Summit Entertainment Music Blu-rays (View From Space With Heavenly Music/Dispatch Zimbabwe/New Orleans Concert/Natures Colors With The Worlds Greatest Music/America The Beautiful/A Stained Glass Christmas/The Yule Log/A Guitarscape Planet/Motley Crüe – Carnival of Sins Concert Hot Spot)

 

Picture: B     Sound: B     Extras: B-     Main Programs:

 

View From Space With Heavenly Music B-

Dispatch Zimbabwe B

New Orleans Concert – The Music of America’s South B

A Stained Glass Christmas With Heavenly Carols C+

A Guitarscape Planet – Murial Anderson C+

Nature’s Colors with the World’s Greatest Music C+

Motley Crüe’s Carnival of Sins B

The Yule Log – Christmas by the Fireplace B-

America the Beautiful B-

 

 

While Summit Entertainment may not be a colossal studio like Sony or Warner they are not letting that stop them from putting out material on Blu-ray with their Concert Hot Spot series to help establish themselves in the High Definition format.  Here we have a look at nine titles, which are sure to appeal to many different tastes.

 

First, let me categorize these a bit more as we have several titles that basically fall into a similar type.  View From Space with Heavenly Music, Natures Colors with the Worlds Greatest Music, America the Beautiful, A Stained Glass Christmas, and A Guitarscape Planet are all High Definition programming that showcase the great capabilities of HD with pictures from space, nature, and even stained glass windows while featuring music to accompany the program.  Natures Colors and View From Space feature some of the most recognizable names and compositions in classical music.  America the Beautiful is a really terrific piece as well as it features landmarks across the United States accompanied by a wide range of popular musical selections that are highly regarded and well-known.  A Guitarscape Planet features Murial Anderson’s concert footage with stunning scenes from all over the world to combine for a highly memorable experience.  A Stained Glass Christmas features some spectacular views from all over the world of some of the most famous Stained Glass work around and forged with beautiful Christmas Carols to provide a super experience. 

 

While most might think that these are only good for in-store plays or certain displays to showcase the beauty of High Definition, this is simply not the only case.  While these do make for great reference discs to showcase both picture and sound, there are certainly other possibilities as well.  The Yule Log is perhaps one of the most popular DVD and now Blu-ray titles to arrive as this disc plays in just about every store display during the holidays, but this is a perfect disc to have at home, especially for those who do not own a fireplace, all while hearing some of the most popular Christmas music as well. 

 

Dispatch Zimbabwe, The New Orleans Concert, and the Motley Crüe discs showcase that this company also wants to get some of the best concerts out there as well, and these three titles showcase just that.  Dispatch Zimbabwe documents the three-night concert benefit at a sold out Madison Square Garden as the band Dispatch puts on an unforgettable concert experience that was filmed in High Definition. The New Orleans Concert features some amazing players at Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, and Joss Stone unite to make for a thrilling evening of music that highlights some of the best from the South.  Here we have a true celebration of life and music, the art of music, and the collective ability of music both past and present to unite together in a celebrative moment, which has all been captures here.

For Crüe fans, this is perhaps one of their best concerts as it captures the band in raw form as they plug away hit after hit in a whacked out and crazy carnival setting that gets wilder and wilder as the night wears on! 

 

The footage here is mostly all High Definition 1080i and presented in a framed 1.78 X 1 transfer.  Technical information was not readily available on the packaging for these titles, but as far as I could identify these all seem to be non-progressive.  Additionally it was difficult to find the audio information, most of the titles feature Dolby Digital soundtracks and a few of the more popular ones even have the Dolby Digital TrueHD option OR even Dolby Digital Plus, which I thought was obsolete at this point.  It’s too bad that not all of the titles have lossless audio tracks. Picture and sound are adequate with the majority of the footage looking particularly strong.  The nature scenes look vibrant and life-like, the concert footage for the most part is sharp and crisp, and although there are moments where it would appear that it is a degree or two less than some of the better HD transfers that we have seen. 

 

While some of these titles feel a bit more dated with the image and sound quality, they are still acceptable at this point and at least provide some interesting material early on in Blu-ray that will get some consumers started.  We can only hope that Summit Entertainment continues with the solid product and brings forth more interesting titles as well.

 

 

-   Nate Goss