It's not easy being green.

[RickZarber]

No, not a Muppets thread. I'm talking about color timing, specifically, a whole movie getting tinted green/cyan for its newest home video release. No, not the first Matrix movie, that's old news. (Good for you if that actually crossed your mind, though.)

I'm talking about the extended edition blu-ray of the Fellowship of the Ring.

The LotR EE BDs come out next Tuesday, and FotR's video presentation is once again stirring controversy. (Last time, for the theatrical version BD release, it boasted an inferior transfer full of compression artifacts and rampant digital noise reduction, resulting in smeary textures and reduced detail.) While those issues have been addressed and resolved with a new 2k transfer, it has been discovered that the entire film has been re-color-timed for this release, and it has allegedly been done under the supervision/approval of Peter Jackson and Andrew Lesnie (the DP). But they haven't commented save one mention that they approved the new transfer--no comments on the actual version as it appears on the disc. So the question remains: is this truly how they intend it to look, or was there an error somewhere down the line? WB Home Video has been silent thus far.

The changes run like this:

Originally Posted by Kenneth Brown on the Blu-ray.com review

Shadows are darker, saturation has been dampened in key scenes (the Council of Elrond, in particular) and greens and cyans, though already heavily at play in the film's original palette, have been noticeably intensified throughout, in some cases during sequences that once featured very little green or cyan at all. [...] Having viewed the full transfer and all of the changes made to its original color-grading, and having made several comparisons between it, its DVD counterpart and the theatrical cut's Blu-ray release, there are a variety of scenes that have the distinct aroma of intention. However, I'm also not about to discard the possibility that something might be amiss, especially when the green/cyan tint is as consistent and pervasive as it appears to be. (Even the film's white title letters exhibit the same green/cyan hue as the shots that first brought attention to the tint.) [...] It's worth noting that some of the scenes giving purists pause have been, from top to bottom, tinted with a green/cyan hue, which seems a bit strange given Jackson and Lesnie's previous methodology when using digital color grading.

Here are some comparison examples I put together myself. (BD screencaps come from blu-ray.com, DVD screens are by me, and have been scaled up to match the native resolution of BD.)

Here, you can see the de-saturation and hue changes brought to the Rivendell scenes:





Now, despite it not being the original intent for those scenes, I'd pretty much call that an improvement. However, stuff like this just seems unacceptable:



I mean seriously, what?

Overlong post is getting too long, but I guess I don't know how to feel about all of this, and wonder what your opinions might be. There's quite a lot of heated debate in the AV-type forums, but I really have no clue how the "general public" feels about any of this.