Marley, Ziggy & the Melody Makers-LIVE! (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Audio & Animation Audio-Only Track-Tomorrow People Featurette-Rehearsal #1 Featurette-Rehearsal #2 Featurette-Rehearsal #3 Discography
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	105:33
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (60:10)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	K Thor Olsen
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Ziggy Marley Stephen Marley Sharon Marley Cedella Marley
Case	Soft Brackley-Transp
RPI	$39.95	Music	Ziggy & the Melody Makers Marley

    Ziggy Marley, properly called David Marley, performs live in concert in late September 2000. The venue is in Florida, but I guess it does not matter. The Melody Makers play their greatest hits and appear on DVD for the first time - that is what matters. Ziggy sounds a lot like his dad and although it would be fair to say that he has not risen to the heights of his father, he still has a loyal following. The music of Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers is still very much in the spirit of reggae, from the subjects of the songs to the spirit in which they are sung, and of course the reggae rhythm is easily identifiable in every song. This DVD presents 19 Marley favourites including the bonus track in both Dolby Digital and DTS in front of an appreciative audience.

It should be noted that Track 18 (Reasonings: End Credits) is not a song. It is comprised of brief interviews with the musicians and followed by the end credits.

Video

    There are no real problems with this very high quality transfer.

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced. It appears to have been sourced from videotape.

    The luminance portion of the transfer is of very high quality. The transfer is super-sharp with plenty of detail evident. The bright lights never resulted in any flaring, even when pointed directly at the camera. Darker parts of the picture looked fine. Shadow detail was great and there was no low level noise.

    The DVD is a riot of colour. A colourful background poster, brightly coloured clothing worn by the artists and strong lighting covering every colour of the rainbow make for an intensely colourful experience. One shot in particular stuck in my mind. Ziggy was wearing a bright red top with a large white marijuana leaf on it. A bright green light bathed him, which contrasted with the strong deeply saturated blue lights in the background. The dominant colours were red, black, green and yellow. This would be of no surprise to reggae fans. I would not recommend watching this DVD through standard composite video - the dot crawl along colour borders would be terrible. As it was, there were no problems with the colour in the transfer.

    MPEG artefacts were also not a problem. The bitrate stayed around 10 for the whole performance and the transfer always looked good. The layer change, however, was obvious with a second long pause at 60.10 between tracks. The audio paused for a second as well.

    The subtitles are only present during the band interviews in Reasonings and for the first 30 seconds of the first track as Marley is talking to the audience. Regardless, none are in English.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The audio quality of Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers Live is also pretty good. The disc contains three audio tracks; a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack and a DTS 5.0 soundtrack. I swapped over from one to another on the fly and came to the conclusion that I liked the 5.1 Dolby Digital track the best. The DTS soundtrack sounded the same in terms of fidelity, but was recorded several db lower and had no LFE.

    There were no sync problems with the disc.

    The surround tracks both used the surround speakers largely for ambience rather than having instruments playing through them. They were in constant use throughout the concert.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Not much here I'm afraid.

Main Menu Audio & Animation

Audio-Only Track-Tomorrow People

    This is a bonus track, also presented in full surround sound.

Featurette-Rehearsal #1, Rehearsal #2, and Rehearsal #3

    These are three takes of the band in rehearsal during the day with each lasting for a couple of minutes and captured in stereo.

Discography

    This is a discography where the album covers are in such small type that you cannot read them.

    This is a Region 4 PAL DVD. The footage would have been captured originally in NTSC. The Region 1 version appears to have the same specifications as ours based on checking out its listed features at various US web retailers. Our version is going to cost you less and is thus is the one of choice.

    Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers Live is a very positive DVD. Although I am not a particular fan of reggae, I enjoyed it. The quality of performance is high. The picture and sound quality cannot be criticized. Obviously, if you like reggae you will want this DVD.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall