BUY

General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Audio and Animation
Rating
Year Released	1995
Running Time	71:02 minutes
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	2,3,4,5,6	Director	Jim McKay Chris Bilheimer
Studio Distributor	Warner Reprise Video Warner Vision Australia	Starring	Michael Stipe Bill Berry Mike Mills Peter Buck
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$39.95	Music	R.E.M.

    And after the final video, you also get a little presentation called R.E.M. A B C, which is basically an A to Z of things associated with the band. I might add that it really is not much and merely serves to flesh out what would have been a 62 minute DVD to 71 minutes. This fleshing out is also aided by some interstitial footage that varies between rubbish and bizarre: it uses film taken during their 1995 tour, but is not much of a linking mechanism. It could certainly have been dispensed with in my view. Once again, there are no complaints about the music on offer, although the stand-out track here is Man On The Moon, a song that has had something of a renaissance recently thanks to a certain film of the same name. R.E.M. fans are obviously going to be suffering in the wallet area when this DVD and its companions hit the stores.

Video

    The concert is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and obviously is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Overall, the transfer on offer here is a moderately sharp and detailed effort, that vacillates between the needs of television and the demands of the band's style. Just do not expect lots of sharp detail, and you should get on fine here, as you will not get it - indeed you may well get the antithesis of it! Unfortunately, the style that is in general adopted in this collection of videos is not exactly the best and at times this is absolutely riddled with grain - both intentional and otherwise. You may well have guessed that clarity is not a key word here. Still, we continue to live content in the knowledge that the source material is the culprit and not any DVD mastering problems.

    The colours are somewhat all over the place in the transfer, although the general trend is certainly towards undersaturation. There are as usual significant chunks of black and white footage, and this displays the usual problems that are associated with such material from this source. Having said that, the likes of Man On The Moon look very good and this makes for a highlight of this DVD. Bright primary colours you can definitely forget, except perhaps in Everybody Hurts as this is the best-looking colour I have yet seen in an R.E.M. video. However, undersaturated tones you will certainly get more used to.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. Unlike the previous efforts, there is something of a problem with aliasing in this transfer. It is most noticeable in Everybody Hurts, where just about every vehicle displays the problem. Aliasing was also apparent in other songs, such as Find The River, but mainly of the relatively minor, non-disruptive type. There were no real film artefacts noted.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The music and vocals come up very well in the soundtrack.

    There are no significant audio sync problems with the transfer at all.

    Just to keep the broken record syndrome running: the soundtrack makes no use at all of the surround channels, nor the bass channel, and this is just like listening to a compact disc, and a quite decent one, too. There simply is nothing much wrong with this soundtrack at all, other than the fact that it is not a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. The great music on offer here gets to shine aplenty.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
7th October 2000