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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Main Menu Audio Notes - Update
Rating	Exempt
Year Released	2000
Running Time	Unknown
RSDL/Flipper	Dual Layer	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection, then Menu
Region	1,2,3,4,5,6	Director	Martyn Ives
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision Australia	Starring
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$39.95	Music	Ernie Wood

    Of course, when this was first announced on the release sheets, the immediate reaction was is it the famous Cosmos? You know, the one by which all other series about the universe are compared. You know, the one done by arguably the greatest man of the past century, Carl Sagan. Alas, it turned out not to be and if you really are desperate like me to indulge in THE best documentary series about the universe to have been broadcast on television, you will have to join me in sourcing it from the United States. I guess the main problem for any documentary series is that it will inevitably be compared to the best, and in this instance that comparison is not exactly flattering.

    According to the cover blurb, of which there is admittedly very little, this is the award winning TV series. Quite what awards it has won are not specified, and so some digging was done. This eventually divulged the fact that the awards won were: Best Educational Programme, Radio & Television Golden Laurels, French Senate, 1999; Special Award at the Jules Verne Film Festival, France, 1999; and Best Scientific Clip at the Tele-Science Festival, Quebec, Canada, 1998. Not an exactly impressive collection in my view and sums up pretty well that in reality this is not an especially great effort all round. Be warned: if you prefer your television series to come in the same format that they were broadcast - that is, with full opening and closing credits - then you are not going to like this. The series has been reformatted (their words, not mine) and part of the reformatting involves removing these items and splitting the programs up so that they do not run in a nice coherent collection of episodes.

    The programming on offer here is:

• Hub Of The Planets
• The Sun - the birth, life and eventual death of the little ball of gas in our sky.
• Mercury - just about all we know about this little hell that will be the first to go when the Sun decides to.
• Venus - what little we know about what the Earth will look like soon if we don't do something about greenhouse gases.
• Earthspace
• Earth - what makes our little blue oasis tick.
• Moon - how our little satellite came into being and the effect it has on us.
• Aurorae & Eclipses - about the celestial sideshows that make the really avid space nuts go ga-ga.
• Mars, Life and Impacts
• Mars - the object of our fascination for centuries it seems and undoubtedly the next planet to be visited by man - probably in about the year 3000 the way we are going.
• Lifequest - our endless fascination with that eternal question: are we the only morons in space?
• Impact! - what happens when two large objects collide.
• Outer Planets
• Jupiter - current speculations on the big gas giant and its miniature solar system.
• Saturn - more current speculations on a slightly less big gas giant and its rings.
• Uranus and Neptune - more educated speculations on these two distant members of our little system.
• Realm of the Comets - what happens way out there in the celestial garbage beyond the edge of the solar system?

Video

    Since the series was made for television, it is presumed that the presentation here in Full Frame format is correct. However, I have not been able to locate any definite confirmation on this point, and plenty of television shows from around this period were starting to switch to a widescreen format. The transfer is not 16x9 enhanced. You should also be aware that despite the appearance of the DVD coming from Europe, the transfer is in NTSC and therefore you will need a display device capable of displaying such a signal. If you have not, the picture will be just a little worse than otherwise would be the case.

    The main issue with the transfer is that it is all over the place as far as sharpness is concerned. Whilst some sections are quite sharp, and therefore show plenty of detail, there are plenty of segments that display a distinct softness and lack of detail that makes the viewing of the programming a little difficult. Quite a bit of the CGI work lacks sufficient definition and distinction, which really was a big surprise here: some of it appears to be distinctly out of focus. As for some of the archival film, some of this is decidedly third rate and some that I have seen before (such as the Apollo 11 launch) has never looked as flat and diffuse as it does here. There is a fair deal of grain of display at various times here and overall I really could not call this a clear transfer at all, which really is a huge problem as a lot of the detail that you would be expecting to see is simply lost. Shadow detail is not much of a problem here with that aspect of film. There appears to be some degree of low level noise in the transfer at times. Please note that as much a I would love to point out where, there is no time information encoded into the transfer and there is no proper chaptering, and therefore there is no real reference points to work to - other than to say that these problems crop up in all four episodes on offer. It is for this reason that I cannot give you a running time for the DVD.

    Perhaps I was expecting too much, but this really lacks the sort of bright, vibrant colours I would expect from a recent series involving significant amounts of CGI. Whilst there are the occasional glimpses of the bright and vibrant transfer I was expecting, in general terms this is quite a muted display of colours which again does the programming no favours at all. It would perhaps have helped if there was a bit more depth to the colours. Despite the tendency towards a muted colourscape, funnily enough on a couple of occasions it looked like oversaturation was a definite issue with perhaps just a little bit of colour bleed thrown in for good measure. Overall, not at all what I was expecting but certainly not in the terrible category either.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer, although on a couple of occasions there appeared to be some sort of wave distortion in the transfer which may be indicative of a mastering problem. It is not a consistent problem and is only noticeable against flat coloured backgrounds (such as photographs of Venus). However there is a constant problem with film-to-video artefacts, with plenty of aliasing and moiré artefacting on offer here. The overall feel of the transfer is indeed quite shimmery, which does detract enormously from some of the CGI work. Add into the mix some rather plentiful film artefacts at times, most noticeably in the archival film segments and overall this is not a transfer to rave over.

    This is a Dual Layer format DVD, as there is no readily apparent layer change during any of the program material.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue in all soundtracks seemed to come up pretty well and there were no major issues with understanding what was being said. For the record the narrators on the various soundtracks are: Michael Goldfarb (English-American), Jon Snow (English-British), Ingrid Drissen (Dutch), Patrick Floersheim (French), Achim Hoeppner (German), Natsuo Tokuhiro (Japanese) and Josep Gaya Sans (Spanish).

    The music comes from Ernie Wood, and rather innocuous stuff it is too. There really is not much to rave over in this lot and the brief sampling of the music and effects soundtrack would indicate that you might be in for a very boring evening if you were to listen to it.

    Really there is not much comment to pass on any of the soundtracks. They do the job that is required of them and not much more. Whilst they are mostly quite frontal sounding, being so heavily dialogue based, there are occasional dribbles of sound out of the rear channels, at least in the English-British soundtrack, to make you think that things might have been a lot better.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Notes - Update

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
23rd February, 2001.