Video Reviews: 720 - Beyond the Fifty -- FON - Huntington Beach Super 7

[BlackVCG]

I've become interested in watching paintball videos lately to see what really makes these tournament teams as good as they are. I really enjoyed watching what games they showed on the OLN coverage of the 2002 World Cup, so I wanted to see more paintball footage. I got these videos the other day from www.paintballvideo.net

Here's what I thought of them after watching them all the way through:

FON - Super 7 Huntington Beach

I've been pretty impressed with what FON does for the paintball community in terms of tournament coverage and other little things. I was really impressed with the reports about this tournament, so I decided I'd get at least one video that covered the tournament.

The video is on DVD and comes in a standard music CD case with a cover piece and a really cool back cover picture of Dynasty sitting together as a team. The DVD has 9 games on it, a huge picture gallery and final standings.

The footage is okay. I guess if you really want to watch individual players up close throughout each game, you'll love this video, but I know I would much rather see a large portion of the field and see what is actually going on in the game. Too much up close footage of the players to have any idea of what is going on. If they would have had cameras in each of the four corners of the field and just filmed from those angles and a couple at the 50 sidelines, they could get some much better footage that would show how the game played out.

The video is DVD, but not DVD quality IMO. Some of the footage is grainy when they're following a player that is running. Also, there was lots of sun there and there's points in the video that the glare from the sun makes it so you can't really see much until they switch the camera view or focus in with the camera.

The picture gallery has some VERY good pictures that make for great desktops and just looking through. My main gripe towards FON is that they use ONE song for the picture galleries. In their World Cup video, they used one song for each of the ten galleries, started it at the beginning of each gallery and then it cuts out at the end of the gallery and takes you back to the photo gallery main page. That is extremely annoying and very poorly done. In this video, they use they same song (Limp Bizkit - Rolling), but only part of the song so it just keep repeating a segment of the song. I just turn off my speakers when I watch the picture gallery. I think it would be much easier and come off much more professionally if they would pick a couple of songs, put in enough pictures to cover the length of the song and make that one gallery. Or they could make it one large picture gallery and use a couple of songs. Also, a thumbnail page of all of the pictures in the picture gallery would be nice so you don't have to let the galleries cycle through the pictures to find the one for which you were looking.

Overall it's an okay DVD. If they'd do it a bit more professionally and get better "action" footage, I'd buy more of their videos, but the World Cup video and this one are pretty much the same in terms of their video capturing style.

720 Video - Beyond the Fifty - World Cup 2002

By far the best paintball video I have ever watched. Not perfect (I'm very picky), but I was blown away by the action footage. They captured every game from every angle and it made for an entertaining video that made paintball actually exciting to watch on video.

The video is on DVD and comes in a standard DVD case with two discs. 19 games in total + Product Reviews (DYE and Nexxed), Post Game Interviews and other special features.

There's a nice long interview with the Aftershock guys at the end of their last game. Each game has music with it and the music is a lot of "no-name" bands, but some of it is good and fits the game well. You can turn it off and watch just straight raw footage with all of the cussing, yelling and sound of paint flying through the air and hitting the bunkers. In total it's about 100+ minutes of video.

One of the cool features of this video is the Heads Up Display. Before I explain that, I'll explain one of my gripes about the video. Instead of being wide screen and taking up the whole area of the screen like in a normal wide screen movie, they setup a box template for the video so the video is in the box and on the right top corner it says "720" and below that it either says the name of the two teams playing or if the game has the HUD, they put that in the bottom right corner of the viewing box. What I don't like about this is that the video of the game is in a small box so it doesn't fill up the full 1.65:1 ratio, or whatever it is. I guess they had to do the "view box" so they could have a place to put the HUD when they showed it.

The HUD is only shown on a a few games. I think about 5-6 of the games have the HUD. The HUD is an overhead view of the field that shows the postions of the bunkers, their shape and everything is to scale to the actual field. Each player is shown by either a blue or red dot and as they move in real time, the HUD shows their movement. As players go out, green crosshairs go over their dot and then they disappear from the HUD. This shows you where everyone is at from the beginning of the breakout all the way to the end of the game. You can really get an idea of how teams setup off the break and how they adapt to how the game starts to pan out. A very cool feature. I think it would be cool if when a player goes out, they would put their dot behind the dead box and that way you can just look at the dead box to count how many of each team are out instead of counting all the remaining dots on the field.

My gripes about the video are the box layout and not having the game footage take up the whole wide screen aspect ratio, the extremely annoying, "cheap" computer/robot sounds they use during the introduction and the occasional black/white video they show when they're using one of the elevated camera angles.

The video was expensive, but overall it was worth it. I was very impressed by the amount of effort put into getting as many camera angles as possible and the fact that you can get a sense of how the game is panning out, unlike with the FON videos. I would recommend that you buy this video if you're looking for a GOOD paintball video.