This is an excellent edit. I haven't seen anything Hobbit related for years (save for Ed Sheeran), but I think I never really quite managed to properly enjoy the Hobbit trilogy. Some of the edits made it more bearable, but this is the first time I truly enjoyed watching this. One can tell you know your shit and you put a lot of love into it.
A few criticisms:
- The encode is okay, but could be better. If you get the chance, try doing an encode with x264 if you haven't done that, it has much better quality than the encoders integrated into most editing software.
- Would be nice to have a lossless audio option, in form of an optional PCM/FLAC track for example. Or DTS-HD MA if you have a way to encode it.
- The color correction seems mostly fine, but I think that overall the colors tend to look a tiny bit off, especially in faces. It's absolutely not a big problem and most people probably won't even notice, but if you wanted to improve it, you could try to do extra adjustments to the range of colors typically found in faces while leaving the rest intact so as not to compromise your vision. I believe the "professional" term for doing such selective adjustments is "qualifying", but I could be remembering wrong. The thing is, I believe professional color graders often do this to make faces look natural, so when you change the grade from what the color graders did, even if only to restore a more natural look, you also have to adjust the faces back to make them look good again. For example a lot of movies these days have those green blankets over them and they actually seem to do extra adjustments to the faces so they still look natural despite the green cast. So when you remove the green cast, you actually end up with a magenta tint in faces. In the case of your edit, I feel like the faces seemed a bit too desaturated at times, compared to the surroundings. I imagine that when they amped up the saturation in the production process, they had to avoid applying it to faces to the same degree otherwise the faces would have ended up unnaturally saturated.
Anyway, thanks for making this, it was great.