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That wasn’t the case. In 2023 dollars, the LotR trilogy had a budget of around $513 million, eventually resulting in about 12 hours of finished product. RoP has a budget of about $150m for around 9 hours. So the trilogy spent $42m per hour compared to RoP’s $16m per hour.
It was in certain shots of most scenes. The ones where the height was most obvious.