BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Music	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1993	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	111:45 minutes (not 120 mins as stated on packaging)	Other Extras	None
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	2,3,4,5,6	Director	Mitchell Sinoway
Studio Distributor	Warner Reprise Warner Vision	Starring	Sammy Hagar Eddie Van Halen Michael Anthony Alex Van Halen
Case	Super Jewel
RRP	$39.95	Music	Van Halen

    The director of this DVD makes an appearance before the start of the program proper to announce the fact that 15 cameras were used over two nights to capture this performance. This seemingly odd introduction makes a lot of sense when you start seeing outfits change back and forth multiple times during a song.

    The track listing of this DVD, which by the way is out of sync with the chapter numbers on the actual DVD by one, is as follows;
 

1. Poundcake 2. Judgement Day 3. Man On A Mission 4. When It's Love 5. In 'N' Out 6. Right Now 7. Ultra Bass 8. Pleasure Dome/Drum Solo 9. Spanked

10. Runaround 11. Finish What Ya Started 12. Eagles Fly 13. 316 14. You Really Got Me/Cabo Wabo 15. The Dream Is Over 16. Jump 17. Top Of The World

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of slightly less than 1.33:1, with a small amount of image cropped from the top and the bottom of the frame. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was extremely variable in the degree of detail on offer. At its best, the level of detail was passable. At its worst, the level of detail was very poor indeed. Out-of-focus camera shots occurred all too frequently, and all of the long shots of the stage were lacking in any sort of meaningful detail at all. I suspect that a lot of this has to do with the fact that it seems as if only some of the cameras in use were film-based, with the remainder being video-based. The on-stage close-ups appeared to utilize the film-based cameras, and these were all adequately defined.

    Shadow detail is generally very poor. The frequent crowd shots in particular are problematic because there is simply insufficient light on the crowd, and the majority of the shots of the crowd are poorly composed expanses of black dotted with the occasional blurred pink face or two. Low level noise was frequently present in the blackness to a distressingly obvious degree, and frequently marred the presentation of this DVD. Some of this appeared to be deliberated added into the image in post-production, but most did not appear so.

    The colours were unremarkable, but generally quite muted.

    MPEG artefacting was a real problem for this transfer. The deadly combination of grainy source material, long programme length and extremely high motion video leads to endemic MPEG artefacting. The transfer rate of this DVD is consistently below 5Mb/second, and this includes a Linear PCM track which gobbles up 1.5Mb/second of this bitrate. All of the songs had more or less MPEG artefacting readily apparent in their backgrounds. Some were much worse than others, and the MPEG macro-blocking extended to the occasional foreground objects as well. The two worst tracks for MPEG macro-blocking were Chapter 6, In 'N' Out, and Chapter 10, Spanked. These two songs were all but unwatchable because of the severe nature of this artefacting. This type of programming demands RSDL formatting to have even a chance of looking good.

Audio

    The vocals were indistinct and blurred into the overall mush of sound that made up the majority of the soundtrack of this DVD. Forget about dialogue intelligibility here, folks, as this transfer fails at even managing to produce dialogue audibility. I suspect that to a certain extent this is inherent in the Van Halen style, but this transfer dismally failed at even producing the suggestion of a separated, central vocal image, instead presenting a distorted, loud wall of sound.

    There were no definite audio sync problems with this disc, but there were times when it became obvious that the shots being offered were not from the night that the audio performance had been taken from.

    The surround channels and .1 channel were not specifically used, but the subwoofer was kept quite busy with this soundtrack, supporting the bass guitar and the bass drum.

Menu

    The video quality is unacceptable.

    The audio quality is poor.

    There were no extras.
 

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
29th June 2000