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One DVD To Rule Them All
Obiwan Kenobi writes "In a gala event last night New Line Cinema revealed their Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD Plans. This includes a 2-disc version on August 6th (in both Pan & Scan and Widescreen, click here for box art), and a special 4-hour, R-rated cut of the film debuting in a 4-disc set on November 12th. While the August release includes some nifty features, it's the four disc version, with the longer cut and three audio commentaries, that really gets the drool flowing."
Now that's what I'm talkin about!
So, do we hate the MPAA this week?
Or are movies going from the big screen to DVD faster and faster? I swear that some of the movies seem to hit DVD before they've hardly left the theater!
:-(
In this case the added commentary tracks are going to be great. Nearly every movie I've seen with these has been interesting. Wild Things and the movie with the kid seeing dead people (argh what was the title) had truly insightful commentaries I thought. I'll be interested to see what the commentaries for this one will have.
Looking forward to it and am glad to see it coming out so quickly. Nowadays heading to the theater just isn't high on my list - too expensive too. DVD I can watch anytime I want, unfortunatly it supports the damned MPAA
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Was having trouble getting to the site, so:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will be released in no less than four versions this year. On 8/6, separate widescreen and pan & scan versions will be released, each a two-disc set with identical extra features. Disc one includes the film presented in English Dolby Digital Surround EX and Dolby 2.0 surround (sorry, no DTS). Disc two is where all the goodies are at, and retail will be $29.95 for either the pan & scan or widescreen editions. The extras to be found on disc 2 include:
3 in-depth documentaries that reveal the secrets behind the production of this epic adventure, including "Welcome to Middle-earth" in-store special as shown by Houghton Mifflin, "The Quest for the Ring" as debuted on the FBC Network, and "A Passage to Middle-earth" as premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel
15 featurettes originally created for lordoftherings.net, which explore the locales and cultures of Middle-earth and include interviews with cast members Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler and others.
Exclusive 10-minute behind-the-scenes preview of the next The Lord of the Rings theatrical release, "The Two Towers"
Enya "May It Be" music video
An inside look at the special extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Preview of Electronic Arts' video game "The Two Towers"
Original theatrical trailers and TV spots
Exclusive online content only available to DVD-ROM users via a special website set to go live on street date
Then, on 11/12, New Line will release a mega four-disc set, with a new extended cut of the film created by Peter Jackson himself, and featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage. This cut of the film will be Rated R due to some extended violence, and no retail price has yet been set for this release. The now nearly four-hour film will be spread over the first two discs and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen (alas, no sound format information is yet available.) Unfortunately, all the supplements for the 4-disc set are still in production, so final details were not revealed. However, the disc is planned to include 3 audio commentaries and another four hours of bonus material. It is also not yet known if all the features on the "standard" two-disc set edition will also be included here.
Last but not least, New Line is also planning on release a special limited edition gift set of the 4-disc set, with two bookend statuettes by sculptor Sideshow Weta, the National Geographic "Beyond The Movie" DVD, and several collectible Decipher game cards. There were also rumors floating around that after all three films are done and released, a fifth mega-box set of all three with possible additional material may be released, which would be sometime in 2004.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I understand. It's long. If you don't want the 1/2 hour extra footage you can buy the shorter version. Everyone wins.
I take that last bit back. in the end the people selling me the cd utimately win. Bastards.
Exactly how much of the extra footage is "closeup of ring" or "closeup of Frodo in awe".
Somebody walking out of the movie suggested that a good drinking game would be to take a shot every time there was a closeup of the ring. We decided that any viewer, Boris Yeltsin included, would be dead before a single RingWraith had ever appeared.
Am I the only one disappointed by the sound getting no better than DD 5.1? I'm all about DTS. And widescreen. I'm still trying to convince some of my friends that you GAIN by watching the widescreen. They always complain that the black bars destroy their viewing experience. Ahh well, a home theater nerd I am. :)
MIRROR!! (Box cover art)
l owship_w.jpg
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mohanc/lordoftherings_fel
Just think Liv Tyler...We all know she got one good thing from her dad. Open up Liv...
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
You put the disk in your player but being The One Disk it makes your player disappear. You then end up poking blindly at the front panel for the play button(or eject button...which ever comes first) or finding the long lost remote.
This is stupid, you know. There's no bloody reason that pan & scan and widescreen shouldn't be THE SAME FILM, using the SAME MPEG-2 stream, on the SAME DVD. After all, it's not like it's a different movie, or anything - this entire mode of "must choose widescreen - must choose pan&scan" is more stupid than I can possible imagine.
Let me explain: normal TVs are in one format (NTSC), and movies are in a different, but all of the movies are wider than the TV, right? So, Pan & Scan movies aren't cropping, or zooming, or anything: all they're doing is displaying only a "portion" of the screen, and another remaining portion is left offscreen.
WHY didn't the movie makers come up with a standard to allow a DATA track along side the DVD MPEG stream which cues the DVD player to pan & scan ON ITS OWN? Most people already have "Zoom" features on the DVD player, and then with "left" and "right" buttons you can "pan and scan" manually. All you need is a cue track to move the 'window' left and right. It's a joke - honestly. It would take no effort, everyone would have everything they want, and we'd be happy. And better yet, if there were some scenes where the director said "um, no... I really want to retain the widescreen here" it could simply switch out of pan and scan for a portion of it. Best of both worlds, and all it requires is a really trivial amount of coding (come ON, I could do this in my sleep!).
Grr. Rant off. Pan and Scan will always be around, simply because different films use different transfer techniques, and while most people say "who cares, I don't mind the black bars" the fact is, it's not the black bars - it's the fact that you're tossing resolution in one direction to gain information (which may be meaningless) in another. I'd rather have the option to see it full screen (that is, pan and scan) rather than having widescreen shoved down my throat.
Heh, four hours doesn't come close to doing the books justice. The book is an epic adventure through wide spaces, dozens of side stories, meetings with all sorts of interesting people, etc... Heck like half a year passes in the first book. The movie is like "gotta go, gotta go, move move move move move, not enough time, lets skip a few chapters, go go go, action action action, go go go, skip some more, go go go go go, fight some baddies, go go go..." The movie makes it seem like the whole war of the rings took place in 3 days. A movie that actually represented the first book would alone take like 12+ hours, even if some of the more expendable side stories (like Tom Bombadil) were cut.
If it weren't that mini-series were always so poorly made, it would be better served in that format... Except it would be like 3 seasons long... So, maybe a regular TV show where the entire series is written and shot before it airs... But the first season would have a lot of episodes with no action, so nobody would watch it... Maybe if they took the story and put it in a series of books... Oh, wait...
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
...I suspect there will be nine DVDs...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
- Sundays attitude will be decided via a random number generator. Numbers 1-3 will mean we hate them, numbers 4-6 will mean we like them and numbers 7-9 mean we're flexible: if they put out a good movie, like The Matrix, we like them. If they put out a bad movie, like anything with Leonardo DiCraplio, we hate them.
Milhouse:- Wait...What about 0?
Bart:- Yeah, what about 0?
Martin:--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Doesn't work that well.
First, most DVD players don't have a "zoom" feature. Mine doesn't, and I think that it's only really common on Toshiba players.
There actually is a standard in the DVD spec for panning and scanning a "wide" image based on the DVD player's setting (16:9 vs 4:3 letterbox vs 4:3 p&s). If it's ever used, it's used in menus that can be displayed wide. Unfortunately it's too flaky to work with the movies themselves.
Another problem is that it would only be useful for 1.77:1 images. A movie that is 2.35:1 (like Blade or Contact or FotR) couldn't be panned and zoomed without still having small black bars at the top and bottom.
I'm not sure how having 16:9 resolution affects it either -- though if allowing a movie to be p&sed by the player would require dropping the 16:9 resolution then you can forget it; widescreen affectionadios are not going to be happy sacrificing image quality to appease the peons who like watching butchered films.
And finally a number of movies aren't filmed directly in the aspect ratio they are shown; they're filmed "full-frame" or at least with more of the image at the top and bottom than what you see onscreen -- it's just that the extra information is matted by the black bars. In those cases you'd look for scenes where you can get away with showing that extra information to minimize the panning and zooming that needs to be done, however there will be times when the top and bottom information shows things that don't need to be there, like set equipment, and CG FX is usually rendered and applied to the finished frame rather than the open frame, so those shots need to be cropped more. Very complicated work and doing that on the fly is not in the DVD spec.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
"This tv has been modified. It has been formatted to fit your movie." PAN & SCAN should be a CRIME!
Heck like half a year passes in the first book.
In fact, a little less than 18 years pass during the first book. For seventeen of them, Gandalf is researching the ring and Frodo sits on his ass in Bag End.
Five months pass between Frodo leaving Bag End until the breaking of the fellowship at Amon Hen. Two of these are spent lounging around Rivendell, and they spend almost an entire month at Lorien. I don't think we'd want to see all of these periods represented accurately in the movie. A sense of urgency in the movie is appopriate and appreciated.
Assuming you are a patient person, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too -
Buy DVDs second-hand
You get the discs and the MPAA doesn't see one cent of revenue. Plus, you'll have the added bonus of supporting the First Sale Doctrine, which the media and software companies are silently trying to do away with!
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry