Bon Jovi-Live from London (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Featurette-Concert Highlights Video (6:45)
Rating
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	90:00
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	David Mallet
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Bon Jovi
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$19.95	Music	Bon Jovi

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.66:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.66:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	Yes, the drummer Tico Torres.
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, at the end.

    Bon Jovi needs little introduction - if there was ever a physical manifestation of the dictionary term 'rock star' Jon Bon Jovi would be it. His music, his voice and his very appearance define exactly what the modern rock star really is - well at least in my opinion, anyway. After seeing this concert there's no denying the man can fill a stadium with what seems like relative ease. This concert was shot at Wembley Stadium in London in 1995 in front of a 70,000+ crowd and is touted as Bon Jovi's first live concert video.

    The performance includes many of his bigger hits including Keep The Faith, Blaze Of Glory and Wanted Dead Or Alive, however it does omit a few as well including Dry County and In These Arms - both personal favourites of mine. The missing songs aside, this is quite a remarkable performance from a very talented musician and his band. Sadly, however, the concert's presentation here leaves much to be desired - indeed the overall lack of effort put into the production of this DVD, particularly in respect to the audio, really detracts from the concert itself.

Video

    This is a very unusual transfer in that it has been partly shot on film and partly on video - among the evidence is a film camera visible at 14:34 and a video camera visible at 63:48. The consequence is that the overall quality is extremely variable from shot to shot. From what I've gathered, all the close-up and mid-shot footage of the band from stage front has been shot on film. Nearly all of the remaining footage, including wide shots of the audience and stage, aerial shots and some footage shot on stage has been shot on video. However, prior to editing the video footage has been transferred to film to effectively blend it in with the film footage - this is easily seen as the video footage shares the same film grain as the film originated footage. However, this still leaves the problem of fields and frame rates. To solve this problem - and a warning this will get technical - the video footage has been de-interlaced, thereby converting it from interlaced scan to progressive scan. To achieve this, every second field has been removed and the first field has been interpolated (the remaining field was line-doubled to create a whole frame, rather than two separate fields). By converting the video footage to progressive scan, the frame rate could then be matched to that of the film footage, which in this case was almost certainly 25 frames per second given the need to edit it with video footage. (On a side note: it is important to remember that both fields of each video frame are actually different - the second field is recorded 1/50th of a second later than the first). The de-interlacing process is critical if you want to match interlaced video to film because at 50 fields per second, PAL video has twice the refresh rate of film (at 25 fps) - this means that any movement in the picture is twice as smooth on video as when compared to film. Normally, if interlaced video footage is edited with film footage, it clearly stands out – you’ll notice this when watching movie ‘making-of’ documentaries with clips from the movie. The first unfortunate side effect of de-interlacing is that the resolution of the video footage is halved. For example - if video footage of 500 lines is de-interlaced, the actual resolution is halved to 250 lines because every second field of 250 lines is removed. The second side effect is aliasing - and there is plenty of it to be found in this transfer, something I’ll cover in detail shortly...

    The transfer is presented in 1.66:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced. It is difficult to determine what exactly the original aspect ratio was but there is little evidence to suggest it is anything other than 1.66:1. Rather unusually, the matted image is slightly biased to the bottom of frame so the black bar at the top of the frame is larger than the bottom one.

    The transfer is extremely sharp, but as previously mentioned the video footage intercut throughout is noticeably lacking in resolution compared to the film footage. The shadow detail of the film footage is extremely high. In fact, the close-up of Jon Bon Jovi against a spotlight which is pointing right down the barrel of the camera at 69:37 is testament to the high contrast range of film. Despite the extremely bright light behind him, we can still see the details of his face. As for the video footage, shadow detail is not quite as high with dark backgrounds, particularly towards the end of the concert which takes place at night, dwindling into black significantly faster. If there was any low level noise present in the original video footage it is now indistinguishable from the film grain.

    Colours are quite vivid in spite of the amount of processing that some of the footage has been through.

