The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The second entry in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, given the same treatment as An Unexpected Journey. Once again with better picture quality, original color palette, expanded picture frame, uncompromised 7.1 audio and the commentary track for the over 3h official extended cut.
Everything in one package.
As it was the case with An Unexpected Journey, the official UHD blu-ray was a smudged mess of scrubbed details bloated to 4K which actually looked worse than the normal Blu-Ray. Something that was very unnecessary given these movies were filmed in digital in the first place and were already being criticizes for looking \"plasticky\". I went to correct this by using the Blu-Ray as a base and doing a much more conservative upscale with the goal to preserve every detail of the original master while bumping it to something that looks more like true 4K thanks to new A.I. upscaling technologies.
To preserve all the pre-existing details paired with the extra information given both by the better upscaling and the considerable expanded picture frame, it was all encoded in very high bitrate so that nothing is scrubbed away. So this master is not for those who are stingy about storage space, but more so for those who like to spare no punches when it comes to experiencing something in the best quality realistically available.
As you may have come to expect from my releases, the Open Matte master was used and joined scene-by-scene with the blu-ray to achieve that \"IMAX\" dynamic aspect ratio. The most outrageous thing perhaps is that these movies were originally filmed and even released in selected cinemas in this format, yet never received a home release. Until WB gets their heads out of their butts and decide they want your money and release these movies as they were originally intended to be seen (if ever), this is going to be as close to those masters as we get.
When Peter Jackson re-released the Middle-Earth movies, he had many of them re-graded and homogenized. The Desolation of Smaug took the biggest hit as it got completely regraded. While I don't necessarily mind the regrade as it falls in line with the rest of the trilogy. I wanted to preserve the original vision for this film in 4K as well. Which was distinctly more dark and tone-muted.
All the extended scenes featured in the Official Extended Edition will be found here as well with no notable differences.
As usual the highest quality audio (and commentary) were transferred from the 4K Blu-Ray. As well as the subtitles in a solid variety of languages.
Screenshots:
Please keep in mind all images here are HDR tonemapped to SDR, so considerable color/light data has been clipped out, hence they are not fully representative of what you'll see when playing the movie on a proper Rec.2020 screen. As you can tell from the shots, it still looks good, but you'll get a lot more out of this master if you play it on an HDR TV with at least 300nits.
https://preview.redd.it/4kzaxi8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fb80dc2f7aacb1c1033a4917f3e4b6fb6e4c9ad7
https://preview.redd.it/u18fao8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82ed0eae3bc2d77b427a08732447b273b0f5cd17
https://preview.redd.it/llrvzj8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b6c407ceff7092d66902567f74cc77678f3cca6
https://preview.redd.it/7eri4l8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=06f193b4d03b56780631ca0fbc1a03f265918a54
https://preview.redd.it/2rya4k8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=593b51769a8b1d990ad279ac2c680e3cf224ad82
https://preview.redd.it/5d3hak8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cf9386dd20ded5b84d82d050a01f38638840952c
https://preview.redd.it/o02gck8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=855b84e4d6c3e5a215f913e61d0f70f388fb29df
https://preview.redd.it/pnqznl8gb7se1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7057de42cc1ee12431496f7ffe3348a21e25cc8
IMPORTANT NOTES:
This is a meticulous labor of love and passion, by a fan for fans, it is not perfect.
You may notice the presence of "blurred squares" at the corners.
This is due to basic geometry, due to the way the Open Matte version is framed compared to the Widescreen version, which results often in a cross-like shape.
Due to both masters containing picture the other doesn't (see scheme here)
This results in empty corners, as there are no masters publicly available to restore the footage in these, so they get filled through a technique called "ambilight" to mitigate their presence.
LINK IS IN MY PROFILE
(you may need to use new reddit to see it)
I must give credit to Yaut for the original overlay here which served as a basis and huge time-saver for this project.
I would like to always thank everyone that has been supportive.
I know they are not for everyone and I never expected so many people to enjoy them so I'm very happy to bring them to you.