a-ha-Headlines and Deadlines: The Hits of a-ha (1991)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1991
Running Time	72:33
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Various
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	A-Ha
Case	Super Jewel
RPI	$39.95	Music	A-Ha

    Without wanting to sound disparaging, one good way to describe the music of A-Ha is to describe it as predominately "pretty boy" music. Strictly middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator pop, there isn't all that much that stands out in this collection, other than a few of the more recent songs, which clearly display a more sophisticated and complex structure than the earlier songs. In fact, the great majority of the songs on this compilation sound very similar, with much the same bass lines and synthesizer sounds predominating. All-in-all, this is a disc that I will occasionally return to for background music, but I can't see myself watching it all too often.

    A good way to illustrate the non-impact that this programme had on me is to consider the fact that as I write this review, some 15 hours after viewing this DVD, I cannot remember the tunes of any of the songs from the album that I have just watched, except for Take On Me and Crying In The Rain, both of which I knew before I watched it.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was generally on the softer side, but still looked pretty good considering the 10 - 15 year old nature of some of the source material. Shadow detail was acceptable, and there appeared to be no non-deliberate low level noise in the image.

    The colours were variably rendered but seemed to remain true to the specific artistic intent of each of the video clips.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen, despite a significant number of deliberately grainy shots which you would expect to present serious problems to the MPEG encoder. The MPEG encoding is at a constant high bit rate of between 7.5 and 8 Mb/sec for the great majority of this DVD, with peaks in the 9Mb/s range during the really difficult-to-encode sections. Aliasing was a minor issue with this DVD, but the degree of sharpness necessary for this transfer to be prone to significant aliasing was simply not there.

    Most of the source elements that make up this DVD are video-based, however a few of the earlier selections appear to be film-sourced. There is little in the way of artefacts in any of the source material other than deliberately simulated artefacting. Some minor film artefacts can be seen in the film-based material, and there are a couple of analogue video tape dropouts at 63:51 and 64:16. In addition to these artefacts, there are occasional skips in the video stream which are slightly distracting.

Audio

    Vocals were always clear and easy to understand.

    There were no audio sync problems with this disc other than the obvious ones of A-Ha miming the words to their songs.

    The surround channels were not used.

    The .1 channel was not specifically encoded, but received a great deal of signal from the soundtrack, enhancing it nicely.

Menu

    The video quality was always acceptable and at times quite good.

    The audio quality was average.

    There were no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall