It's a little more involved than just throwing the same material into a different container and pressing a button. Condensing the material and putting it on 2 Bds would have involved more production time, more QC time, and would have taken up more replication time and *probably more significantly* hogged that replication space that could have been used to press actual HD content for other titles.
Encoding and pressing 2 new Bd disc images would have also increased the production cost for the release, increasing the final MSRP.
So you would have had to wait longer and pay a little more.

You see lazy, I see economical and efficient.

You're using the binary capacity of DVD (GiB), but the decimal capacity of Blu-ray (GB). In reality, a dual-layered BD can hold approx 46.61 GiB of data. That's still plenty of space to fit all the bonus material DVD content onto two Blu-rays though.

The material wouldn't have to be condensed, recompressed, or re-encoded. A single dual-layer Blu-ray can hold approximately 5.86 dual-layer DVDs worth of content.

However, the menus would've have to have been re-authored, to map all the content now amassed on less discs.

Waiting longer probably wouldn't have been necessary if WB/New Line had planned to use all BDs from the start; they schedule these things far in advance of even announcing them, let alone releasing them. Also, the final MSRP has very little to with the costs of manufacturing, and more with the value of the content on the discs. This is why DVDs and Blu-rays can drastically drop in price over time. The manufacturing costs didn't drop that quickly, and new titles are still released at high MSRP.

That's what I meant when I said condensing. Someone has to sit down and take time to map out the new navigation, create the menus, etc etc. While people may think that all amounts to a sluff job, it takes some skilled man hours that have to be paid for. And while the increase in cost of two Bd 50s may seem negligible to us, to the bean counters submitting the budgets to the execs that approve or disapprove these projects, they do matter. The run on this set is going to tie up the presses a lot more than something like The Horse Soldiers or The Big Country or even The Hustler and Some Like It Hot- it may even exceed all those put together. That's hogging a lot of replication space. WB also has another big multi Bd50 set coming out a few weeks earlier.

I understand why people would want this streamlined onto less discs. I wouldn't have minded one bit. At the same time though I understand why WB would go this route and don't really have a problem with it. These projects have fixed budgets they are allowed to work within. I want them to spend their resources, however constrained, into making sure the movies are presented correctly. The extras are information-centric and I just don't need them in HD.

They wouldn't be in HD, just in SD but on a Blu-ray.

ditto....that's "why" they're on DVD. Paul are you not reading that part of the info? On BD they could've condensed the size of the package drastically cuz the material was made in SD. Therefore...putting all that SD stuff on a couple of BDs or whatever and more neat in presentation.

Yeah...$120 SRP for 3 films should cover some re-authoring and some design work.

Yeah, I still think MSRP is crazy, but I'm OK with the $40 I paid from the last B&N sale. I really don't feel like waiting a couple more years after the Hobbit is released on blu for another bundle to possibly come along. And other then the possible restoration of the extras in HD, I don't know what else they could possible cram into this set.

Yeah, Alien and Star Wars were able pull it off without bankrupting Fox.

Nothing new for Warners, though, the extras discs in the Ultimate Matrix blu-ray set were DVDs, too.

And the extras discs in the Blade Runner 5-disc Blu-ray and HD-DVD sets. This appears to be a reoccurring theme with WB.

Sorry I wrapped that post up with my boiler plate response to extras on Bds in general. The rest of the post I'd hope would have made clear I understood the extras were intended to be SD in either case.

Yes they could have streamlined things. I agree. I also wouldn't have minded one bit. I just disagreed that little to no more cost would have ensued. And again, cost is only 1 factor.
DVD has contracted and Bd has expanded- this means all those DVD rep facilities that were built in the heyday to handle heavy demand are now idling. There is far more capacity available now than there is demand. I expect it is closer to the opposite on the Bd side. You could tie up lines producing a couple streamlined Bds, but it why when the discs already exist and they can be included at a fraction of the cost of Bds, and they don't impinge on the replication of other Bd titles?

I could be wrong, but I expect these are some of the considerations at play.

And the theatrical LOTR BDs

agree...

And the terrible thing there is that those extras are available in HD (and were originally meant to be released as such), but Warner wimped out at the last hurdle. I give them a pass on that one, though, as it was early days and also still the greatest BD release to-date.

Of course, if they re-released it with the extras in HD on BDs, I'd be first in line to re-buy the shit out of it.

http://www.lordoftherings.net

The lord of the Rings EE are coming back to the big screen this month. FOTR June 14th, TT June 21st, and ROTK June 28th.

For those interested....Bill Hunt reviewed the trilogy. According to him, the picture quality is substantially better, with the disc space fully being used to maximize the bit rates. Sounds good to me.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/review...ews061411.html

Here's the Fellowship breakdown.

The most important thing to know here is that the HD image quality for this film is vastly improved from the Theatrical Blu-ray. It's actually a new presentation, remastered from the film's original 2K digital files. In fact, it's breathtaking. There are significant gains in fine detail and overall contrast. The image is delicately textured and refined. You can actually see the very light grain structure of the image, which results in a far less digital and far more film-like presentation. Contrast is excellent, with deep, true blacks. Colors are pleasing too, though it's worth noting that the color timing for these films has been redone. I've confirmed with production-related sources that Jackson and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie were directly involved in all decisions related to this new transfer and approved it personally. So to the extent that there are changes to the color-timing, they were made at Jackson and Lesnie's direction - the films look exactly as they want them to. Like the DVD release before it, the high-definition presentations of all three films in this set have been split over two discs, in this case BD-50s. While I've no doubt some will complain about having to get up and change discs, I'm EXTREMELY pleased that this was done in order to max out the video and audio data rates with the least amount of compression. The Rings films have so much detail, texture and action that they really need room to breathe on disc - even in high-definition. I'm very pleased they've gotten that room. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise - it makes a REAL difference. The added data space and lower compression significantly enhances the dimensionality of the image. All you need to do to see it is watch the scenes in Rivendell - there's remarkable depth visible. The improvement almost knocks you over. The presentation is rich, nuanced... stunning. My hats off to Warner for making absolutely the right call. At long last, Fellowship presents a truly satisfying image on Blu-ray.

Sounds great. Look forward to when it drops in price.

Fuck that review - looks like WB must have Bill in their pocket(ses). They must have thrown him a birthday party!!!!11!!1

Probably did. Warner already fucked over fans last year, so now they can properly bend them over and get them to pay again. Not me.

I like a guy with principles! Yeah!

Went to the theatrical presentation of the EE of Fellowship last night, and it was the "remastered" (as Peter Jackson put it) version, played by a digital projector. If so, Bill Hunt is correct - it really looks sharp and defined, but not artificially so (the EE and DNR curse). There were a small handful of shots that were a bit fuzzy (one particularly glaring one near the end of the film of Aragorn before the Uruk-Hai battle in the forest), but the overall picture is quite stunning.

I can't compare it to the existing Blu-Ray of the original cut, though, as I've never seen it.

Looks like the BDs may suffer from green tint. AVS thread is exploding.

There you have it....

How so? I didn't get fucked over because I didn't buy the theatrical versions knowing the extended versions would come out eventually. You only got fucked over if you have no self control.

Ahh yes, AVS, the bastion of rationality.

People are going to find something not to like about these. Or, to put it in a more modern vernacular, "haters gonna hate".

Nothing wrong with criticism, these are only some of the biggest films around after all. Certainly some of the screenshots I'm not liking either, the question is whether they're accurate or not.