Queen - 1977-06-06/07 - London, UK (2xDVDfull pro-shot)

(2xDVDfull pro-shot)

Live At Earls Court, London, UK - 6. & 7. June 1977

pittrek remastered edition

LINEAGE:
2st Gen (PAL) VHS > SA DVDR > DVD Decrypter > Elementary Streams > Professional NLE and Video Editing/Remastering software > Frame-served to CCE SP2 > DVD Chaptered/Authored

Audio :
Audio 1 : LPCM 2.0
Audio 2 : AC3 5.1

Subtitles
speeches between tracks

DISC 1
01 - Procession
02 - Tie Your Mother Down
03 - Ogre Battle
04 - White Queen (As It Began)
05 - Somebody To Love
06 - Killer Queen
07 - Good Old Fashioned Loverboy
08 - The Millionaire Waltz
09 - You're My Best Friend
10 - Bring Back That Leroy Brown
11 - Death On Two Legs
12 - Doing All Right
13 - Brighton Rock

DISC 2
01 - '39
02 - You Take My Breath Away
03 - White Man
04 - The Prophet's Song
05 - Bohemian Rhapsody
06 - Keep Yourself Alive
07 - Stone Cold Crazy
08 - In The Lap Of The Gods
09 - Now I'm Here
10 - Liar
11 - Rock n' Roll Medley
12 - Lucille
13 - Jailhouse Rock
14 - Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting
15 - Stupid Cupid
16 - Be Bop A Lula
17 - God Save The Queen

SNIVLLE'S PRODUCTION NOTES:
I received a copy of this show from a great trading pal from the UK. As he'd told me before we traded, it was indeed one of the best versions of the show to have ever circulated. To find high quality copies of classic 70s QUEEN shows is very, very rare. After carefully watching the disc that I'd received from my friend a few times, I decided that there was enough picture quality remaining, underneath all the video noise, to facilitate a decent remastering attempt. It took close to 3 weeks of processing, remastering, revising, testing, and finally compiling, to come up with the finished product.

It is an unfortunate fact of "video-geek" life that there are only 240 lines of resolution inherent in VHS recordings. This number can obviously not compare to the more the 540 lines of resolution seen in commercial DVDs. The motivation behind all "Snivlle Remastered Edition" DVDs is not to compete with commercial DVD quality; rather, it is to get older VHS footage as close as possible to the quality of SVHS or Laser Disc. 

(Video Noise Reduction)
The original VOB files were extracted from the source disc using DVD Decrypter. The VOB files were analyzed and indexed as a d2v file with DGindex. The VOBs were then frame-served with AVIsynth into Pro-grade NLE (Non Linear Editing) Video/DVD production software. AVIsynth frame-serving was used so that a few very powerful AVIsynth filters could be used on the footage without having to re-encode at this stage, or without having to create 100 GB uncompressed AVI files. In particular, the AVIsynth filters used were UnDot, CNR2, and Guavacomb. In combination, these filters eliminate multi-gen VHS anamolies such as 'dotcrawl', chromiance shifting, and over all chromiance noise. The nasty chroma disturbances are removed WITHOUT affecting the actual picture details.

Various video noise samples were captured and analyzed from the original footage. Careful video temporal de-noising was applied to remove a substantial amount of analog VHS noise and mpeg-2 artifacts. This portion of the video processing was carefully calculated to ensure that maximum results would be achieved WITHOUT disturbing the integrity of the original picture. I use the "NeatVideo" noise reduction plug-in in Highest quality/High resolution mode. 

(Video Encoding)
Snivlle Remastered Editions are never mpeg-2 transcoded! All of my DVD projects are frame-served and encoded with Cinema Craft Encoder SP. The Cinema Craft Encoder is recognized within the DVD Production industry as the leader in high quality mpeg encoding. In order to maintain compatibility with a broad range of SA DVD players, bitrates are kept at 8000 KB/s or lower. I use standard (PAL) GOP settings (N=3/M=4), higher than average quantization settings, and tweaked picture quality parameters within the encoder itself.

