The Art Of Anticlimax...
Dec. 27th, 2005 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
...rather than being some graphic method of contraception, is instead a lesson in how not to prduce a DVD.
Before they finally fragmented into almost unimaginably small pieces, Pink Floyd spent an evening in Earls Court performing Pulse - the last proper live show they would do under the name: A wattage of PA that required a new number to be invented especially for the evening, enough lights and lasers to make Jean-Michelle Jarre blush, a standing army of techies that could take over a mid-sized African nation if pointed in the right direction, and the band itself, in a sufficient state of flux that any number of people could have feasibly gone on stage under the name and not got sued.
Damn, it rocked - even though I wasn't there, I've had both the audio CD and snippets from VCD rips for several years now. I couldn't tell you the tracklist, nor what happened past the first ten minutes - for by then, whenever it was put on, the beer/spirits would be flowing far too fast in either my or my best mate's room to remember anything. For years, we had waited for Pulse to come out on DVD, in the fully mastered 5.1 version that would grab you from all sides while the visuals did their thing on the screen.
Imagine, then, our happiness when we found it - coming out on official release on the sixteenth of January.
Imagine, as well, our utter dismay to find that in what must have been viewed as a stroke of sheer genius at the time, it was in Dolby Stereo.
That's right - restrictive, obselete, anti-immersive, BORING OLD 2.0 SOUND.
Ground-breaking visuals without the sound backing them up. It's like Laurel without Hardy, Abbot without Costello, Blair without Brown - how could they even consider splitting up the partnership?
There's going to be outrage. That, or everyone will be so relieved to actually have an official version that it will be forgotten - I'll just sit here with my surround sound speakers and fume quietly.
Before they finally fragmented into almost unimaginably small pieces, Pink Floyd spent an evening in Earls Court performing Pulse - the last proper live show they would do under the name: A wattage of PA that required a new number to be invented especially for the evening, enough lights and lasers to make Jean-Michelle Jarre blush, a standing army of techies that could take over a mid-sized African nation if pointed in the right direction, and the band itself, in a sufficient state of flux that any number of people could have feasibly gone on stage under the name and not got sued.
Damn, it rocked - even though I wasn't there, I've had both the audio CD and snippets from VCD rips for several years now. I couldn't tell you the tracklist, nor what happened past the first ten minutes - for by then, whenever it was put on, the beer/spirits would be flowing far too fast in either my or my best mate's room to remember anything. For years, we had waited for Pulse to come out on DVD, in the fully mastered 5.1 version that would grab you from all sides while the visuals did their thing on the screen.
Imagine, then, our happiness when we found it - coming out on official release on the sixteenth of January.
Imagine, as well, our utter dismay to find that in what must have been viewed as a stroke of sheer genius at the time, it was in Dolby Stereo.
That's right - restrictive, obselete, anti-immersive, BORING OLD 2.0 SOUND.
Ground-breaking visuals without the sound backing them up. It's like Laurel without Hardy, Abbot without Costello, Blair without Brown - how could they even consider splitting up the partnership?
There's going to be outrage. That, or everyone will be so relieved to actually have an official version that it will be forgotten - I'll just sit here with my surround sound speakers and fume quietly.