Petty's Purist LotR Edits [4]

OK I'll give it a try. Maybe this weekend. It might just work if I can get exclusive use of a friend's wifi for 2 or 3 hours. If anybody tries to log on in the middle of the download though.....

Well at this rate (its at 76% now) it might be uploaded in time!

Done and ready to watch!

Hi Petty, I watched your cut of An Unexpected Journey and have some feedback for you.

Generally your editing choices are pretty good. AUJ was the least tarnished of the three films so it's fairly easy to remove the unwanted scenes. I like your montage of the dwarves running across the plains toward Rivendell. The overall pace is fairly intact in the film.

On the technical side of things, this is unfortunately where your fanedit suffers. Apart from the low image quality, the audio editing is pretty rough. This to me is what makes or breaks a fanedit. Having music/SFX suddenly cut off with a transition is distracting and can hurt the viewing experience. If you are able to get copies of Howard Shore's score, using his music to cover up some of your audio cuts would help tremendously. I also noticed that the video quality drops during the Goblintown/Gollum sequence- it gets very dark and muddy looking.

Hi Goldeneye- good to see you on Forumshire.

The low image quality is merely for uploading for comment at the moment as my upload speeds are terrible- the edits are made at full 1080p quality- these uploads are converted from that to 480 so I can upload them a bit quicker (12 hours it took for just over 1gig for DOS/BoFA) for folk to make suggestions (If you check out the Book 1 or book 3 edits hat are there from LotR's you will see they are full HD)- this also partly accounts for the murkiness in the goblin section- that section has been filtered to be darker than in PJ's version and combined with being darker and the low image quality it tends to go murky- the problem doesn't exist at full quality however, its just darker.

I completely agree about the audio issue however- my biggest bug bear- and a recent series of pc calamities has left me short of a few programs I used to use- these TH edits have all therefore been done in Adobe Premiere pro, which is fine for visual editing, very good in fact, but on the sound side it has basically two options- a cross fade and a constant gain!
I used the LotR's soundtrack for bits of editing the LotR's films but I dont have the TH score currently to work with- and I need to get Audacity again to be able to work on sound issues.
In a sense like all my edits they are works in progress, hence open to suggestion, and the main aim at this point is to get feedback on choice of scenes and if the story still flows as the main aim.
But I do completely agree that sound is the biggest issue in masking where things have been cut- on which issue I watched your version of the Kili/Fili deaths and thought it was superbly done from a technical stand point, especially on the sound side. Very impressed indeed.

What do you use for a source? I would love to have the ability to separate out vocal from fx from music- but never found a version it was possible to do so from.

Also feel free to put up the link to your blog on your edit- it wont get pulled here I can assure you.

And once more, thanks for watching and welcome to Forumshire.

I edited everything on Adobe Premiere, using the Blurays for the source. For the audio, I used DTS-HD 5.1 and modified the channels to 6 separate mono tracks in Premiere. That way I can individually adjust each channel.

For example, the center channel track contains most of the dialogue. I also used EQ effects to deaden or liven up existing sounds where needed. It's a lot of extra work but it goes a long way in smoothing out the transitions. It's still not perfect but I am happy with 90% of the audio cuts.

I will start a new thread on the Hobbit forum once my upload is complete. Should be ready this afternoon actually!

I really need to use the original bluray for this- unfortunately in my recent series of pc calamities one of the things that has died is my disc drive Which means that unlike the LotR's edits these are from torrent files which has the added annoying issue that the files are already compressed and the sound for some reason whilst still having technically six channels is oddly merged across the channels, so that for example dialogue tends to appear on all of them at once.

Looking forward to seeing your version however and seeing what choices you've made regards that tricky balance of bringing it closer to Tolkien whilst still leaving an intact storyline (I noticed in your Fili/Kili clip you still reference Azog for example in the dialogue). Also looking forward to reading your thread when you put it up.

Got it! (the right file this time )

Will be watching it this evening.

Thank Eru for that Dave, I was beginning wonder what on earth was going on with that drive!

I watched the new DoS/Bo5A edit last night. Very nice indeed! Here's some quick thoughts:

The awkward sequence when Gandalf is leaving at the entrance to Mirkwood is still a week spot, but it's much more watchable than the last edit I watched.

I like the darker Mirkwood.

I'd still like to see the Elven dungeons and Bilbo's roamings in the castle extended if possible so the escape doesn't seem to come right on the heels of the capture.

The Bilbo/Smaug scenes are actually really GOOD, now that they've been pared down to closer to the book and the memory of all the molten gold $%^# has faded like a bad dream. This really puts Bilbo back into the driver's seat of the narrative. And thank you so much for killing Alfred without having hardly introduced him.

The battle itself makes a lot more sense now, with the silliness, the love stories and the personal dramas surgically removed. When I watched it in the theater I'd gotten so bored by this point I was beyond caring, but with Bilbo's storyline coming back into focus and Balin signposting some key points it's starting to be entertaining again.

What I'd say it's lacking, based on one quick viewing, is a little more sense of ebb and flow during the battle. I think that's critical to making any war movie interesting. Hopefully the EE's will give you more to work with. Especially the arrival of the Eagles. I'm a sucker for soaring eagles (so was JRRT I think ) More of Beorn as a giant bear would be welcome too. I have high hopes for the EE's on this score.

I'm afraid I've forgotten a lot of details of Thorin's death in the theatrical edit. I remember scratching my head and palming my face. Yours isn't half bad actually. I just can't figure out how you got from what I'm remembering to where you are now. Of course I can imagine it a lot better, but you've done well considering what you had to work with.

The deaths of Filli and Killi is a gallant effort, but without more emphasis on the genealogy it would lack some of the punch of the book, even if you did get them fighting and dying to protect Thorin. Hopefully the EE's will give you more to work with on that score too, but I'm doubtful...

I remember watching the Beorn sequence in the cinema and blinked. I missed it.

Mrs Figg wrote:I remember watching the Beorn sequence in the cinema and blinked. I missed it.

They added some good Beorn material to the extended editions, including Gandalf introducing the dwarves to Beorn by twos.  It's not quite like the book, but it's better, and Beorn comes across as a large, dangerous man (with bad hair ). I'm actually getting to like him, especially since Petty has edited out the whining orc-victim story. His back-story is best left mysterious, and Beorn left as an inscrutable force of nature.

I'm afraid I still can't recommend Petty's edit for you, Mrs Figg. It's PJ's CGI atmosphere. It dampens any and all magic, particularly elven.
 Although Petty's getting the  story pretty good now, there's not much he can do about the drab magicless atmosphere, especially concerning the woodland elves. The best he can do is take out the worst of the offenses and move the story back to centering on Bilbo. It helps a lot, but it will never even hint at the magic of the Book I'm afraid

The power of words. Out weighs visuals most of the time, unless your doing a war correspondence job, you do need the horror of visuals to drum the seriousness in or people will just keep doing it again & again. But magic, its best done in written words, read only by you, to escape with those heros into your own private world, where it gives you a tingle.

David H wrote:

Mrs Figg wrote:I remember watching the Beorn sequence in the cinema and blinked. I missed it.

They added some good Beorn material to the extended editions, including Gandalf introducing the dwarves to Beorn by twos.  It's not quite like the book, but it's better, and Beorn comes across as a large, dangerous man (with bad hair ). I'm actually getting to like him, especially since Petty has edited out the whining orc-victim story. His back-story is best left mysterious, and Beorn left as an inscrutable force of nature.

I'm afraid I still can't recommend Petty's edit for you, Mrs Figg. It's PJ's CGI atmosphere. It dampens any and all magic, particularly elven.
 Although Petty's getting the  story pretty good now, there's not much he can do about the drab magicless atmosphere, especially concerning the woodland elves. The best he can do is take out the worst of the offenses and move the story back to centering on Bilbo. It helps a lot, but it will never even hint at the magic of the Book I'm afraid

yep the magical atmosphere is nowhere to be found in TH. you are right its drab plastic cgi. I still cant believe they left out the Elven feasting in favour of Legolas and Tauriel gung-hoing it to poor spiders. I love spiders!

David- thanks again for giving them a watch and taking the time to comment.

Regards the Gandalf Mirkwood moment- the only way can see round that is to put the reference to the WC back into AUJ as I had it once before- with just Gandalf being introduced to Galadriel and Saruman by Elrond, and then the very short version of the Council with the bit where Saruman talks about the Necromancer just being a man. That would logically then mean putting back in a little more of the conversation between Gandalf and Beorn, when they leave his house, and name dropping the Necro again there. Then leaving in Gandalf finding the eye graffiti at Mirkwood as the reason for him to hurry off.
Thats the only way I can see to give a narrative reason other than 'he's a wizard he comes and goes doing mysterious other stuff because thats what wizards do'. Which is the current reason.


Not sure there is any other footage to put in from the elven halls to make Bilbo's stay there seem longer I'm afraid. Can but hope the EE might provide- but to be honest this EE is going to have to be like a completely different film for everything thats hoped of it to actually be in it.

With Thorins death I just got rid of the stupid, so no Azog going under the ice, no super leap somehow up through the ice. I just kept it a bit more grounded in a literal sense, and a bit shorter and so more brutal. What I am hoping for is more Beorn footage so I can extend the time between when we see the eagles arrive in the Thorin/Azog fight to when we go back to the fight and Thorin is on the ground. That gap just needs to be a bit longer.


Figg- what David says is true. I can repair the story line to a quite significant agree, I can return the focus right back onto Bilbo and keep it there. But I cant add the missing magic back in- I ant make elves seem like beings who have the capacity to delight in the world with the eyes and wonder of children, and yet be ageless and wise, or put the feasts back into Mirkwood, it remains a dreary , surreal nightmare place where nothing much happens very slowly and shot in slow motion.
I can make the story more like Tolkien but I cant make the film less like PJ.

Out of Interest, Petty, Eldo (or anyone else that was active online in Tolkien forums before TH entered production) would you say there was as much discussion about LOTR re-edits/fan cuts as there is with the TH trilogy currently, back in the day?

Obviously editing software/video sharing sites have come a long way since 2003, and LOTR was a media juggernaut that introduced millions to Tolkien (and more or less kick started online Tolkien discussion), but I haven't been exposed to anywhere near the amount of purism or outrage over LOTR as I have with TH? Maybe LOTR are simply better films, or I missed all the discussion?

(Obviously Petty will feel differently about this, I'm pretty sure my first Tolkien Forum was TORn...so I've never been exposed to to much 'purism'...)

Fan vids were rarer. When I started out on my first one I was hooking two vcr's up together to do the editing- thats how long ago it was! There have definitely been ore done of LotR's between, and seems to me there have been far more of TH than of LotR's in terms of how close to release.

I think part of this was down to the LotR's audience been more split on what they got from PJ- whereas bar a few fanboys willing to defend anything PJ does TH films have not gone down well in general with fans.

But on line 'discussions' around fidelity to source were probably more common and more visceral back in the day than now. And there were a hell of a lot more folk about to argue with over it.

Most of the big debates I have had on the subject of PJ's treatment of Tolkien were back in those days. Although I am always willing to argue the case all over again if anyone wants the debate

{{This is an appeal to anyone who may have a copy my edits- I only have book 1 and 3 still and have lost the rest
If anyone has the others still I would be very grateful if you could either upload them to a google drive or such for me to download, or I can send you a memory stick to put them onto and cover any postage. Thanks. }}}

I have what appears to be the entire edit as one file of 8:19:43
Would that be what you're looking for?
Of course I'd have to do the carrier pigeon trick to get to Scotshobbbitland, but it could be done.

{{Um, I have no idea which version that is - but its better than what Ive got! And of course you are due some Who I believe. }}}

OK then, I'll put out my pigeon snares tomorrow and if I catch one with a Scottish accent I'll send it winging your way on Monday or Tuesday, unless you find something closer by then.

{{{Excellent. Don't send a plump pigeon though, don't want it to end up in the pot before I realise its the message carrier! Send a scabby one }}}

always back up the palantir!

(which reminds me, I'd better do mine right now!)

{{4 dead hard drives and changing rules of online storage companies Never trust online storage- its not permanent in the slightest and can disappear at any moment }}

Yeah, I never drank the online kool-aid. It's why I never jumped on the google docs bandwagon, I just don't trust it to be there for me. And I like the feeling that I can do my work without an #$%!! internet placenta.

Me, I've got two backup drives, and alternate between them, kept in two different locations. I learned my lesson the hard way!