U2-Rattle and Hum (1988)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1988
Running Time	94:47
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Phil Joanou
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Bono Adam Clayton Larry Mullen Edge B.B. King
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$39.95	Music	U2

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Slovenian Hungarian Czech English English for the Hearing Impaired French German Swedish Danish Norwegian Finnish Dutch Bulgarian Icelandic Portuguese Hebrew Greek Croatian Arabic Turkish Polish Italian Spanish Romanian	Smoking	Yes, only a small amount.
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Much of the footage presented for Rattle And Hum is in black and white, shot on 16mm high-grain film stock (an artistic choice intended to lend a gritty realism to the film). The movie, as well as featuring many performances of classic U2 songs, also features interviews with the band, and some behind-the-scenes footage from their tour. There really is no discernible structure to the movie, and little is revealed beyond the fact that U2 are passionate about what they do, and the messages they are trying to convey.

    A final note is that while the back cover of the DVD states that there are 11 extra tracks not included on the Rattle And Hum album, many of these are sung only in snippets, with only about 6 being actual full songs. This DVD certainly will not stand in for a full concert, but works quite well as an accompaniment for the big U2 fan.

Video

    Presented in the aspect ratio of 1.78:1, this transfer is 16x9 enhanced.

    This transfer is, for the most part, quite soft. There are only a very few instances of clear images, when the source lets the image clean up enough. Filmed on a combination of 16mm and 35mm stock, the 16mm segments make themselves abundantly clear with an enormous amount of grain that barely lets enough detail through to make out what is happening during darker segments. While this was an "artistic" choice, it certainly makes for a very bad image. Shadow detail is likewise affected by this combination of sources, displaying some nice detail during some concert footage, while other dark sequences are simply a black mush.

    As the vast majority of this transfer is presented in black and white, colour does not play as large a role as normal. When the colour does appear however, it is quite nicely presented, displaying well the multi-coloured nature of U2's shows.

    Apart from some light background pixelisation, directly related to the excessive levels of grain in some scenes, there are no MPEG artefacts present in this transfer. For such a soft presentation, aliasing is surprisingly common. While it never becomes a large problem, the usual parade of items come up again, including a guitar neck, and stage grating. Some not-so-usual items are affected, such as Bono's hat. Film artefacts are present throughout the transfer, and seem to change in number from segment to segment. Most are small and not particularly distracting, however a large round blob makes its presence felt at 18:03.

    There are two sets of English subtitles present on this disc, one containing lyric subtitles and the other simply for dialogue. The lyrics reflect correctly what is being sung, not the official words for the songs, while the dialogue subtitles tend to clean up the mumbled and mis-spoken dialogue from the interviews, often making it more pleasant to read the subtitles than listen to the dialogue.

    This is a single layer disc and hence does not suffer from a layer change.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are two audio tracks present on this disc, being a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround track encoded at the higher bit rate of 224 Kbps, and Dolby Digital 5.1 track encoded at the higher bit rate of 448 Kbps. I listened to the 5.1 track in its entirety, and sampled the 2.0 track.

    Dialogue is clear and easy to understand at all times, even when the band members are mumbling their way through interviews. For the live performance sequences, the vocals are clear and not obscured by crowd noise or the music.

    There are no problems with audio sync on this disc at all.

    The musical performances are usually limited largely to the front soundstage with the crowd noise passed through the rear channels. A notable exception to this is Desire where some of the percussive noises are placed in the rear channels with a significant amount of reverb - an effect which is quite disconcerting. The music is well placed across the soundstage and the sound is more than clear enough to distinguish the individual instruments. Occasionally, the crowd noise becomes loud enough to be irritating, but never during the performances, only during general applause.

    The subwoofer is used extensively to support the lower end of the music, and adds a nice punch to the kick drum and decent bounce to the bass guitar, but is not over used. The 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks are actually very close in quality. While the discrete bandwidth of the full 5.1 soundtrack means that it has a distinct advantage over the 2.0 track, the latter is still quite active in surround use, and does not lose much ground to the 5.1 track in terms of quality.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (1:21)

    Some of the "artistic" choices made in the filming have lead to a problematic video transfer that is full of grain, and covered in film artefacts.

    The audio quality is good, and the surround re-mixing for the most part is successful (with a few notable exceptions).

    The extras are limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall