According to information at the first of the video, Mike McCaleb, the producer of the video, says he contacted Mark Kelly, proposing to film the Capistrano show.

Apparently the shootwas coordinated in just 2 days. I suggest that there was a hope on Mike's Part that Marillion would use this as a Racket Release, because at the first of the video, the opening credits list both Blue Cow Productions and Racket Records. During an interview in the film, Mike is talking to Mark Kelly, and mentions that he had not been financially able to contribute to the NA Tour Fund at the time, and thus this film was his way of contributing.

While it is only speculation on my part that Mike hoped this would be used by the band as an official release, I doubt that the band had any intentions of this being an official release. For instance, the audio is not from the soundboard. Yes, this is a proshot, with multiple tripod steady cameras, but the sound is from an audience recording. If it were the band's intention that they might even consider using the film shot that night as an official release, then they would have given Mike access to the soundboard, I would think. Personally, I think that Marillion thought that it would be made into a documentary, or TV spot that would give them some publicity. The video was made with the bands full knowledge and consent, as evidenced by interviews with each member. In any event, we all know that it was not officially released, nor did it ever appear on TV. The video seemed destined to sit in Mike's closet gathering dust, never to be seen by anyone else. He did however make a couple copies. The tape used for this DVD is one of those few copies. The donor of the source tape can provide the background on how he got his copy, but that's his story to tell if he wishes.

The video does not contain the full concert. Nor are the songs presented in the order they were perfrmed that night. Mike used the style of showing a song or two, then showing a band member interview, and then another song or two, then an interview. This is similar to a style Marillion has used in the past for one of their own video releases. It is done in a cohesive fashion, and the songs played normally have something to do with something discussed in the interview that precedes it.

Finally, just a note onthe technicalities of the DVD production. The capture of the source video to my hard drive went smoothly except for one small bit at the first of the tape. There was a trackng probem at the first of the tape, which caused a bit of a disturbance with the audio for the first minute of the tape. The video tracks fine, but there is some audio tracking static for the first minute. After that, the rest of the video tracked perfectly. I played the first minute a few times in my VCR with different tracking settings. I then edited the audio in this section, picking the best part of the audio from each of these runs and editing them together. I was not able to hide all the static in that first minute, but it was at least reduced to a couple short rough spots.

Capture was done via a D/A outboard conversion, fed by fire wire to my hardrive in uncompressed AVI format. After the video was edited, the conversion to mpeg 2 video was done with Main Concept encoder in high quality mode, with a VBR for best results. The DVD disc was authored on my PC, complete with an interactive menu, and chapters. DVD case artwork is included on the DVD. Just look in the included artwork folder on the disc, and print it off.