Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains

 (2007)

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray offers solid video and great audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
Feel the crisp air as it caresses the towering spires of America's most majestic peaks. Experience the peace and tranquility of the Tetons reflected in pristine mountain lakes. Roam unnoticed through undulating fields among elk, deer, moose and wild bison. Wings beat the air at sunset as waterfowl return home to golden mirrored marshes. The roar of waterfalls will buffet your senses. Wildflowers adorn Yellowstone River as you glide along crystal clear lakes, glittering ponds and shimmering streams.

For more about Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains and the Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray release, see the Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray Review

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray Review

Another strong, if somewhat repetitive, entry in the Living Landscapes series features the glories of the Rockies.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 17, 2010

The Living Landscapes series has provided a wealth of beautifully scenic Blu-ray's which have helped elevate the "ambient television" niche market to something that can actually be more than just digital wallpaper. For those of you who live in, around, or even on mountains, you may think that you get enough of the high altitude scenery in your real life, but you might still want to explore the wonder of Rocky Mountains, which includes some lovely shots of two of my favorite places on Earth, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, as well as Idaho's perhaps less famous, but no less awe inspiring, Sawtooth range.

I had the privilege of growing up during my young childhood, and then again in my late adolescence, on the side of the Wasatch Range, "cousins" as it were to the Rockies. In fact my parents' mountainside home was at well above 4500 feet elevation, so I was raised in the rustic glory of snowcapped peaks and wilderness literally at my front door. When my parents' home was in the finishing stages of being built, we went up there one day to see the progress. I had gone downstairs for a moment, and when I came upstairs, there was a beautiful fawn just standing in our entry hall, having wandered in from out of doors to see what was going on for itself. That same "up close and personal" interchange with nature is available in Rocky Mountains, if only a bit more vicariously.

The Tetons are simply breathtaking in this video.

This is a beautifully serene Blu-ray, with a long opening segment of cloud strewn skies spreading out over thrusts of rocky peaks. Some time lapse photography is utilized by producer-director-cameraman Michael Heumann to create some magical effects as the clouds grow and morph, constantly changing shapes and sizes. One of the more spectacular segments involves a gorgeous waterfall spilling into a closed off canyon, with a huge plume of spray shooting out into the stony envelope. It's a really beautiful sight to behold, creating a magically misty veil through which the harder edifice of the surrounding canyon is seen.

Though you might assume this Blu-ray only shows scenes of high altitude peaks, the fact is we get a rather large array of environments and scenes throughout Rocky Mountains. There's a segment featuring some buffalo, caught in their natural habitat in Yellowstone, as well as some beautiful alpine meadows filled with wildflowers of assorted colors and shapes in the Sawtooths. A spilling waterfall creates a multihued rainbow at one point, and various scenes of the sun rising and setting cast an incredibly fiery glow on all the surrounding scenery. As with most of the Living Landscapes series, an optional music soundtrack is provided which is blended with the ambient nature sounds. Rocky Mountains features one of the more enjoyable in the series, with a nice, Windham Hill-esque track of piano, flute and violin which is relaxing while also having real interest to keep the listener engaged. While the slipcover lists composer Gary Malkin, the actual credits for Rocky Mountains credit Radhika Miller, Paul Hacker and Donald Regalamuto, so I'm not entirely sure who is responsible for the tracks on Rocky Mountains, but together they provide a perfect and soothing accompaniment to the glorious sights shown throughout the Blu-ray.

The only word of warning I would give anyone thinking about picking up Rocky Mountains is this effort, as with most of the Living Landscapes series, can seem pretty repetitive if it's looked at with rapt attention. Yes, each individual scene of mountainous glory can be awe inspiring, but as the hour's worth of video winds down, some viewers are apt to be thinking "been (or seen) there, done (or watched) that."

My wife and I took our sons on a really magical vacation to Yellowstone and the Tetons a couple of years ago and it was one of the few times my kids weren't begging for their electronic gaming devices to keep them entertained. The glory of the sights they were exposed to were overwhelming enough to make them at least momentarily forget the magnetic pull of their various game systems. It may seem ironic to get that same feeling from the high-tech world of Blu-ray and high definition televisions, but if you're unable to experience these wonders first hand, Rocky Mountains is as about as close to actually being there as you're likely to get without a National Park pass.

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

This is one of the older Living Landscapes releases and utilizes an MPEG-2 codec. That said, for the most part this 1080i 1.78:1 image is quite beautiful, with nicely saturated color and an appealingly diverse palette. This piece is strongest in some of the detail it provides in the water or watery scenes. The segment noted above with the waterfall spew is really breathtaking, and each individual droplet of water can be made out as it attempts to escape the realm of the waterfall itself. Some of the more placid, reflective scenes are equally amazing, with a sort of liquid glass quality to the water which the Blu-ray offers in really sharp focus. There are some moments of noise and shimmer on the usual suspects: gangly, interwoven dead tree branches, which the Blu-ray can't quite resolve correctly, and, kind of ironically, on very lush, fully leaved trees where the same issue occurs. But for the most part this is a solid, and often quite spectacular, image.

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

Unfortunately for you audiophiles, Living Landscapes releases have not stepped up to the lossless audio plate yet, and so you are given the choice of two quite good, and often very immersive, standard Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks, one with just the ambient nature sounds, and the other with music blended with the ambient track. I tend to prefer the musical tracks, but I spot checked both of these throughout the hour's length of the video. These both offer sterling fidelity, if never quite the robust low and high ends that a lossless track provides. Even better, the 5.1 nature sounds seem (to my ears anyway) directly linked to the images being shown, which strangely is not always the case with the Living Landscapes series. Therefore, you can hear the gurgling sounds of water surround you as the segment featuring the Yellowstone River plays out, or in another lakeside scene, ducks clearly enter from the right channels and squawk through to the left as they land and hunt for food in the water. Clarity here is quite exceptional. As noted above, the music on this release is above average for this kind of outing, as is often quite enjoyable on its own.

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

As with all the other budget priced Living Landscapes titles I've reviewed, there are no extras on this release.

Living Landscapes: Rocky Mountains Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

I've really become a fan of these Living Landscapes releases, and my own love for mountains has made this one of the more enjoyable offerings in the series for me personally. Graced with some very lovely imagery and a better than average selection of music, Rocky Mountains is the next best thing to actually being there.

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