ray was total crap. You are actually accepting the argument that they took the old encode and mucked it up so badly that it looks inferior to an 8-year-old screencap at a low bitrate. You'll have to excuse me if I find that very far-fetched and improbable. You're being quite selective with your critical thinking.

Also... the 2005 HD broadcast version is not the same thing as the 2002 Dish PPV version. One is HD, the other is not. At the time, they promoted it as the "HD broadcast premier."... and in 2002, HD just didn't mean the same thing that it does now. In 2002, an upscaled 720p through S-video would pass for HD, now most people would call that "fake HD". I'm not calling the source "stupid", I'm saying that the review is so old that the terminology doesn't even hold up any more.

When I said it was a "PJ review" I was saying it was a projector review, not a Peter Jackson review, hahaha.

That's your own failure to communicate. I think you should understand why that was very unclear.

I don't know who said "10 year old MPEG 2 encode," if anyone said it at all, but I didn't.

Yeah, I know you didn't, it was David Boulet; hence the use of the phrase "...another guy said...". The point in lumping you two together, is that you are both resorting to hyperbole. You are arguing that the PQ of the BD is inferior to a 8- or 10-year-old broadcast version, and that is complete nonsense.

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

Exactly.

The experienced/knowledgable posters on the various forums aren't crying foul that Warner didn't get all the original talent together and spend millions to recompose the digital effects and mint a new DI... what they're furious about is that a 10 year old MPEG2 HDTV encode show MORE REAL PICTURE DETAIL than the bran-new "optimized" high-bit-rate VC1 encode..

--------------------------------------------------------------

Originally Posted by Todd Smith

You would have to be blind not to see that fine detail has been removed from the blu ray. There is NOTHING to debate as far as that goes, it is just fact. What is subjective is how much or little it bothers you (as well as the other issues) and how sensitive you are to it in your own environment.......It goes without saying that those of us in a uproar over these transfers are VERY sensitive to this garbage, and even if you are not sensitive, the fact remains that these should be better.

That is correct, it is subjective... and yet so many people of your viewpoint seem to think that their opinion is the only one that counts.

Being able to detect DNR is not the same thing as being annoyed by it. I can detect it just fine, I just happen to fall in line with the majority opinion:
Through extensive market research, home video producers have concluded that the majority of consumers prefer a judicious amount of DNR... not too much, but not zero, either. Being annoyed at the slightest hint of DNR does not make you look like an expert, it makes you look like a blowhard.

As I've said before, if DNR is such a big problem for you, then you should just skip blu-ray altogether, you are beating your head against a wall. Mass-market products do not cater to minority opinion, that is a fight you will never win.

I'm aware that they could have made a better product. However, I'm also aware that it is their expressed intention to do so at a future date. That will be the version for me, this one isn't. So many people were demanding it NOW, that they had to toss out this stop-gap version... but what are they supposed to do, come out and say in a press release "this version is no good; wait for the better one next year"? That would be rather self-defeating, wouldn't it?
While I have no interest in purchasing this sub-par version, I'm also not going to take it as an excuse to spin hyperbole and exaggerate the faults of this release. It has enough faults already without making stuff up. I'm also not going to take it as an excuse to beat up WB. They'll get on this one, but they're not going to do a remastering and so-forth without involving Peter Jackson, and he wasn't available at the time. This release is "good enough" for most people, and the rest of us will just wait. It's smart business to make this release now, and save all the expensive production for what was always the inevitable: an "ultimate edition", to be released after they've made some dough off of this one.

[Ken Brown]

Originally Posted by SellmeyourDVD

I was being goofy and talking about Avatar III (look at the quote in my post )

Unless you also have a crystal ball? In that case... I'll be Gandolf and you can be Saurman; we can battle over the Avatar III release review.

No worries, I knew what you meant. I just wanted to help keep things nice and light like you were doing

[42041]

Originally Posted by mjbethancourt

So, what... are you saying that someone captured those 8-years ago, and have been sitting on those captures all this time, waiting to compare them to a future BD release?

No, they probably recorded the actual mpeg2 transport stream, stored it because they wanted an HD version of the movie, and took screen caps when the blu-rays came out. I have no idea what year the HDTV broadcast is from but it's quite beside the point.

[mjbethancourt]

Originally Posted by 42041

No, they probably recorded the actual mpeg2 transport stream, stored it because they wanted an HD version of the movie, and took screen caps when the blu-rays came out. I have no idea what year the HDTV broadcast is from but it's quite beside the point.

Unless, of course, the point is that people are exaggerating.

[Stinky-Dinkins]

Originally Posted by mjbethancourt

So, what... are you saying that someone captured those 8-years ago, and have been sitting on those captures all this time, waiting to compare them to a future BD release? Besides being highly improbable, do you not understand how such circumstances would introduce a great deal of "contamination" to the data? That's eight years worth of software and hardware updates, do you really believe a capture taken eight years ago would be a fair comparison? That is why I call BS... the claim doesn't even make sense, you could not have possibly captured an image off of cable in 2002, with 2002 equipment, that would be superior to a modern BD50 release, unless the blu-ray was total crap. You are actually accepting the argument that they took the old encode and mucked it up so badly that it looks inferior to an 8-year-old screencap at a low bitrate. You'll have to excuse me if I find that very far-fetched and improbable. You're being quite selective with your critical thinking.

I'm not saying that's when he captured it, I'm saying that's when they first began starting to broadcast that specific version. There was an HD version on Dish PPV going back to 2002 and supposedly it is the exact same version.

I didn't post the caps, so I take them at their word.

The fact is that screen is from an old DISH PPV version and it clearly shows fine detail that is not present on the BD.

It's just blatant. There's really nothing else to say, dancing around that fact accomplishes nothing.

Changing the argument to when specifically the HDTV version those screencaps are from was recorded is a red herring, and is useless to debate.

EDIT: I just realized you were the same guy that went back and forth in the old Gladiator thread (pointlessly) defending its PQ and saying how all of the complaints were overblown and misrepresentations.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/blu-ray-mo...ml#post2293231

You know, that same one they're remastering and have since said was "terrible" which makes this old post fun to read:

https://forum.blu-ray.com/blu-ray-mo...ml#post2293550

Deja Vu....

[Grand Bob]

Originally Posted by neo78956

Basically the director periodically steps into view between two big monitors, so it's like a mashup of a director's commentary and a PIP track, where the director has the movie playing on one monitor to the left, and the behind the scenes footage, storyboards, etc on the right monitor, where the director stands between the two images and talks about the scene or some aspect of the scene. It's a really fantastic and immersive feature. Check it out on the Watchmen: The Director's Cut blu-ray and the Sherlock Holmes blu-ray.

Sounds great! Thanks for the reply.

[rileyparrish]

Wow The Two Towers & Fellowship are night & day in PQ...

[mredman]

Originally Posted by ryoohki

Most New Line release suffer from DNR, if not all of them. Check the screenshot at AVSFORUM the Bluray is barely better than the upscaled DVD..

Its way better then upscaled DVD.
Do you even have the set?