Kylie Minogue-Intimate and Live (1998)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Introduction Menu Animation & Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	154:52
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (58:14)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Mark Adamson
Studio Distributor	Worldstar Festival Mushroom	Starring	Kylie Minogue Chong Lim Stuart Fraser Carl Mann Joe Creighton Angus Burchatt James Mack Lisa Edwards Natalie Miller
Case	Click
RPI	$34.95	Music	None Given

    Well hasn't Kylie Minogue come a long way since she first starred in the TV Series “Neighbours” all those years ago? After leaving the show to concentrate on her musical career, she has gone from strength to strength and continues to take a larger and larger slice of the music pie.

    It was part intrigue and part like for some of her songs that made me put my hand up to review this particular title. Unfortunately, soon after putting this disc into the DVD player, any wisp of excitement was soon gone. This was not only from the high colour saturation in the concert, but the strict choreography was too robotic and left a show without the star revealing her true self. Now before you start beating down my Inbox with flame mail, this is not an attack on the girl but simply a concert style that did not agree with me. Personally, during those numerous times when she appears more “natural” onstage, such as with Robbie Williams and the like, she seems more relaxed and puts on a better performance because of it. This may well be the norm for Kylie's shows and that’s fine, it’s just that this is “not my bag, baby”, to coin a phrase.

    This particular concert, entitled "Intimate and Live" was filmed at The Capitol Theatre in Sydney on the night of July 1st, 1998. It features Kylie and the band doing a total of 21 songs together with an endless supply of men in pink hot pants.

Video

    The transfer is presented in a full frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and therefore there is no 16x9 enhancement.

    The transfer did have moments where it was very clear, generally for the close up camera shots of Kylie which were quite sharp. Band members are less detailed and the crowd tends to be out of focus quite often which leads me to speculate that this was inherent in the way the concert was captured and not due to any irregularities with the transfer. Shadow detail is quite acceptable, especially for a concert, where it is very challenging to find a happy medium between a great light show and being equally visible on video. There is no low level noise.

    The majority of this footage is badly affected by colour bleed and what appears to be minor chroma noise. This is most pronounced when the strong blue stage lighting is on and causes people and objects to be oversaturated by this particular shade of colour. The best examples can be seen at 50:12 and 50:38 where Kylie’s head is badly affected by the shades of blue spoiling any detail in the shot. There are some good points like the neon signs at 52:04 which show bright and colourful neon light.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen. Aliasing is also something that I was unable to detect in this transfer. Being a direct-to-video production, there are no film artefacts.

    There are no subtitles.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, which has the unfortunate honour of being the first DVD to show a layer change on my Denon DVD-1600 player. It occurs at 58:14 and causes a dropout in sound as the crowd is cheering between songs. There are a few points during the concert where a brief animated graphical outline of Kylie walks across the screen and giggles. If the layer change had been placed at one of these points, I feel it would have masked or at least reduced this obvious layer transition.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are two audio tracks on this DVD. The default is an English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. There is also an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack which I reviewed in its entirety. The stereo track was checked for some titles.

    The dialogue and lyrics were clear and easy to understand at all times.

    Audio sync was not a problem at all with this transfer, and was completely spot on.

    The surround channels were used for crowd ambience and for music. This is not an overly dynamic track with no extensive use of either high or low frequencies giving little depth to the sound in the midrange at least. The surrounds are not aggressively used and the majority of sound is output from the front sound stage.

    The subwoofer was active for some of the songs and did provide the necessary bass extension at the bottom end.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no extras.

Menu

    The menu features the word Kylie with stars twinkling around the edges of the letters. It is presented with a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded audio underscore which loops every 41 seconds.

    This disc is not available in Region 1.

    As I stated previously, this is a concert that was not to my tastes and something that I did not personally enjoy. Perhaps down the track I will take another look at Kylie's concerts again.

    The video suffers from difficult colour saturation caused by the strong stage lights.

    This is not an audio track that you will use to show off your latest speaker purchase. It was acceptable and nice to listen to, but nothing better than that offered by her CDs.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall