Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon Blu-ray

Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon

 (2008)

Documentary

Grand Canyon

The supreme spectacle of one of the world's natural wonders, the Grand Canyon vividly comes to life. Journey rim-to-rim through extreme backcountry and hidden side canyons, along wild rivers and into ancient pools.

National Parks of the Great Southwest

'National Parks of the Great Southwest' reveals astonishingly beautiful lands in Canyonlands, Arches, Saguaro, and Death Valley. Feel what it's like to climb the face of a monolith millions of years in the making, take a sunrise horseback ride through cactus country and uncover the desert's elusive mysteries.

For more details about Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon on Blu-ray, see the Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon Blu-ray Review

Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon Blu-ray, Video Quality

 


Featuring an interlaced picture encoded in VC-1 and averaging about 15 Mbps, Grand Canyon looks awfully good. Filmed and mastered in high definition, the program boasts a lovely amount of detail; the crags of ancient seabed, eroded away by a millennia of rainfall, are captured and presented with a large amount of precision, making broad long shots and extreme closeups alike breathtaking. Flowing water is crystal clear and free of macroblocking. Colors are vibrant and rich, although the balance seems a little off at times, as the faces of several interviewees (park rangers and the like) took on a "Cheeto orange" color in some segments. Red rock country, with its bold, rusty hues, looked very nice however, and no artifacts or effects like posterization were noticeable. In fact, the transfer is overall very clean and free of compression problems, and blacks were satisfactorily deep without crush. Likewise, whites did not bloom, and contrast overall is quite good. Aside from the wonky color in some parts, the picture understandably has a slight softness due to the interlacing, but it does not detract much overall from the spectacular vistas that Grand Canyon presents.

Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 


Grand Canyon offers two audio options in Dolby Digital - one is in stereo and the other is a 5.1 mix. The multichannel presentation is adequate for the material, which is mostly narration and talking heads. The rears and LFE are seldom used, but do pick up some ambiance like the clop of mules' hooves and the rushing of river rapids. The scoring is rather flat and uninspiring, and feels sort of "boxed in"- one can only speculate that this is due to the lossy nature of the compressed DD mix. Being a primarily "show and tell" type of title, the audio serves its purpose as an educational tool, although the flat sound makes the material difficult to be engaging at times.

Scenic National Parks: Grand Canyon Blu-ray, Forum Discussions

Topic

Replies

Last post