Australia: Eye of the Storm (1999)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	200
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	None Given
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Rachael Blake
Case	C-Button-Version 2
RPI	$49.95	Music	Ricky Edwards

    So having given away the four episodes, the further details are:

• La Niņa - discusses the effect upon the Australian continent of this phenomena as the extremes of cyclones and heavy rainfall as far inland as the red centre are mirrored by the droughts of South America.
• Southern Exposure - discusses the effect upon the southern portion of the country of the storms that head north out of the Southern Ocean and produce some weather that adds to the unusual extremes of our nation.
• El Niņo - since La Niņa has generally a beneficial effect upon the continent (if you can ignore the obvious cyclone devastation of major human habitation), its corollary in El Niņo obviously has a generally not so beneficial effect upon the continent.
• Monsoon - discusses the rather obvious seasonal nature of the north of the country, namely the wet and the dry, and how this is effected by the Himalayas, and its result on Northern Australia.

    Certainly nothing wrong with the programme as is, but again I feel that ABC Video could perhaps have taken the opportunity to expand the educational value of this DVD a little more through better use of the DVD format itself. Still, impressive enough stuff and well worthy of consideration for expanding the minds of young Australians.

Video

    In general this is a very impressively sharp and detailed transfer that does just about everything it can to present the subject matter as visually pleasingly as possible. In general, there is little hidden here in the way of detail and this is due in no small part to an often impressively clear transfer. However, this clarity was just let down a little by some display of grain during certain segments that does jar a little with the general clarity throughout. Shadow detail was pretty good throughout and there was little here that could in all honesty be complained about in that regard. There is no real indication of low level noise problems in the transfer. Some of the media footage used is obviously of significantly lower standards, but this has to be excused in the overall excellence of the transfer.

    Colours are very nicely rendered throughout and have a richness that really bring out the essence of the Australian outback magnificently. Only in the Australian outback do you get the gorgeous red tones that are so vividly rendered here. This is really a gorgeous looking transfer with some impressive vibrancy to the colours. Tonal depth is excellent and there is no hint of oversaturation at all. There is no evidence of colour bleed in the transfer at all. Really terrific stuff indeed in general.

    There did not appear to be any MPEG artefacts in the transfer, apart from what might have been some slight blockiness at times in some of the backgrounds. I would have liked to detail exactly where these were, but very disappointingly there is no time information encoded in the DVD and so all your player will display is the rather useless message "play". There did not appear to be any significant film-to-video artefacts in the transfer, apart from one instance of shimmer in the third episode at very approximately around the 43:00 minute mark. There were no film artefacts in the transfer.

    There are again no subtitles on the DVD, which when combined with the lack of time information encoded affords just a slight loss of lustre as far as desirability is concerned. The use of subtitles could have provided some more base information of what and where we were looking at. The lack of timing information encoded on the DVD means that I have to accept the 200 minutes claimed as the running time. A rough manual timing would indicate that this is not incorrect by any substantial margin.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The narration comes up very well in the soundtrack and there are no problems understanding what was being said.

    The music comes from Ricky Edwards and comes over as a rather stock sounding effort. Nonetheless it does not draw attention to itself which must mean that it does a decent job of enhancing the programming.

    This is a rather impressive soundtrack at times considering that the vast bulk of the series is narration. When the video needs it, there is some very decent surround channel support, especially out of the rear channels. Thus things like the thunderstorms of the wet are quite impressively handled in the overall soundscape. The only real downer is that the bass channel has been rather poorly mixed overall and at times a really annoying bass reverb problem occurs that has no real correlation to the on-screen action. It got so bad at times that I had to switch to the Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack for relief for a short time. A good example is around the 43:00 minute mark of the first episode. This really does diminish the overall excellence of the soundtrack somewhat.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall