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Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility
DVD International // Unrated // October 30, 2007
List Price: $24.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
HDScape has made a name for themselves turning home theaters into a window to another world, anywhere from the far reaches of space to lush, tropical locales to the bitter chill 
of the Antarctic. With Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility, HDScape aims their cameras a little closer to home.
The title says it all, really, and this Blu-ray disc includes lingering looks at several different fires. Clocking in at 17 minutes, the 'romantic fire' is both the shortest and the smallest of the four. The promotional copy on the back of the case makes it sound like it's geared towards nuzzling up to that special someone, and I guess 17 minutes of someone else's fireplace is all it really takes to get the job done. The other three fires each run right at a half hour in length. The 'eternal flame' is the steadiest of the bunch, opting for a single, robust camera angle and fully burning with the same consistency for the full half hour. The 'complete fire' starts just as strong but flickers out as time goes on. Finally, the 'extraordinary fire' jarringly alternates between several different angles. I realize that this sort of disc is meant to be left playing in the background, not actively watched, but bounding between camera angles the way the 'extraordinary fire' does strikes me as awfully distracting. Each set of footage automatically repeats after drawing to a close.
There are close to two hours of these fires in all, and viewers are offered a choice between several different soundtracks with each of them. First is the natural sound of the fire, of course, along with a selection of holiday-themed songs (including "Little Drummer Boy", "Away in a Manger", "and "Joy") and familiar orchestral numbers from Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Vivaldi. Because the romantic fire is just over half the length of the other sets of fireplace footage, it gets its own distinct soundtrack along with selections offered from the rest of the Christmas music.
Although Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility does offer several different types of fires and lets viewers choose between a handful of soundtracks, the overall package seems underwhelming. Both the video and audio are fairly lackluster, Blu-ray has the capacity to offer a much wider selection of music than the fairly conventional ones offered here, and the price tag strikes me as higher than it really ought to be. I know there's a market for these discs -- some of the cable companies even started offering high-definition fireplace footage on-demand last Christmas -- but given a choice between spending $20 on a hundred-someodd minutes of mediocre fireplace footage or putting that money towards any of the hundreds and hundreds of movies on the format, it's hard for me to want to side with Fireplace. Skip It.
Video: Fireplace's 1080p video is kind of a letdown. Because the photography is kept so tight throughout, I was expecting the image to stand out as particularly crisp and detailed. This Blu-ray disc doesn't look bad, but
Fireplace should be high-definition eye candy, and that sense of depth and clarity just isn't there. If I'd strolled into the room without taking a peek at the case, I'm not sure I would've even guessed this was supposed to be high definition. The dark backgrounds also tend to be noisy and don't sport the sort of deep blacks I would've expected. The AVC encode is fine throughout the other three fires, but the 'romantic fire' suffers from some pretty nasty compression artifacting. I'm halfway tempted to pull out my old HD camcorder and aim it at a fireplace to see if it turns out any better than this. Mediocre, at best.
Audio: Each fire includes three Dolby Digital soundtracks. The natural crackle of the flame is in stereo, and the musical accompaniment on the other two tracks is in 5.1, encoded at a bitrate of 640Kbps. The quality is awfully inconsistent, even in the space of the same soundtrack. The natural sounds are marred by some sort of warbling background noise; I'm not sure if this is something in the fireplace that the mic happened to catch, a side effect of some excessive noise reduction applied to the mix, or if HDScape's neighbors had cranked the stereo up a bit too loud. The music -- orchestral mainstays alongside Christmas music with a dash of Weather Channel funk -- hovers closer to CD quality, again lacking any noteworthy sense of detail or clarity. Some numbers sound flat and slightly hissy, disinterestedly leaking into the surround channels; others, like "O Come All Ye Faithful", roar from every speaker. Overall, it's really kind of uninspired and unremarkable.
Extras: A medieval English poem about a crackling fire -- spanning one page of text off the main menu -- is the only extra on this disc.
Conclusion: I can see how high-def footage of a fireplace might carry some novelty value. When I was shopping around for houses, I opted for a big, boxy living room with a home theater in mind, and since that came at the cost of a fireplace, I get the appeal. Something like Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility might be worth fishing out of a cut-out bin to give a quick spin near the holidays, but with a $24.95 MSRP and fairly unremarkable video quality, I really can't recommend buying this Blu-ray disc. Skip It.
