In January 1997 Mark Kelly posted on the internet that Marillion would not be touring North America, due to financial considerations. At the suggestion of Marillion fan, Jeff Pelletier, a tour fund was begun. Marillion fans worldwide contributed to the fund, raising $61,000 for The North American This Strange Engine Tour.

During the North American tour, Marillion played at The Rave in Milwaukee, WI. A local cable access show called *progrock was able to arrange to film and broadcast the Marillion concert at The Rave on September 20, 1997. The show was filmed with multiple cameras, and then edited and put into broadcast ready form by Illage Videot Productions, in association with Toxic Bag Productions, Inc. MARILLION LIVE IN MILWAUKEE was aired on Cable Public Access TV, and was nominated for a "Cammie" award.

I was lucky enough to obtain a nice source for this broadcast on VHS. Once I saw it, I knew I had to share it in the best possible form I could. I therefore captured the video tape to my hard drive via fire wire via analog to digital converter. I then converted to DVD format. The show runs a little over 110 minutes. By converting the audio to Dolby Digital, I was able to free up some extra room on the disc to encode the video at a higher bit rate than would have been possible if I'd used PCM audio. The sound is still very good, and the increased bit rate results in a better picture. The average bit rate is about 4900 kb/s (as opposed to the standard VCD bit rate of 1150), so the quality is quite good, with very little if any pixelation or "jaggedies".

To give the DVD a more professional appearance, I prepared an introductory video listing the credits, and also prepared an interactive menu where all the tracks are listed, and you can use your DVD remote control to select individual songs, the same as you would on a commercial release. I have also prepared artwork, which I will upload to the Prog_cdr files section later tonight.

The DVD was encoded in NTSC format, as I understand that most modern PAL DVD players and TVs in Europe can properly convert the NTSC signal. I note that this is how Marillion releases all their DVDs.

The TV show as broadcast was called MARILLION LIVE IN MILWAUKEE, This Strange Tour. To identify my release from any possible other release of this video on DVD, I have entitled my DVD release "Milwaukee in the Rain"

I put many weeks of effort into this release. Between the capturing, the encoding (which takes almost 24 hours on my machine for each attempt), creating menus and artwork, it really took over my life for the past little while. For that reason, I would like the release to stay true to the original release. Therefore, I would ask that only those with PC or MAC DVD burners make copies of this release for others. Standalone DVD burners can not make digital clones. They re-encode the video stream when making copies, thus degrading the picture quality. Standalone DVD recorders are great for recording stuff from TV or VHS tapes, but they are no good for making duplicates of DVDs, as they add a generation, just as dubbing a VHS tape would. The purpose of releasing this DVD was to provide a nice source that could copied without generation loss. Copying with a standalone DVD burner would defeat the whole purpose. The only way to make a faithful digital copy of this release is with a PC or MAC based DVD recorder.

I hope that people who receive this will find it a big upgrade to the VCD version of the show that is currently circulating.