Marillion
September 9, 1997
Simple Misty Visions

Release details:

Marillion
Toad's Place, New Haven, CT
September 9, 1997

Title: Simple Misty Visions - NTSC
Catalog: Duley Digital - DD-M970909-D
Media: 1 DVD
Time: 121 minutes
Video Type: Single Cam Proshot - House Feed
Video Source: 2nd(?) generation VHS - NTSC
Audio Type: Stereo Soundboard
Audio Source: 2nd(?) generation VHS - NTSC

Setlist
01. Seasons End
02. Alone Again in the Lap of Luxury
03. Hard as Love
04. 80 Days
05. Warm Wet Circles
06. That Time of the Night
07. Man of a Thousand Faces
08. Waiting to Happen
09. This Town
10. The Rakes Progress
11. 100 Nights
12. Slainte Mhath
13. King
-------Encore-----------
14. This Strange Engine
-----2nd Encore---------
15. Brave
16. The Great Escape
17. Falling From the Moon
-----3rd Encore---------
18. Garden Party

Production Notes:

I came across this tape in an unusual way. I've been searching out and converting low gen Marillion tapes for a few years now. A trading friend offered to send me this tape quite some time ago. He wasn't aware of what the lineage was, but said that he thought it looked pretty good. I had several good, known gen videos to work on, and wasn't real enthusiastic about having him send me a tape that I might look at and consider unworthy of converting to DVD. So I didn't have him send it to me. A short while ago, he told me he was getting rid of his video tapes (to make space for a growing DVD collection perhaps) and said he was going to throw this tape in the garbage, but would send it to me if I wanted, and if I didn't like it, I could throw it out. Of course, I told him to go ahead and send it to me. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the quality was indeed pretty
good for an unknown gen tape. From looking at it, I would say that the tape was no more than 2nd gen. I had always thought
that this video was an audience shot video, so imagine my surpise upon playing it to learn that it was actually a "semi" proshot video with soundboard audio. Suddenly, I was excited about this project.

Unfortunately, the tape was stuttering a bit upon playback. I attribute this to the tape sitting on a shelf unplayed for some
period of time. I put the tape in the VCR and fastforwarded it and rewound it from start to finish 3 times. Now when I played it, it played smoothly. I proceeded to transfer the tape to my hard drive using an analog to digital converter attached via firewire to my computer. The capture was done to DV .avi format. The tape played smoothly and cleanly, with the only real problem being a slight roll for a couple seconds at the beginning of the show.

I next had to decide whether to put the show on one disc or two. As the show ran for 2 hours, putting it on two discs would have resulted in the best quality. However, as the tape was not a master or 1st gen, I didn't feel the quality warranted putting it over two discs. I decided to try encoding it to fit on a single disc, and see how it looked. I encoded it using a variable bit rate averaging 4750kb/s. I frameserved from Adobe Premiere to TmpegEnc using AVISynth. I used a 2 pass encode, to get the best encoding quality I could for the bit rate. The encoding took 48 hours to complete. However, the results were worth the time spent. Upon watching it, I found vitually no difference between the quality of the source tape, and the encoded video.

The audio sounded good, but was a touch flat, and lacking some low end. I EQ'd the audio to give it a bit more punch. There is also a touch more hiss than in the original, but I think the improvement in sound is worth the trade off. I applied no hiss reduction, as I find that usually causes the audio to deteriorate in quality. The only real glitch in the audio takes place near the end of "That Time of the Night". The low end became louder and distorted for several seconds. I applied no EQ to that section of audio and reduced the volume slightly, so as not to blow my speakers. Once done, the audio was encoded into Dolby Digital AC3 compressed format in order to allow more of the bit rate available on this disc to be available for the video. Once the final authoring was done, the disc was just a few mb shy of being completely full.

The audio mix is very nice, coming from the soundboard, with some audience mics to suppliment the sound, from the sound
of it. There is very good separation of the instruments, which can all be heard very distinctly. I was especially impressed with how clear Pete's bass sound came across. In many songs, you can clearly hear him as he plays each note. Listen to "Slainte Mhath" for a good example of this.

Finally, a few words about the video itself. I stated earlier this was a "semi" proshot. What I mean by this is that it was shot with a single camera, tripod mounted at the rear of the venue. I believe this camera was providing the house feed, which would show up on TVs in the venue. You will note that at the end, a message comes on the screen stating that "The Bar is Still Open". The camera work is pretty good, with nice zooms. The panning is not perfectly smooth, indicating the tripod was not a professional tripod. Also, there are many occasions when cheesy digital effects are used. However this does not detract too much from the enjoyment of the video.

The show itself is a pretty good one. After a rather mundane start to the show, the band seems to pick up intensity, and by the time they get into "This Town", they are firing on all cylinders. Just look at the emotion of Steve Rothery's face during the "100 Nights" solo. You can tell he is totally feeling it.

Overall, a very nice show to have in the collection, until someone comes forth with a version sourced from the master or a 1st gen tape. Enjoy.

Duley - September 2005