    MPEG artefacts are present in the form of some minor posterization, but the film grains blends this in quite well so it's not really noticeable. The bit-rate is extremely dynamic, jumping frequently from 3Mbs to 10Mbs. This was clearly done to fit 90 minutes onto one layer. Now we get to the real sore point - aliasing. Essentially the lower the resolution, the worse it gets. So, with the video originated footage having roughly half the resolution of the film footage it suffers far worse from the aliasing - it is in fact about as abundant in this transfer as fans in the audience. The staircase effect can frequently be seen on the keyboards, the guitars, the drum kit, the big screen... well just about everything really. There are so many fine lines on the stage that there was simply no way to avoid it (other than shooting the whole concert either on film or video - not both). A stand-out example is the edge of the stage at 21:06. Because of the halved resolution of the de-interlaced video footage there is a greater distance between each line in the image - this causes the staircase effect (aliasing). A staircase is in fact a very good illustration - the fewer stairs you put within a given area, the greater the space between each stair must be (more aliasing). The more stairs you put within the same given area the smoother the gradient gets (less aliasing). Ever wondered why non-16x9 enhanced widescreen transfers suffer from more aliasing than 16x9 enhanced transfers? That's why.

    A few minor film artefacts are present throughout the transfer, mostly of the white negative kind, however the old hair in the gate is visible from time to time also - the one located at 23:07 is one of the more prominent examples. My keen eye also spotted two unusual tape glitches, the first at 40:41 and the second at 79:03. The first example distorts the image - over Jon Bon Jovi's face actually - for about five or so frames. These appear to be analogue tape glitches of some kind as there is none of the digital splatter normally associated with digital tape glitches.

    There are no subtitles.

    The is a single layered disc. The main file size is 4055Mb.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    I would dearly love to say that the audio is a major improvement over the video but sadly this is not the case. In what seems to be a trend on this disc, the audio quality is very sub-standard. My first major gripe is obviously the lack of a 5.1 remix, in particular the surround channels - there is only a single audio track presented here and it's Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kbs). While this is not normally enough for me to completely turn my nose up at a music DVD I found the soundtrack to be very flat and heavily lacking in dynamic range, ambience and bass - three key ingredients of a good concert DVD.

    The vocals are very clear with no real issues to speak of. There are no audio sync issues.

    While this is a straight stereo mix I thought I might take the opportunity to test drive the Dolby Pro Logic II Music and DTS Neo:6 Music features of my new receiver. What I found was that in this case it did little to improve the lack of ambience, although the circuitry did redirect some of the crowd effects to the rear speakers on occasion which was precisely what I was hoping it would do. The concert really needs rear surround channels to create the concert atmosphere.

    The subwoofer is my other major gripe with this soundtrack. While there was small amount of bass redirected to the subwoofer - just enough to keep it from going into standby - there just wasn't anything there that my bookshelf speakers couldn't already handle - in other words the bass level is very weak. I'm of the opinion that it's very hard to have too much bass on a concert DVD - for me lots of bass and a live concert are synonymous with each other, so naturally the .1 channel is sorely missed in this instance.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Despite there being no indication as such on the packaging, there is a small highlights video present at the end of the concert at 83:15 (Chapter 14) after the final fade-to-black, although the menu's chapter selection simply claims it to be a 'bonus track'. It is actually part of the main feature, suggesting that the whole program has probably been lifted from an old VHS master. Like the concert it is presented in 1.66:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced - being part of the main feature the audio remains unchanged. Cut to the song These Days, this is quite an entertaining little highlights video of the concerts at Wembley. Keep your eyes open for wife of guitarist Richie Sambora, Heather Locklear.

    This DVD has been coded Regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Presumably there is also an NTSC version. The version available in the US appears identically featured to ours.

    Bon Jovi - Live From London is good concert from a very talented artist and his band presented on a very unspectacular DVD.

    The video transfer is highly variable as a result of being shot on both film and video.

    The audio transfer is very ordinary - flat, and lacking in dynamic range, ambience and bass. I would have expected more from a CD.

    The one extra present is not enough to save this DVD.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall