Review Detail

9.0 4 10
TV-to-Movie November 18, 2012 3660
(Updated: January 15, 2013)
Overall rating
 
9.4
Audio/Video Quality
 
8.0
Audio Editing
 
10.0
Visual Editing
 
9.0
Narrative
 
10.0
Enjoyment
 
10.0
Terrific work. I'm a big fan of Brumeous' first fanedit "Solaris Station"(1972), on which he reduced the running time of Tarkvosky's worthy but snails-pace epic and tranformed it into a much more enaging sci-fi film.

And the story is the winner with his edit of "Rome", too. I only made it half way through the original 1st series. I knew there was something wrong with it, but I was vague as to exactly what. This fanedit has made the shortcomings crystal clear to me: too many subplots and soap opera nonsense. Let's face it: only a few TV writers have the skill to juggle a huge number of plot strands - "Game of Thrones" is one of the few exceptions - and Brumeous has been creative and thoughtful in untangling and streamlining the knotty mess of subplots. He's turned "Rome" Season 1 into a much better piece of storytelling. It now has a palpable sense of momentum and a clearer narrative purpose.

Technically the editing is bang-on, save for a few crossfades in the middle part of Disc 1 which felt a bit abrupt, e.g. cutting away from the scene where Ceasar's men are about to discover treasure hidden on wagons that are leaving Rome as his army approaches.

Video quality is good but not perfect. Using double-layer DVD discs to allow a higher bitrate would have made the video indistinguishable from the source. An MP4 or MKV encode with the x264 codec at around 2000kbps would also achieved the same result. Bare in mind that I'm fussy about vid quality.

"Rome: Decimated" is fine work. Hopefully Brumeous will be editing Season 2 as well.

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