All Saints - The Videos |
Warner Vision/Warner Vision .
R4 . COLOR . 53 mins .
G . PAL |
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What I can I say about this disc that isn’t on the front cover? “12 complete videos including two from MTV Live”. And that is what you get. The menus are pretty and functional. All Saints are Natalie and Nicole Appleton, Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt - an attractive girl group a notch up in ‘attit00d’ from the Spice Girls. Classed perhaps as poppy, dancey and electronicky, they do a lot of covers although some songs are not actually covers, regardless of their having the same names as past songs (e.g. Black Coffee) Go through the track list; perhaps there’s some songs you like. I doubt people who are fence sitters will buy this, however dedicated fans will love it. Production-wise the videos vary from very strongly CGI based, ‘kinetically’ directed and edited numbers to some more film-like productions. As for the music, well you can make up your own mind... Track List:
- Pure Shores
- Never Ever
- Under The Bridge
- Lady Marmalade
- I Know Where It’s At
- Take The Key (MTV Live)
- Black Coffee
- Bootie Call
- All Hooked Up
- If You Want To Party
- Under The Bridge (MTV Live)
- Never Ever (US Video)
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The full frame video is generally of music video quality. It is pretty good; a notch above good television but hardly anything special. There is a certain amount of variation per clip, some are quasi-widescreen matted to 1.66, 1.85 and 2.35; all non-anamorphic of course. Colours are generally good, some clips are better than others. Darkness levels are very good and so is smoothness. Naturalness of colour is not a strong point, however one would expect that in an MTV video. There is also a strong artistic style (if it can be called that) in each video with use of CGI and black and white film. People used to VHS will be ecstatic. and it is assumed that the target audience will love it.
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There is a single track – linear PCM that could best be described as “CD-like”. Things are not that simple for people with a reasonably flexible setup. You can either decide to run it in direct analogue stereo from your DVD player, your main speakers must take up the slack for all bass duties. Recommended for those with bassy floorstanders. You can also force out a digital PCM stream and have your processor split the signal for LFE and rear ambience. Since these are very much compressed studio songs destined for radio, there’s scant all soundstaging and rear ambience. There is also a lack of treble. Bass however is in abundance. Owners of floorstanders and processors that can route LFE to the subs will experience a surfeit of deep bass. A bit artificial, but typical of how these things are mastered for general consumption. None of the tracks sound at all natural, even the ‘live’ versions sound like they’ve been fed through a stack of post-processors. Vocals are strangely very clear. Being MTV videos, you’ll also experience considerable special audio effects like explosions, strong pans and other movie style effects to accompany the visuals.
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Overall |
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This is a good quality DVD with high production standards. If you are a fan and really want these videos in crystal digital then it's simple, get it. It does run a scant 53 minutes, yet some may find sitting through the lot in one go quite a challenge...
LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=1256
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