Contamination Festival 2003

Starring:Various Artists
Studio: Relapse
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

I liked Neurosis, the scene, and the 5.1 mix
Some good music, but a terrible, terrible DVD

Contamination Festival 2003
Starring: Various Artists
Manufacturer: Relapse
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Rock | Styles | Music

General | Hard Rock & Metal | Styles | Music

General | Music Video & Concerts | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $9.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( C ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Customer Reviews:

I liked Neurosis, the scene, and the 5.1 mix.......2004-08-13

alphadrakon's review surprised me, because I remember this DVD (which I rented a month ago, so I'm likely wrong and he's probably right) as having a pretty good, surprisingly professional 5.1 mix. Neurosis were especially pleasing & hypnotic (musically of course, and also visually as their act involves a video artist), so much so that I went and bought their DVD (A Sun That Never Sets), which I didn't find nearly as pleasureable the Neurosis set here.

The rest of the music I didn't enjoy. I never learned to like "heavy" rock with Cookie Monster vocals, and this didn't teach me. An English subtitle option would have been useful.

Among the extras are some behind-the-scenes Contamination Fest band & biz chat segments that were amusing and gave a good feel for the "scene".

As for the menus, at least you could at least play a whole band set straight through. And soundwise, while I also disapprove of audio that is compressed, artificially loudened, or boosted beyond standard (so "Boo!" to 0db) I do remember vocals being isolated neatly in the Center channel, instruments in the Left & right, crowd & room echo in the surrounds, and all of it sounding surprisingly natural, unlike many of the movies or 5.1-mixed music DVDs I've heard. At least for the Neurosis set. With the rest I had trouble paying attention.

Some good music, but a terrible, terrible DVD.......2004-05-27

Maybe I'm just biased cause I author DVDs and edit for a living. Perhaps I'm too judgemental. But what you get here is a very poorly made DVD. The packaging is really nice, I'll give it that, but once you play the disks you begin to realize that this disc is strictly amateur hour. The menus are okay, if a little excessive (you have to go through about 10 chapter pages to get to the special features on the 2nd disk).

Here is the real kicker though: it's sold as a "2 Disk Set!" but this is really a cop out. You see, there are a few different ways to author DVDs. There is DVD-5 (which is the size of your average DVD-R) and DVD-9 (which is dual layered, and double the size). This is a 2 disk set authored on two DVD-5s, which means they could have only done one disc and fit the same thing they are offering here.

This would be all fine, if the picture quality was good. But it's terrible, it is extremely low-bitrate and is so because they had to jam a lot of footage onto a DVD-5, so they had to make it look really bad to make the files small enough to fit. This is not even VCD quality! It's so bad (I've only seen worse quality on the Dark Tranquility Live Damage DVD).

The actual performances themselves are decent, except the sound is awful (very poor 5.1 mix) and the low picture quality causes any flashing lights or darkness to pixelate horribly and distort the picture. And this is metal. There are a lot of flashing lights and darkness. To top everything off, the audio is mixed way too loud (to 0db! - most DVDs sit between -12db and - 6db) so you always have to turn your receiever way down from where it is normally set to watch a disc.

Worse than any of this technical stuff though, is that I was bored while watching it. There are no titles to speak of, nothing to discern between songs and bands besides chapter points. The edits are all rather slow and the cameras very rarely move. Plus for some reason they edited together shots of the bands tuning and everything that should have been dropped to have a good moving live show.

I do not recommend buying the disk. The expensive price is due to the expensive packaging (cardboard fold out digipak) and not the DVD quality. It's bad, but at least I now own a performance of Dillinger Escape Plan's "When Good Dogs Do Bad Things".

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