Bee Gees: This Is Where I Came In (Warner Vision) (2001)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Booklet Menu Animation & Audio Additional Footage Gallery-Photo Music Video-This Is Where I Come In (4:44) Biographies-Cast Web Links
Rating
Year Of Production	2001
Running Time	119:56 (Case: 150)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (79:50)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	David Leaf John Scheinfeld
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Bee Gees
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$39.95	Music	Bee Gees

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Frame	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None
16x9 Enhancement	No
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.33:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Dutch French German Italian Portuguese Spanish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, during credits

    What exactly can you say that has not already been said about the Bee Gees? Well, if you can find it, it is probably on this terrific documentary DVD that delves into the forty year career of the brothers Gibb. Whilst Australia is quick to claim them as her own, these three lads from Manchester via Australia returned to the old country to become one of the legendary bands of rock and roll, as evidenced by their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. The journey began in Manchester, moved to Australia where the talent was developed and explored up to the release of Spicks And Specks, which went to number one in Australia as the brothers were on the boat back to England. What happened from there is the stuff of legends indeed, and this documentary takes us back through that journey.

    This journey is retold through the often candid words of the three brothers, along with other important people in their lives and careers including Barbara Gibb (their mum), Robert Stigwood (the bloke that really got them going), Timothy White (editor of Billboard), Sir George Martin (sometime producer for that minor band known as the Beatles), David English (president of RSO records, their label) and their current wives. Mixed in amongst the interview material is a whole bunch of home movie footage and various performances recorded over the entire length of their career.

    There really is not a whole lot more to be said. If you are even a moderate fan of the Bee Gees, then this is an absolutely essential addition to your collection. Even if you have only a remote interest in music, there is still plenty of interest here. Along with the often frank interview material, some of the home movie stuff is utterly priceless, as are the performances dating way back to their start on Australian TV as the B.G.'s. The scope of the music that these three guys have been responsible for is actually quite amazing and the fact that there were to a large extent not granted their due until quite recently is equally staggering.

    Just get this and enjoy what they have to offer, which includes incomplete performances of the ilk of:

Video

    The transfer is presented in a Full Frame format (1.33:1) that is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Obviously with home movie footage dating back to the late 1950s, and television archival stuff dating back to the early 1960s, we are talking about a wide variation in both the type and quality of the source material included here. Some of the archival material is fairly ropey, and it ranges from that extreme to quite good indeed. None of it is really bad, and the quality is soon adjusted to in broad terms. The more recent interview material is lovely and sharp, very nicely detailed and basically without any real problems at all. Clarity is very good in this material but obviously the earlier archival stuff is not in the same league. Thankfully, shadow detail is quite good throughout and there was only modest amounts of grain to be seen in any of the material. Whilst I would have preferred somewhat less in the way of grain, I never found it annoying. There does not appear to be any low level noise infestations in any of the videos.

    The archival material is mainly black and white for most of the time with only the more recent performances showing up in colour. Some of the black and white is a little murky, but this is very much in accord with what was expected here. The newer interview material is all rather nicely saturated colour material, and relatively vibrant too. Oversaturation is not an issue here, nor is colour bleed anything to be concerned about.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There are some indications of aliasing throughout the transfer, and at times it gets a bit over the top: the front windscreen of the van at 23:20 and the jacket at 89:19 are notable examples of the poorer end of the scale. There are plenty of film artefacts in much of the archival source material as is to be expected, but the recent stuff is free from any such problems.

    The DVD is an RSDL formatted effort, with the layer change coming at 79:50. This is right at the end of a scene and whilst mildly noticeable is not exactly disruptive to the programme. Nonetheless, I would have though that it could have been made a little less obvious.

    Somewhat unexpectedly, and rather disappointingly, there are no English subtitles on the DVD. If you can speak one of the six European languages for which there are subtitles, you are sort of saved, but frankly the lack of English subtitles is a fundamental problem with the DVD for our Hearing Impaired readers.

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 the default English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack.

    The dialogue and music comes up well in the transfer and dialogue is easy to understand. There are no significant audio sync problems in the transfer.

    If nothing else, when looking at the entire career of the Bee Gees in one programme, it soon becomes obvious that they do produce some very fine songs.

    There is nothing especially memorable about the soundtrack. It does its job pretty well and without any major hassles. Indeed, my notes reveal no particular comments about the soundtrack. Whilst it is indicated as being surround encoded, don't get carried away with your expectations in this regard. The surround encoding is confined to the front channels and is used predominantly to give some body to the dialogue that might otherwise be missing. Obviously the subwoofer is AWOL again for this, but who really cares. I doubt that we could have expected any better than this, given that some of the source material would have been fairly raw sounding.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Actually, a quite decent package has been assembled here, even if the presentation of some is not what I would call sensible.

Menu

    Quite decently done and with some decent animation and audio enhancement, they certainly are better than average.

Bonus Footage (31:24)

    Going under the title of Anecdotes, my initial thought was that it was merely chapter selections for various interview snippets in the main programme. What it actually is is a whole bunch of additional interview material recorded but not used in the main programme. As such, it provides some more fascinating stuff about the career of the brothers. Unfortunately, the presentation on DVD is pretty poor. It actually comprises 28 interview segments with Barry, Maurice, Robin and David English, ranging in length from 21 seconds to 3 minutes 34 seconds. The dumb mastering problem is that you cannot play them continuously and after each individual segment you are taken back to the menu and you have to select the next one. You can guess how infuriating that is! The presentation is the same as for the main programme.

Gallery - Photo (7:13)

    This is an automatic running effort divided into two parts: photos and album/singles covers. It comprises about 144 images, all of which are presented in a Full Frame format, and which is accompanied by a nice medley of the music of some of the great Bee Gees songs. Sometimes annotation would have been nice, but otherwise the presentation is more than adequate.

Music Video - This Is Where I Came In (4:44)

    A pity that this is the only music video on the DVD, but otherwise this is a decent enough song representative of about the fourth or fifth incarnation of their ever-changing career. Also presented in the same format as the main programme.

Biographies - Cast

    Unusually we don't get biographies of the brothers themselves, but rather of five people who have contributed to the interview material included on the DVD - and in some instances contributed to the career of the brothers. Those covered are Allen Kovac, David English, Sir George Martin, Sir Tim Rice and Timothy White.

Booklet

Web Links

    This would seem to be pretty much identical to the Region 1 release, which would probably make Region 4 the region of choice owing to PAL formatting.

    Bee Gees - This Is Where I Came In is a terrific video biography-documentary on one of the truly great bands of the past fifty years. If you have any interest at all in popular music, this is an essential inclusion in you collection. Whilst there are a few problems with the video transfer, in general these are easily dismissed due to the quality of the content, and there is really nothing here to deflect a strong recommendation.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall