The Beatles on DVD!

[Jack Sparrow]

I've created a thread where Beatles fans can discuss about Beatles movies and other kind of stuff on DVD. You might remember the Anthology series that ran on TV a couple of years ago. Now there's a DVD box containing the whole series (of course) and a couple of stuff.

Here's a picture of the box set:



The supplements are (according to amazon.com):

Bonus disc of rare and never-before-seen footage, including:

Recollections (June 1994): Paul, George, and Ringo spend a summer's day together singing, playing and warmly remembering the early days

Back at Abbey Road (May 1995): Paul, George, and Ringo at Abbey Road Studios with George Martin, play back the multi-tracks of some of their classic recordings and reveal the inventive techniques used during the original sessions

Recording "Free as a Bird" & "Real Love": Paul, George, and Ringo, along with Jeff Lynne discuss the story behind these recordings - includes intimate footage of them at work in the studio

Real Love Video: The video not screened as part of the original Anthology series, now in glorious 5.1 surround sound

Compiling the Anthology Albums: Paul, George, Ringo, and George Martin talk about how the three Anthology double albums were compiled

Making the "Free as a Bird" video: An intriguing insight from director Joe Pytka into how the Grammy Award winning video was created

Production Team: The team behind the Anthology series discuss how the programmes were made

Newly mixed in 5.1 surround sound with picture restoration

Release date is the 1st of April. There's also the movie "Let it Be" in the works which I also look forward to.

[MacGuffin]

Happy Happy, Joy Joy!!

[MacGuffin]

Isn't it awesome? Still haven't poured over all the extras, but the revisiting of Abbey Road gave me chills. But seeing George again made me  

[MacGuffin]

George Martin?

It'll be sadder day when he...goes.

[budgie]

I don't remember seeing the Real Love video. What was it?

[MacGuffin]

It was basically clips of the remaining Beatles and Jeff Lynne in the studio recording the track.

[Ravi]

The Real Love video was not on the VHS set and probably wasn't on the LD set either.

[ShanghaiOrange]

I just got this today. I haven't watched it yet but the liner notes by Derek Taylor are excellent.

[ShanghaiOrange]

I finally watched this. The klansman protesting the Beatles was probably one of the funniest thing I've ever seen.

[Ravi]

I got this set a while ago, but I only finished watching the whole thing last week.  Here are my thoughts.

The content of the documentary is good, though I wish it had gone into a little more detail on some aspects, such as the making of the Sgt. Pepper album.  I liked the inclusion of the original promo films even though I had seen them before.  The extras disc has some interesting content, such as the making of the Free as a Bird video and listening to the old tapes.

I don't have a 5.1 system, so I listened to the PCM track, which presents the dialogue and music very clearly.  The video, however, has problems.  They crammed DD/DTS 5.1 and an uncompressed PCM track for about 2.5 hours of content on each dual layer disc.  I noticed a general lack of detail and some compression artifacts, particularly on the new footage of people's faces.  It's possible that the master didn't have that much resolution to begin with, since it was produced years ago, but the video is still disappointing.  They should have either provided 2 layers per episode (DVD-18 with 1 episode per side or 1 dual layer disc per episode) or dropped the DTS track altogether.  Not that the picture is covered with big blocks or anything, but there is definitely a layer of noise that may be distracting to some people.  It is watchable, but disappointing.

Kudos to Apple for putting each disc in a separate case rather than making the set a fold out like on the X-Files sets.

Video quibbles aside, this is a great set and a must own for Beatles fans.