Is Lord of the Rings the best example of Blu-ray vs stream quality?

[onyx527]

I’ve been on a LOTR binge lately, reading the books and making my way through the movies. I have them on disc and have been watching them that way but sometimes I’ll load up Netflix to watch certain scenes. And the difference is just striking.

When I watch on Blu-ray the image is razor sharp, colors are amazing, detail audio just everything is as good as it gets. Like it was filmed this year.
But the stream is just holllly cow crap. Colors are washed out, picture fuzzy, it even makes the CGI look worse.

Usually streaming gets pretty close but for some reason lotr is the perfect example of the disparity between the two and the reason for getting the disc.

[LegacyCosts]

Any 4k disc vs UHD stream tends to be vastly different in my experience

[JamesKurtovich]

Did they ever fix the color grading on Fellowship?

[CreasyBear]

Originally Posted by JamesKurtovich

Did they ever fix the color grading on Fellowship?

Yeah, on the EE Blu-ray. Looks so much better than the Theatrical disc.

[Afa]

Likewise, great binge.

Also just realised there hasn't been a 4k release yet... blasphemy!!

[chip75]

Originally Posted by Afa

Likewise, great binge.

Also just realised there hasn't been a 4k release yet... blasphemy!!

It's due this year if I remember.

[Shingster]

Originally Posted by CreasyBear

Yeah, on the EE Blu-ray. Looks so much better than the Theatrical disc.

You're mistaken, it's the other way round, the theatrical editions have the neutral transfers, the EEs have the green-bombed transfers:

LOTR - Green Cast Comparison (Extended Left vs Theatrical Right) - YouTube

[CreasyBear]

No, the EE's look proper. The Theatrical version looks like an upscaled DVD.

[Shingster]

That might be your personal opinion, but when people talk about "the fudged up colours" they are obviously talking about the green cast on the Extended Editions. They were the controversial releases.

[CreasyBear]

Originally Posted by Shingster

That might be your personal opinion, but when people talk about "the fudged up colours" they are obviously talking about the green cast on the Extended Editions. They were the controversial releases.

Shocking! Hobbiton looks green!

[Shingster]

Hobbiton looks green in the theatrical editions as well. Hobbiton also looks green in the Extended Edition transfers for the other two films as well. None of these have the green/blue cast in Fellowship of the Ring, so perhaps you can explain to all of us here how the colours can be correct on the BD of Fellowship of the Ring when they immediately dropped the cast for their release of the other two films!

[CreasyBear]

Originally Posted by Shingster

Hobbiton looks green in the theatrical editions as well. Hobbiton also looks green in the Extended Edition transfers for the other two films as well. None of these have the green/blue cast in Fellowship of the Ring, so perhaps you can explain to all of us here how the colours can be correct on the BD of Fellowship of the Ring when they immediately dropped the cast for their release of the other two films!

I saw FOTR seventeen times in theaters. The opening did not look blue. It had a gold tint to it.

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&...=48945&i=1&l=0

The Theatrical Blu-ray's look like they're being played on a poorly calibrated monitor, with the "cold" color space. The EE's look proper and since they were approved by Jackson, I'll take his word for it.

[Shingster]

Again: Explain why Fellowship of the Ring EE is the ONLY film in the trilogy to have the cast. The other two films in their EE Blurays do not. Are you honestly going to sit there and tell us that Jackson just randomly decided that the first film was going to look completely different to the other two?

[CreasyBear]

Originally Posted by Shingster

Again: Explain why Fellowship of the Ring EE is the ONLY film in the trilogy to have the cast. The other two films in their EE Blurays do not. Are you honestly going to sit there and tell us that Jackson just randomly decided that the first film was going to look completely different to the other two?

TTT and ROTK had better DI's performed. FOTR had a relatively early and rushed DI completed for its release and likely Jackson was never happy with it, thus he went back and fixed it for the EE BD.

[Shingster]

I don't know what you're talking about now. Ignore the condition of the DIs, Fellowship looks different on the actual EE Blu-ray release to the other films on their EE Blu-ray releases. If Jackson had "fixed" the dodgy DI of Fellowship then he would have done so and ensured that all the films would look the same across all releases.

So again: Please explain why Fellowship of the Rings is the ONLY release in the trilogy to have a blatant green/blue cast throughout. Explain why snow looks blue on Fellowship of the Ring if the colours are correct. If that is the case, why isn't snow equally as blue on the sequels?

Very simple question.

Also BTW you seem to think we are having a debate about Theatrical VS Extended colours with me claiming that the Theatrical edition of Fellowship is accurate, but I have made absolutely no such claim so far in this thread. The crux of this debate is the perception among fans that the EE Bluray of Fellowship has a blatant cast to it that fudges up the look of many scenes. The relative quality of the theatrical edition release is completely immaterial.

[Ray0002]

Originally Posted by onyx527

I’ve been on a LOTR binge lately, reading the books and making my way through the movies. I have them on disc and have been watching them that way but sometimes I’ll load up Netflix to watch certain scenes. And the difference is just striking.

When I watch on Blu-ray the image is razor sharp, colors are amazing, detail audio just everything is as good as it gets. Like it was filmed this year.
But the stream is just holllly cow crap. Colors are washed out, picture fuzzy, it even makes the CGI look worse.

Usually streaming gets pretty close but for some reason lotr is the perfect example of the disparity between the two and the reason for getting the disc.

Think that's bad, I picked up Gemini Man on 4K UHD and when I loaded it up a pop up message indicated the film would be played in 4K UHD at 60fps.

I was like sure. accepted the format and to my utter amazement , I never seen any movie regardless of disc , stream or theater ever look the way that movie played. I was so blown away with the presentation I redeemed the digital copy Vudu and informed my friend he had to watch it. However the UHD Steam although played in 4K it was not @ 60fps. He was like whats the big deal ? I said ugh... never mind guess you have to wait to see it on disc to understand. The compression rate and download speed for digital streaming is not ready yet. I'll continue to buy disc until the tech catches up. But by the time it does.... 8K UHD will be available on disk.

[Roonan]

Originally Posted by Shingster

Again: Explain why Fellowship of the Ring EE is the ONLY film in the trilogy to have the cast.

Because only The Fellowship of the Ring was remastered from the original 2K digital files. The other two got transfers from the same masters as the DVD.

[BaronVH]

Originally Posted by Shingster

That might be your personal opinion, but when people talk about "the fudged up colours" they are obviously talking about the green cast on the Extended Editions. They were the controversial releases.

Not this again. Next we will see a screenshot from the internet of the green sky that is not on the disks. The EE disks are glorious.

[onyx527]

Originally Posted by Ray0002

Think that's bad, I picked up Gemini Man on 4K UHD and when I loaded it up a pop up message indicated the film would be played in 4K UHD at 60fps.

I was like sure. accepted the format and to my utter amazement , I never seen any movie regardless of disc , stream or theater ever look the way that movie played. I was so blown away with the presentation I redeemed the digital copy Vudu and informed my friend he had to watch it. However the UHD Steam although played in 4K it was not @ 60fps. He was like whats the big deal ? I said ugh... never mind guess you have to wait to see it on disc to understand. The compression rate and download speed for digital streaming is not ready yet. I'll continue to buy disc until the tech catches up. But by the time it does.... 8K UHD will be available on disk.

Anything he does now I’ll be auto buying the disc haha, just to support his work in 60 fps. If you haven’t seen Billy Lynn I also suggest that, same guy and same 4K/60 presentation. I agree, it’s one of the most astounding ways to present a film. With Billy I never quite stopped being aware of it but with Gemini Man he managed to suck me into the story so well or filmed it differently I don’t know but I almost forgot it was 60fps

Yeah streaming in general annoys me. Sometimes they can get close, like Sicario on iTunes looks pretty damn close to BR I don’t know how. But 4K streams only ask for 20mb/s. Why can’t they offer a proper 1080 BR stream option at 30-40? Majority of people have bandwidth for it and it’s not that much more than UHD.

[Shingster]

OK it's obvious that either nobody here understands my "simple question" or they are simply ignoring the issue because they have no explanation, so let me make my point much more directly:

IIRC Fellowship of the Ring is different to the other two films in the trilogy because the Digital Intermediate was incomplete, so they had to strike their HD masters from a film source (I think) or at least from film for a good portion of the film that didn't have a DI source. The other two films in the trilogy had complete DIs so they are struck from their respective DIs. Peter Jackson, unhappy with the look of the original Fellowship HD master (not completely struck from DI), went back to the well for the EE release and completely regraded the film to his preference. That's basically the official story.

OK, so my question: If Jackson's regrade of Fellowship is accurate, why does it look so different to the transfers present on the other two films? Yes the source is different, but at the end of the day Jackson applied blanket tints to the image that compromise accuracy, now you can certainly argue that this was the original intent and we're seeing it for the first time on home video with the EE BD release, but IF it was the intent, why aren't these tints there on the other two films? Presumably Jackson signed off on the other two films, yes? So why does Fellowship look completely different?

I'm sorry folks, but you can't have it both ways: Either Fellowship has the wrong grading, or the other two films have the wrong grading. You can't claim they are all accurate when one film looks so drastically different to the other two. We're not talking about a trilogy of films shot years apart from each other under different conditions and with a filmmaker having years to decide to go in a different direction with respects to colour schemes. We're talking about a trilogy shot all at once.

Originally Posted by BaronVH

Not this again. Next we will see a screenshot from the internet of the green sky that is not on the disks. The EE disks are glorious.

No-one is arguing that the EE disks don't look great, we're discussing the accuracy of the colour grading. If you don't understand that screenshots are an exact 1:1 representation of the film frames present on the disk, then you have nothing to add to this discussion because you don't understand the subject at hand. The only difference in colour from a screenshot to watching the film is that most people will view a screenshot on a computer monitor or laptop/tablet/mobile screen as opposed to their Home Cinema display, so it's a differntly calibrated display, but that is the ONLY difference introduced into the process of analysis when we are talking about colour grades. Another factor is purely physiological as opposed to technical, and that's when you sit and watch a film with the lights off and settle into it, your eyes will adjust and a green tint won't seem so green. Doesn't mean the green tint ain't there!