BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1999	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	60:10 minutes	Other Extras	Discography
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	1,2,3,4,5,6	Director	Jeremy Marre
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Phil Collins
Case	Amaray
RRP	$39.95	Music	Phil Collins

    Phil Collins is an artist whom I have appreciated for a long time, ever since the days when he stepped out from behind the drum kit to front Genesis. His solo albums all grace my CD collection, and I love them all. They have a unique sound about them that is most refreshing.

    His debut album, Face Value, is the subject of this documentary, which combines contemporary footage of Phil Collins and his colleagues reminiscing about the creation of this classic album with video clips from the album and other archival video materials. This documentary grips you from the very beginning, with the inexorable rhythm of In The Air Tonight exploding onto the screen to open the documentary. Phil Collins describes this album as being very much a reflection of the crisis occurring in his personal life at the time, and this clearly affects him to this day as he presents a song that did not make it to the final cut of this album - Please Don't Ask. Phil Collins and record engineer Hugh Padham have a great deal of fun with the original master multitrack tapes, which is both enjoyable to watch and revealing to listen to. The real scene-stealer, however, is Tom Tom Washington, the horn arranger for the Phoenix Horns. Without trying to be funny, he had me in stitches with his comments on what he thought of Phil Collins' style and method of working.

    The only weak point of the whole documentary came towards the end, where I felt that an unnecessary concert performance of If Leaving Me Is Easy was spliced into the documentary to make up time. Other than this, this documentary was fascinating, enthralling and all too short.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The contemporary sections of the transfer were superbly sharp and clear. The archival footage was considerably more variable than this, and was often blurry and poorly defined. I Missed Again was a perfect example of this, with quite poor definition. Having said that, I have this particular song on laserdisc, and it is no better nor worse than this presentation, so it is clearly limited by the source material rather than the DVD transfer.

    Shadow detail was equally variable, from the superb contemporary footage to the less than stellar home video segments.

    Low level noise occasionally intruded into the archival footage, all clearly sourced from analogue video sources. Again, the contemporary parts of this transfer were superb in quality.

    The colours were variably rendered. Once again, the contemporary footage was exemplary in this regard whereas the older material was variable; I Missed Again suffered from colour bleed, The Roof Is Leaking had quite significant chroma noise marring the presentation, and so forth.

    MPEG artefacts were restricted to the closing credits, with artefacting apparent around the fade in and outs of the credits. According to Paul C, this type of MPEG artefacting is known as the Gibb Effect.

    Aliasing crept in once during this presentation, during the Paris 1997 I Can Feel It In The Air Tonight. Indeed, the video presentation of this particular part of the program is very problematic, with flare, aliasing, colour bleeding, and all manner of other unpleasant video artefacts marring the presentation of this song.

    Film artefacts were restricted to occurring within the few brief segments of archival film footage, and were never particularly bothersome.

    At this point, I'd like to point out that I am definitely not bagging this transfer. The contemporary footage is superb and pretty much flawless from a transfer point of view, and makes up the majority of the programme content. The problems all lie with the archival footage and are relatively minor, all explainable by limitations in the source material - it simply doesn't get any better than how it is presented here.

Audio

    The dialogue was clear and easy to understand at all times, but occasional clicks and pops marred the audio presentation slightly, and it would have been nice if these could have been cleaned up. Occasional minor distortion was also evident from the centre channel on the odd occasion.

    Audio sync was not a problem at all with this transfer.

    I have spoken about the music at length earlier in this review, so I will simply say that I love Phil Collins' music and loved the way it was presented on this DVD. I had to severely resist the urge to crank the level of this DVD way above reference level!

    The surround channels were not used by this soundtrack

    The .1 channel was not discretely encoded, but it was used more-or-less continuously during the music by my Dolby Digital processor and was nicely supportive of the music.

Menu

Discography

    The video quality is variable, with contemporary video being of superb quality and archival footage reflecting the age of the material.

    The audio quality is passable, but could have been better.

    The extras are extremely limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
3rd February 2000