The images in this review are culled from the DVD side of HDScape's sampler and don't necessarily reflect the quality of this Blu-ray disc.
of the Antarctic. With Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility, HDScape aims their cameras a little closer to home. The title says it all, really, and this Blu-ray disc includes lingering looks at several different fires. Clocking in at 17 minutes, the 'romantic fire' is both the shortest and the smallest of the four. The promotional copy on the back of the case makes it sound like it's geared towards nuzzling up to that special someone, and I guess 17 minutes of someone else's fireplace is all it really takes to get the job done. The other three fires each run right at a half hour in length. The 'eternal flame' is the steadiest of the bunch, opting for a single, robust camera angle and fully burning with the same consistency for the full half hour. The 'complete fire' starts just as strong but flickers out as time goes on. Finally, the 'extraordinary fire' jarringly alternates between several different angles. I realize that this sort of disc is meant to be left playing in the background, not actively watched, but bounding between camera angles the way the 'extraordinary fire' does strikes me as awfully distracting. Each set of footage automatically repeats after drawing to a close.
There are close to two hours of these fires in all, and viewers are offered a choice between several different soundtracks with each of them. First is the natural sound of the fire, of course, along with a selection of holiday-themed songs (including "Little Drummer Boy", "Away in a Manger", "and "Joy") and familiar orchestral numbers from Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Vivaldi. Because the romantic fire is just over half the length of the other sets of fireplace footage, it gets its own distinct soundtrack along with selections offered from the rest of the Christmas music.
Although Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility does offer several different types of fires and lets viewers choose between a handful of soundtracks, the overall package seems underwhelming. Both the video and audio are fairly lackluster, Blu-ray has the capacity to offer a much wider selection of music than the fairly conventional ones offered here, and the price tag strikes me as higher than it really ought to be. I know there's a market for these discs -- some of the cable companies even started offering high-definition fireplace footage on-demand last Christmas -- but given a choice between spending $20 on a hundred-someodd minutes of mediocre fireplace footage or putting that money towards any of the hundreds and hundreds of movies on the format, it's hard for me to want to side with Fireplace. Skip It.
Video: Fireplace's 1080p video is kind of a letdown. Because the photography is kept so tight throughout, I was expecting the image to stand out as particularly crisp and detailed. This Blu-ray disc doesn't look bad, but
Fireplace should be high-definition eye candy, and that sense of depth and clarity just isn't there. If I'd strolled into the room without taking a peek at the case, I'm not sure I would've even guessed this was supposed to be high definition. The dark backgrounds also tend to be noisy and don't sport the sort of deep blacks I would've expected. The AVC encode is fine throughout the other three fires, but the 'romantic fire' suffers from some pretty nasty compression artifacting. I'm halfway tempted to pull out my old HD camcorder and aim it at a fireplace to see if it turns out any better than this. Mediocre, at best. Audio: Each fire includes three Dolby Digital soundtracks. The natural crackle of the flame is in stereo, and the musical accompaniment on the other two tracks is in 5.1, encoded at a bitrate of 640Kbps. The quality is awfully inconsistent, even in the space of the same soundtrack. The natural sounds are marred by some sort of warbling background noise; I'm not sure if this is something in the fireplace that the mic happened to catch, a side effect of some excessive noise reduction applied to the mix, or if HDScape's neighbors had cranked the stereo up a bit too loud. The music -- orchestral mainstays alongside Christmas music with a dash of Weather Channel funk -- hovers closer to CD quality, again lacking any noteworthy sense of detail or clarity. Some numbers sound flat and slightly hissy, disinterestedly leaking into the surround channels; others, like "O Come All Ye Faithful", roar from every speaker. Overall, it's really kind of uninspired and unremarkable.
Extras: A medieval English poem about a crackling fire -- spanning one page of text off the main menu -- is the only extra on this disc.
Conclusion: I can see how high-def footage of a fireplace might carry some novelty value. When I was shopping around for houses, I opted for a big, boxy living room with a home theater in mind, and since that came at the cost of a fireplace, I get the appeal. Something like Fireplace: Visions of Tranquility might be worth fishing out of a cut-out bin to give a quick spin near the holidays, but with a $24.95 MSRP and fairly unremarkable video quality, I really can't recommend buying this Blu-ray disc. Skip It.
The images in this review are culled from the DVD side of HDScape's sampler and don't necessarily reflect the quality of this Blu-ray disc.
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