PITREK EDITION NOTES
This is my "pittrek" remaster of the "Snivlle remastered edition" of Earls Court DVD. I have replaced his audio with a lossless source transfered from a low-generation VHS tape by frank39 (www.queenhouse.de). The video and audio were synchronised using Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD.

The 6 chanel ac3 track was also created in Womble. The subtitles are created from text files by SirGH (www.queenlive.ca) using SubtitleCreator.

I have also created new motion menus and compiled this DVD in DVDLabPro.

Or in basic words

I took the Snivlle remaster.
I thought it's great until I realised that it
1) contains ALL the bad editing errors (the repeating section during the rock'n'roll medley is a fine example)
2) contains AC3 audio

I have decided that I can do it better.
So I have taken Snivvle's set and the old YV DVD and the fantastic lossless audio from frank39.
Then I have corrected all the cuts by "shifting" the video on the timeline wherever it was necessary, which means after EVERY song.
On disc 2 there were 2 serious errors. First of all was the repeating section during the rock'n'roll medley. I have corrected it and filled a few seconds which were missing from the YV DVD.
The second "serious error" was the missing God Save The Queen track, so I have added it from YV's source, of course color corrected. 
Also during the opera section of Bohemian Rhapsody there was only black screen, so I have replaced it with the heads from the official video, just like QP does with almost all their concert DVDs.
The video is synchronised with 2 tracks, one is a stereo LPCM track, the second is a 5.1 track, which was "upmixed" from the stereo track.
Also there is a subtitle track for Freddie's speech.
The bonus is all the footage we have from the second night.

Review from QueenLive.ca :
Queen capped off the A Day At The Races tour with two shows at London's Earls Court Arena. The band dropped ?50,000 on a new lighting rig, which was a giant crown on top of the stage. The music of Chopin (Freddie's choice) plays as the audience enter the venue. At this point, one can barely see the stage, as the crown is only a few feet above it, with black drapes below it, so you couldn't see anything on stage (perhaps causing audience members to wonder where the band will be playing!).

Procession is heard (revived only for the Earls Court shows, and never to be used again), and then the usual ADATR overture rings through the speakers. Part way through, the crown slowly begins to rise, and out comes the dry ice (the fourth picture above was taken during this moment; Brian later recalled that hearing the ADATR overture is when they would get nervous, as they knew they were about to go on at any time!). Queen then burst onto the stage to perform Tie Your Mother Down, and the show goes on as usual.

Tonight the band cover Elton John's "Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting" during the Jailhouse Rock medley. Freddie apparently emerged from a trap door (sporting his dazzling silver lurex outfit) at the beginning of the medley, but the videos from both nights unfortunately don't focus on him during that moment. The whole band (especially Roger) are a joy to watch during the medley. At the end of the show, the lights continue to sparkle as the crown descends to its original position.

Freddie's voice is in pretty good shape tonight, but he has problems hitting a few of the higher notes, unlike the Bristol and Glasgow shows. You can feel a slight tension in the air; nothing like Hyde Park, but they (especially Brian) still seem a bit nervous at times. It has been said that this is one of the band's greatest shows, but we must bear in mind that the high quality of the recording has made us impartial to this one. Still, there are many incredible moments throughout. Brian's Brighton Rock solo is one of his best, and he really shines at the end of Doing All Right. Freddie puts in great performances of Doing All Right, White Man, and Gods Revisited. Hearing Roger scream in the background between songs is always fun to hear, not to mention the duck quack before '39, which is also heard in many other shows at this point in the set.

During this time period, Freddie wasn't heard singing "I see a little silhouetto of a man" on the tape of BoRhap's opera section, and it isn't heard on any audience recordings earlier than Richfield 11-25-78 - this leads me to believe that the opera section as heard on the video was most likely tampered with after the fact (bearing in mind that at one point the Earls Court shows were a potential official release). It has been suggested numerous times that they panned the idea because of Freddie's "microphone problems", but we must remember that all we've heard from this show is a video feed. Similar to the Hyde Park "echo" issue, what we are hearing is what was recorded from the video feed, not the soundboard mix, what was heard in the monitors, or from the audience.