How were recorded Hullabaloo and Earl's Court?

[Finn.]

Anyone knows?

 

It could be 35 or 16 mm, digital or analog SD or (i doubt it) digital HD. HAARP was recorded in HD and Rome in 4K, but i can't find information how these gig were recorded.

[FabriPav]

Do you really think they could have been recorded in analog?

[matthijs]

This is what I could find:

 

Director Matt Askem obviously understands where all this is coming from. Using digital video cameras of all persuasions he makes sure nothing’s left uncovered. The usual crane shots, front-of stage and on-stage views, back-of-room wide shots and extreme close-ups are augmented here by more unconventional things. Miniature cameras are mounted on guitar necks and mike stands to bring the audience literally within spitting distance of what’s going on. People with consumer cameras roam the audience and capture the scale, spirit and excitement of the event. And armed with a mountain of footage, Askem cuts the whole thing together with wild abandon, regularly cutting two or three shots into a second. Edited on computer, the video is constantly screwed with - zoomed, paused, frame-repeated, colour-altered, processed beyond recognition or split-screened Woodstock-style. The stage lighting is used as a tool for creating images as much as anything else, and the end result of it all is the feel of the exuberant chaos of standing right there in the front, crushed against the barrier and trying to take it all in.

 

...

 

 

If your idea of the reason for DVD existing is so that you can look at pretty, razor-sharp, high resolution images lovingly photographed on 65mm by a team of experts, you’ve just bought the wrong disc. Live rock concerts are all too often photographed as though they were period costume dramas, but not this one. Much of the camerawork here is spontaneous and handheld, and as mentioned above a variety of formats have been used to capture the show, which itself frequently uses extremes of stage lighting. The whole thing has then been edited with reckless abandon and a ton of digital processing. Putting this onto DVD was always going to be a challenge; the finished production has hyper-speed edits, rapid pans, zooms, colour and contrast changes, grain, video noise and a bevy of other things that can bring a DVD undone in seconds. The fact that there are no unintended video problems is nothing short of remarkable; London-based authoring house Metropolis, who are rather good at this DVD caper, have excelled themselves here.

 

Naturally presented in 16:9 enhanced widescreen at a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, the show is encoded at a suitably high bitrate and is flawlessly transferred to disc. We would have expected to see all kinds of DVD gremlins with material like this, but there’s not a problem in sight. Complaints about things such as edge enhancement are moot; this one looks like it’s supposed to look.

 

The show is stored on a dual-layered disc, with the layer change placed between In Your World and Muscle Museum; unfortunately, like with most live concert discs, this means the crowd noise will be interrupted briefly depending on how fast your player is.

 

There are no subtitles for lyrics, which may bother some people who would rather read a gig than experience it.

Audio

Contract

 

 

If you have a 5.1 surround sound system, prepare to be impressed. Offered in both Dolby Digital and DTS, the multichannel mix of Hullabaloo seems to have been done with the mission of putting you in the venue - and it succeeds superbly. The band is spread out across the three front channels, though in common with many current live discs the centre channel is used very modestly, mainly to aid in localisation of sounds. Matt Bellamy’s lead vocals, for example, appear in all three channels but are firmly anchored to the centre (incidentally, some may think the vocals sound quite low in the mix at times; this appears to have been intentional). The subwoofer is used extensively but is extremely well controlled - this is certainly not the usual low-pass-filter excuse to make the room shake every time somebody breathes. This LFE track has been designed to give the kind of kick to the kick drum and the kind of feel-it-in-your-whole-body warmth to the bass guitar that you’d experience if you were actually at the show.

 

The front channel configuration helps that you-are-there realism, but the surrounds take it even further. The audience’s cheers, screams, mass outbreaks of singing and general chatter are of course very prominent in the rear channels, but there’s separate crowd noise in the front channels as well, giving you the instant feeling of standing right in the middle of the venue. Adding even more realism is some natural-sounding reverb on vocals and instruments in the surrounds, but if you listen closely you’ll also hear that some things - mostly keyboards and sampled effects - have been deliberately, subtly placed at the back as well, though never obnoxiously enough to make you look around and wonder who’s playing at the back of the room.

 

The half-bitrate DTS track is mastered typically louder than the Dolby Digital one, and sounds noticeably nicer - it seems less compressed dynamically and offers cleaner top end, as well as a more prominent subwoofer. Oddly, the DTS surrounds are several decibels louder than their Dolby counterparts, and we had to wind surround volume down by 3dB to restore realism.

 

There’s a stereo mix provided as well, encoded as a Dolby Digital 2.0 track, but you won’t want this unless you’re restricted to listening in stereo (downmixing the default DD 5.1 track works fine, but sub-bass is of course dropped from the mix in that case). There’s a small audio dropout during the crowd noise between the first two songs on the stereo track only; this dropout also appears on the audio CD, which was obviously edited from the same master.

 

 

 

Source: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=1677

 

No idea how trustworthy it is, but I think it's reasonably accurate.

[Finn.]

^ Superb!

 

I think SD digital for Hulla, then.

[005]

What is odd is that HAARP was recorded in HD but never released in HD only SD, only the one off cinema screening which was held round about now in 2008 was the only time the HD was shown which I always wondered why was it never released???