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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Audio & Animation Scene Selection Audio Featurette-The Band's Commentary (22:11) Multiple Angles-The Animal Song, Crash & Burn, Affirmation (4 angles each) Music Video-I Knew I Loved You Music Video-Crash & Burn Music Video-Affirmation Featurette-Parallel Lives (28:06) Discography
Rating
Year Released	2000
Running Time	81:48
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (66:15)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	4	Director	Mark Adamson
Studio Distributor	Worldstar Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Darren Hayes Daniel Jones Karl Lewis Lee Novak Ben Carey Jennifer Blakeman Elisa Fiorillo Angi Bekker
Case	Brackley
RPI	$39.95	Music	Savage Garden

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 448Kb/s) English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	?1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	English	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The track listing for this DVD is as follows;
 

1. The Best Thing 2. Break Me Shake Me 3. To The Moon And Back 4. The Lover After me 5. I Don't Know You Anymore 6. Santa Monica 7. Two Beds And A Coffee Machine 8. You Can Still Be Free 9. The Animal Song

10. Hold Me 11. Gunning Down Romance 12. Crash and Burn 13. Truly, Madly, Deeply 14. Chained To You 15. I Want You 16. I Knew I Loved You (into remix) 17. Affirmation

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer is generally sharp with a reasonable amount of detail revealed throughout. There are exceptions to this, with intense stage lighting effects leading to flaring and occasional complete white-outs of the image, but the image in general is nicely detailed. Shadow detail is quite reasonable given the harsh, stage-based lighting, so that there are lots of details to be seen in the more dimly-lit areas of the arena. Some of the backgrounds tended to exhibit a little bit of graininess, which may or may not have been low level noise.

    As with most concert DVDs, colours are intense and highly saturated as a result of the frequently monochromatic lighting schemes. The rope lights in the background of the stage lent a garishly colourful bent to the overall colourscape. There was some occasional flare with shots looking directly into the coloured lights, but there was no colour bleeding as such.

    MPEG artefacts were not an issue for this transfer, however aliasing was. The start of the concert, and in particular the SG rope-light logo, suffered horrendously from aliasing, and this continued throughout the first song with severe aliasing making the image all but unwatchable. Thankfully, both the intensity of the rope lighting and the speed of camera motion settled down after this jarring opening. Nonetheless, the combination of rope lights and cameras in motion frequently proved problematic for this transfer, with a greater or lesser degree of aliasing detracting frequently from the image to a greater or lesser extent. It got to the stage where I dreaded the combination of rope lighting and camera motion and was relieved when the camera either moved very slowly or stayed still when the rope lighting was in action. Darren's mesh shirt was also a tad problematic in this regard.

    Being shot on video, there were no film artefacts to be seen.

    This DVD is RSDL formatted, with the layer change occurring at 66:15. As with all concert DVDs, this is probably as good a place as could be found for the layer change, although it is quite jarring and very obvious due to the sudden interruption of the crowd noise.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/MPEG Artefacts
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are two audio tracks on this DVD; English Dolby Digital 5.1 and English Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded. I listened to the 5.1 mix in its entirety and made some comparisons with the 2.0 surround-encoded mix.

    The dialogue and vocals were always very clear and easy to make out, firmly anchored in the center channel, but they seemed very poorly integrated with the rest of the mix for some reason. Audio sync was not a problem at any stage for this transfer.

    At 64:41, the vocals suddenly become very tinny, an effect that lasts until the end of the song involved.

    The surrounds were used for musical ambience and crowd noise. I found that the instrumental sounds in this mix were all blurred together across the front soundstage instead of occupying their own space, and found this very disconcerting to listen to, as it made the overall sound very flat and lifeless, in addition to being poorly integrated with the vocals. The 2.0 surround-encoded mix is even worse in this regard than the 5.1 mix, sounding totally dull, flat and lifeless with no significant surround presence at all.

    The subwoofer was all but silent, with grossly inadequate levels of bass being sent through this channel. The output from the .1 channel was so inadequate that I wandered over to the subwoofer on a number of occasions to ensure that it was outputting bass, which it was. I also rechecked the calibration of my subwoofer channel to make sure that it was not a set-up problem, but it wasn't. There simply is not enough bass in this mix for some reason, either deliberately or accidentally. The 2.0 mix is much better in this regard.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Distortion/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

The Band's Commentary (22:11)

Multi-Angle Songs

    I must be honest and say that I only sampled these angles, as I had tired of the concert material by this stage of the review.

Music Video-I Knew I Loved You, Crash & Burn, Affirmation

Featurette-Parallel Lives (28:06)

Discography

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
24th January 2001