Has the "Lord Of The Rings" Movie Trilogy Held Up For You?

No, 4K can do 60fps, as the 4Ks for "Gemini Man" and "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" demonstrate.

4K can't do 48fps, apparently, so that's why the Hobbit movies are 24fps.

I guess they could've tried to up-something the 48fps to 60fps!

 

Calling it "soap opera" was a bit over the top, but I can't stand DNR, EE, image sharpening applied to a whole film when there's no need for it.

Grain should be kept. I get that most people want their high def TVs to show perfectly sharp images, and they see grain as imperfection. The industry happily obliges and gives the buyers what they want.

This is why I still keep old DVDs:

Left: DVD. Right: DNR cropped version on blu ray.

 

Reminds me of The Beatles Touring Years doc...

 

I get it. But there is actually a "soap opera effect" (which is also an abysmal thing to do to a movie). It can either be having that awful refresh rate or whatever turned on televisions or something shot in HFR. Both of these create the "soap opera effect". Although you may not have been referring to that, it does exists. I just wanted to clarify that the UHD sets for all their faults do not have that one.

 

Yeah. You're correct. I should've clarified that the specific framerate for The Hobbit films can't be done on home video physical formats yet.

If they were gonna go the HFR route they should've shot in 60 fps so it could be replicated on home video. But I guess the thought was to make it something that you could ONLY get in theaters.

 

I doubt the standards for 4K UHD discs were in place when Pete started the Hobbit trilogy. The disc format debuted in February 2016, and movie production started March 2011, so that's a long time in advance.

Wiki claims the standards were set in May 2015, so the Hobbit trilogy was over before 4K UHD specs emerged.

Maybe Pete already was aware 48fps wouldn't work in video before he made the movies, though - I don't know those details!

 

I think going with 48 frames just meant that they could have a standard rate movie as well as a high frame rate movie. I don't know if they were thinking about the home video release when they made it but I know Blu-ray doesn't support 1080p60 or 1080p50 so that would have ruled both of them out. You don't get a high-frame-rate home video release but at least it doesn't compromise the blu-ray by looking as though it was shot in 24fps all along.
I don't even think that editing packages support 48frames per second, I don't remember the details but I think they edited in 24 and then designed an algorithm of something to conform the EDL to the 48fps footage.

 

I’ve only got the dvd extended box set and the movies still look good on my 4K tv. Not sure how I feel about the movies being modernised. Would this not make the cgi and sfx look worse?

 

The new 4K box including extended+theatrical versions can be purchased for just €59.99

https://www.amazon.de/Herr-Ringe-Extended-Trilogie-Blu-ray/dp/B08KHWNPTC/

 

Surprisingly not.

 

Color grading is better here. Grain management a bit more uniform (but in a bad way for the first film). 4K upscale for those shots that involve visual effects for the first film while the second and third are still 2K up scaled. That about summarize it?

I’m not going to spend too much time analyzing it all but it does look better than the earlier Blu-rays overall to me. Would it have been ideal to get 4K OCN harvests plus new 4K visual effects? Of course but it would cost quite a bit to do a film as visual effects heavy as the trilogy.

Popeye was clearly an older scan but it still looked pretty good IMHO.