North American version of “Journey In Rock”
Here is the situation with the North American version of the Ian Gillan’s DVD “Highway Star – A Journey In Rock”, straight from it’s producer.
- Exactly what does “cut a different version” mean? Does this mean the NTSC might not be 2 discs or will contain substantially different material than the European release?
- Any idea how much longer it will be before a general release in N. America happens? I’m guessing months, not weeks.
Can’t answer your questions exactly as it’s all in the hands of the people at Universal (although both our company and IG will have a say). What I can tell you is what is anticipated by Universal.
The ‘different cut’ is quite different from the currently released DVD in many respects. The reason for this is due to the music publishing laws in North America which mean we’re charged per track used (or part of a track used). In most of the rest of the world, we pay a flat rate 8.5% of the dealer price to the music publishers and we can use as many tracks as we want (although we have to pay the owners of any recorded music on top of that!). So where we’ve used around 100 short clips of songs to keep the narrative moving along on the film released in the rest of the world, we are limited to around 20 tracks for the North American version. Therefore we’ve chosen 20 tracks and used them long. It means some parts of the original film have had to go, but some music tracks are
used in their entirety.I have no idea how long it will be before there’s a US release. There’s talk of movement but I think it may rely on a US tour by Deep Purple taking place. So maybe in the summer… I’ll ask and if there’s an answer I’ll get back to you. By the way, the current disc is an NTSC hybrid and so should play on US machines anyway.
We can confirm that the “NTSC hybrid” he is referring to is the European version which is mastered as a Region 0 NTSC DVD. This means that it should seamlessly play on any North American DVD player. You can order the European version from Amazon.co.uk.
Thanks to Jim Collins for the info.
did find an imported copy in my local record store the other day and it played fine.. Just got done watching it.. A must for any Ian fan, and try to get the imported as I would not have wanted this cut down at all…..
April 19th, 2007 at 23:47Has anyone found an Import copy in Canada ??
April 21st, 2007 at 19:01If so,please let me know the store and city.
Thanks
Hey Mike,
It looks like it might be a while for release for us Toronto boys, but I just received my copy from CDWOW.com. It plays in my DVD player just fine – Region Free.
April 23rd, 2007 at 17:07Received mine 4 weeks ago from DPAS and it plays fine, great quality.. I’m from Ontario, Canada
April 24th, 2007 at 01:16So basically, if you’re a fan and don’t want to wait for the hatchet job North American version, the best thing to do would be to order from overseas making sure it’s the right format.
April 24th, 2007 at 17:51