The Knack-Live from the Rock n Roll Fun House (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Booklet Menu Animation & Audio Gallery-Photo Discography
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	60:19
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	James "Rico" LaRocca
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Doug Fieger Berton Averre Bruce Gary Prescott Niles
Case	Click
RPI	$34.95	Music	The Knack

    Live at the Rock 'N' Roll Fun House is performed satirically, emulating the big music television shows of the past. It is an interesting way of presenting a new concert recording and really helps with the retro music on offer. The concert is fairly short with 16 tracks and a running time of 60 minutes.

    All in all, this is an enjoyable title, and definitely one for the fans. I found the music to be a little repetitive but that did not stop my foot tapping along.

Video

    The feature is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced. This is mildly surprising as it was recorded in 2001 so widescreen digital cameras would have been plentiful.

    Sharpness is good throughout without any major deviations from the norm. Shadow detail is very good. This is not surprising given that a lot of the time the performers are under strong stage lights, and for the whole time the environment is static. Indeed, for a goodly portion of the show, the white stage is lit by strong white lights, resulting in a near-blinding experience on a front projection system. There was no low level noise.

    Colour is well saturated throughout, but not over-saturated, even under strong stage lighting.

    There were very limited MPEG artefacts on show throughout the course of the transfer. Posterization can be seen on Doug Fieger's cheeks under the powerful stage lights. Some examples of this can be seen at 35:30, and 36:15. There was only one film artefact that I saw and this was most unusual - I cannot explain the source of the problem. A dark horizontal line rolls vertically up the picture for a few seconds at around 22:05. Film-to-video artefacts are constrained to some minor aliasing that will probably remain unnoticed on a standard television.

    There are no subtitles presented on this disc.

    This is a DVD5 (single-layered) disc, so there is no layer change to negotiate.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are two audio tracks, an English Dolby Digital 5.1 track encoded at 448kbps, and an English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track encoded at 224kbps. I listened to the complete 5.1 track and sampled the 2.0 track at intervals. The 5.1 track is superior to the 2.0 track due to the reasonable use of the surround channels.

    Dialogue quality was fine throughout with the lyrics coming through without any form of distortion.

    Audio sync, on the other hand ranges from horrible to reasonable. Often changes in camera angle will result in the performer being noticeably out-of-sync with the music. Then, the camera angle will change back and everything is back in sync. I often found it noticeably confusing when this happened as the lip-sync was so bad it really played with the mind's natural ability to lip-read.

    The surround channels were used quite well throughout to carry the music. Unfortunately, the first few songs would collapse noticeably back to the centre channel at the end of the song. It's almost as though the audio engineer was just turning down the "make this into a surround track" dial as the song would finish, resulting in the crowd's cheering collapsing in a heap into the centre channel.. Most unusual. This problem did lessen as the transfer progressed. Another unusual surround problem was the noticeable disappearance of the left rear channel at around 23:42 for a few seconds.

    The subwoofer supported the music quite well but was not used to its full potential. I did enjoy the bass guitar in a few of the songs as it flowed through the sub.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Gallery (2:55)

Discography

Booklet

    The video quality is very good.

    The audio quality is good with a few minor flaws.

    The extras could have been much better.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall