Customer Reviews

Living Landscapes: Earthscapes - Four Seasons [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Based on some comments left on several "Living landscapes" volumes by Mr. Heumann (from the producing Studio), I purchased nine volumes from this blu-ray series - all from the same Amazon seller - with the certainty that I could turn the music off, and hear just nature's sounds.

Out of the nine I purchased, there are THREE ("World's most beautiful Sunrises & Sunsets", "Four seasons" and "Bali" - sadly, among my favourite ones), that do not provide any audio option at all (I made dead sure about that): you just have to watch them with the music playing.

I figure they're part of an older batch, but I believe the producing Studio should have made sure that ALL of them were pulled out of the market, before reassuring the customers about the adio specs.

Needless to say, I'm very disappointed by all of that. I've been meaning to contact the producing Studio to get a replacement but couldn't find an email contact for the life of me.

It's a shame, cause I'd be happy about my purchase if it wasn't for that.

I've seen many other nature and travel videos, e.g., Art Wolfe's Travel to the Edge and BBC's Earth series. in regular DVD format with much better HD image-quality than this Blu-ray format of The Four Seasons. Even PBS nature programs at HD-TV channel have much better image-quality. The videography of many post-card pretty landscapes was only as ordinary as many tourists' travel videos. As to the music, unless you 'Play All' the whole video from beginning to end, there's no variation of the musical score for each scene selected from the menu --- the same music accompaniment at the first scene is played repeatedly in a loop for every other season selection, which becomes boring after a while. Two stars only for the soothing instrumental music with no selection option.

AH-HEM! First of all, it's just under an hour long for all four seasons![major disappointment for me]. Secondly I live in Illinois where grape vines are yet to be seen by my eyes, and are certainly NOT a symbol for autumn. I thought they might show autumn being a ton of maple trees and deciduous forests-instead they show a bunch of grapes and an overly fat white bird perchimg over a ghoulish swamp. Winter was OK at best, spring was a bunch of flowers, and summer was the best one and it wasn't worth buying! I was trying, when I bought this, to get a blu ray that would capture all four seasons in one, instead, I get this cheaply done "swampscape". Unless I start living somewhere on the EAST COAST I don't think I'll ever watch it again [maybe for laughs]!!

As a lover of Nature DVDs, I can only say that this is a good addition to my collection. The scenes are varied. The photography is excellent and even the music is very nice. I believe Nature lovers will enjoy this DVD.