Discovery Channel-Great Planes: McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom (1986)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1986
Running Time	60:20
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Jonathan Moore
Studio Distributor	Discovery Channel Magna Home Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$19.95	Music	None Given

    Not something that would normally catch the review schedule is what sounds like an interesting series of DVDs entitled Great Planes. The series, tagged under the banner of the Discovery Channel contains documentaries about some of the more famous and important aircraft that have graced the skies. The bias is heavily in favour of combat aircraft thus far, which hardly bothers me at all. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by aircraft and am the sort of person who rocks up to airports hours and hours before flights just to spend time gazing at the passing parade of aircraft. I can only assume that my fascination is in some way tied to the fact that where I lived in England as a kid was not far from the factory and test facility for Boulton-Paul Aircraft. Now a name long since forgotten, during the Second World War they produced aircraft, the most famous of which is perhaps the equally forgotten Defiant - not one of the most successful combat aircraft of that conflict.

    So the series piqued me a little and I have indulged in a few titles for curiosity sake. The first effort from the series to grace my player is the recently released Great Planes: McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom. Just a slight technicality here - it should actually be Phantom II. There was an earlier aircraft given the name Phantom, although it was far less successful than the later F-4.

    The F-4 Phantom is arguably one of the most successful combat aircraft since the Second World War, and continued to form the backbone of several air forces well into the 1990's. Well liked by the people who flew the aircraft, the success of the aircraft is built upon the fact that it was a sturdy aircraft that could handle any number of tasks with ease. From the early days as a fighter with the United States Navy (it was eventually replaced by the Grumman F-14 Tomcat in that role), the aircraft went on to perform a multitude of front line tasks with the United States Air Force and served with distinction in Vietnam. Aside from the armed forces of the United States, the aircraft served with the defence forces of Australia, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Iran, Spain, Egypt, Israel, Turkey and South Korea. Its production run ended with 5,057 aircraft built in the United States. It started production in 1958 and ended in 1979. It held at one time 15 aviation records including speed and altitude records, as well as the longest production run for US supersonic aircraft.

    There is no doubt that by whatever measure you use, the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II is a genuine classic aircraft and worthy of inclusion in a series such as this. Now whether the DVD deserves inclusion in your collection will very much depend upon how much you are interested in aircraft...

Video

    Considering that the aircraft first flew in 1958, and that even in those days there was a fairly tight rein placed upon the releasing of information relating to new combat aircraft, there was always a fair chance that the film used was not going to be really high on quality. That is unfortunately the situation that we have here. Whilst quite interesting and in some cases fascinating, pretty is not a way in which you could describe the program. The program was actually compiled in 1986, so is itself not exactly recent.

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and it is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer, basically comprising archival footage throughout, is rather average in most respects. Definition is reasonably okay in general, although some of the early test flight footage falls below that level and is somewhat diffuse. Detail is equally not the best and is rather variable - some of the USAF footage is actually not too bad but the earlier USN footage is a bit woolly. Shadow detail is not much of an issue as most of this was shot in such a way as to avoid shooting towards the sun. The clarity is again quite ordinary, with grain an issue at times. There does not appear to be any problem with low level noise.

    Whilst notionally all colour footage, at times the colour does descend into varying shades of grey. This is not a real concern however, as I doubt that you could expect some of the footage taken from the planes to be much better than this - its purpose was never really for enshrinement on DVD for posterity. Under-saturation is to the fore here, although there is one brief moment of colour bleed at 13:24 to contend with. There is at no stage any solidity or depth to the colours.

    Whilst there are a couple of instances of loss of resolution during the program, I am almost certain that this is source material related and not the result of MPEG artefacting introduced in the transfer. The source material is in general quite heavily affected by film artefacts of just about every kind, indicating that no effort was made at restoring the original footage. The archival nature of the material though does mitigate against this proliferation of artefacts. There appears to be some pixelisation issues during the transfer, such as at 11:26 and 13:07, but beyond these there are no obvious film-to-video artefacts.

    This is a single sided, single layer DVD. There are unfortunately no subtitle options to accompany the narration.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There is just the one soundtrack on the DVD, being a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack.

    The narration come across okay and there are no problems understanding it. However, the underlying aircraft noise is usually muted which I found a tad annoying - you never really get to feel the impact that this aircraft had when in full flight.

    The small amount of musical accompaniment is not credited and really does not add much to the program anyway.

    Nothing really wrong with the soundtrack, which does just enough to carry the narration and nothing else. It is reasonable clean and clear, but sorely lacking the underlying aircraft dynamic. Almost a straight mono sound.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Nothing whatsoever apart from some menu audio that is more irritating than anything.

Menu

    It would appear that this DVD has not yet been released in Region 1 - although this is by no means certain.

    Great Planes: McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom certainly has some interesting stuff in it, but the audience for this sort of DVD is not likely to be huge. Whilst a keen follower of aviation, I still found some stuff here that I did not know and certainly some of the footage is new to me, so on the whole I would rate the DVD a positive experience. You will have to live with some ropey source material at times though - not unexpectedly so though.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall