just got the new dvd via ups this morning. had a bad day at work yesterday and was in need of some funk, so i had it overnighted. you all know how it's shot, if you've watched the videos on the npgmc. you all also know the tracklist. there are no easter eggs as far as i could find. the npgmc commercial is the little flash vid with the jingle ("join now") that was on the website. the ryde is about 7 minutes long and really good, but i'm not quite sure why it's seperate from the rest of the show, since it's obviously edited from song to song and they could have just tossed it in with the rest. i was sorta disappointed that there was no 5.1 mix, but whatchagonnado? and the packaging is pretty cool. clear case with a double sided cover, so that when you open it, you see prince at the mic. also came with a few npgmc flyers. anywho, good to have another 80 minutes of funk in my possession.

I assume it is a standard full-screen (4:3) presentation and not widescreen?
[This message was edited Wed Aug 13 9:33:28 PDT 2003 by crazymf]

So...what did you like about it? Did you dig the performances?

the presentation is acutally letterboxed. it looks to me like it's about 1.85:1, but i don't think it's an anamorphic transfer. the performance is cool. very nice vibe going on. like others have said, i wish the whole performance was here, but i'll take what i can get. another drawback is that "sometimes it snows in april" is run underneath the credits. also, the intro/soundcheck is nothing more than some handheld footage by someone (prince?) looking out a car window at vegas. i also neglected to mention before that there was a sticker on the packaging that said this was "Prince's 1st official npgmc concert dvd" ... meaning there will be more? all in all though, i'm fairly pleased.

So will it be worthy of the big screen a la Sign O?

jthad1129 said:

ummm ... to my eye, the quality of the original video source looks to be minidv ... possibly a canon xl-1s or one of the panasonic models. it looks fine, but would probably suffer a bit upon being blown up to a theater screen. i saw it projected at paisley a while back, but those aren't ideal conditions (lights, etc) for checking video quality.

of course, when i saw the last star wars film digially projected, i thought it looked like s**t, so others may not be as picky as me.

however, if you're talking about it from a performance point of view, seeing it with a crowd of like-minded prince-heads should be a blast... too bad there are no screenings near kansas city!

crazymf said:

I got mine today too. Highlights are 1+1+1=3 and the Work. Real funky. I liked the dvd a lot. I wish there was more. I was at that show and would have loved to have seen Days of Wild on the dvd.

love5oneanother said:

it was shot with five handheld miniDV cameras
[This message was edited Wed Aug 13 15:03:54 PDT 2003 by madartista]

The mini-DV thing suffers in the transfer because there are numerous compression artifacts. Plus, the focus is dodgy on many shots (shades of the SOTT shoot from Rotterdam?).

The overall aesthetic (handheld, mini-DV, etc.) actually gets in the way of the performance, IMO... I was at that show and this DVD in no way captures the spirit of the performance or conveys a sense of "you are there" to the viewer. So much of the show has been left off added to poor transitions between songs and what you have is a choppy, truncated presentation of what was, to be there, an almost epic, transcendent concert. You get almost no "flow" from song to song, the theatrical elements (backdrop text, etc.) of the show have been cut (removing the very "statement" the tour was supposed to be about), even Prince's stage banter between tunes has been eliminated. It feels like a sample of a concert rather than a concert. Sanaa Hamri should stick to music videos.

Prince owns a world-class studio and all we get is stereo? Not even a DD 5.1 mix? On Rave we even got DTS! Unacceptable. I thought the set list was cut short to allow space for a DTS track without compromising video quality... now there really is no excuse for not including more songs or parts of the aftershow. The DVD is less than half the show.

Still, something from the tour that's not a bootleg is better than nothing, and the performance itself -- what remains of it -- is, as always, enjoyable. But the presentation is severely lacking.

It's better than Rave (by a slim margin), but beneath the tour videos for Lovesexy, D&P, and the various broadcast versions of Nude floating around. The definitive live filmed records of a Prince show remain Cobo Hall in '86 and, of course, Sign o' the Times (even if that one was doctored at the Park). Maybe Prince should stick to directing these things himself.

I'm in MPLS...I got the DVD this afternoon and I had to go to work... gonna watch it now... I'm excited!!!

who did you order it thru?

Do you guys have Bar code on your DVD from the Club ?
Do you think the DVD from the club is different (packaging, notes).

Peace

I received mine yesterday as well (kinda fast considering the type of shipping I chose; I'll give NPGMC kudos on this one), and I must say I'm a bit more disappointed than I thought I would be. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have something on video to document this tour blah blah blah..., but this is so cheap looking for a DVD to me, it's incredible (I know, I know...what else did I expect). I couldn't even sit through the entire thing in one sitting, as I got only as far as "1+1+1 is 3". The transitions between songs are horrendous, as there is no real flow, and P himself just seems so stiff on stage (a criticism I've voiced for a while now for his live shows), that there's really almost nothing to look at (no choreography, decent costume changes), minus a couple of moments and, granted, I haven't seen the entire thing yet. I'm only giving my initial thoughts, but I don't think this is anything I'll be watching over and over like the SOTT film, Detroit 86, or even PR concert vid. Maybe my mind'll change a tad when I see it on the big screen on Monday.

Also, the pictures that were posted in that thread in the Prince: Music forum are not in this DVD packaging. The booklet is really an advertisement for the distributor's other shit, and there's a quick insert with the tracklisting.
[This message was edited Thu Aug 14 4:16:24 PDT 2003 by alexnvrmnd]

love5oneanother said:

Star wars in digital looked like S**t i absolutely do not agree on this...

love5oneanother said:

His crew used the Canons at the Celebration. I can't believe that he recorded the show on the cheap like this.
He's not an indie filmmaker that needed to go mini DV. He has tax deductible funds.

Did they add film grain with a filter? Or did they leave it filter-less? I'm sure that they didn't transfer to film, as they could have filmed it that way to begin with.

This whole DVD sounds disappointing all the way around. I ordered a copy, but I'm glad that it was cheap...

got the DVD yesturday... 2 words: The Bomb!

xcellent per4mance!