Judas Priest December 5, 1990 The Palace at Auburn Hills Auburn Hills, MI, United States Painkiller Tour
1 Dual Layer DVD Live in Detroit - 35th Anniversary Edition Professional Master Downloaded 2-disc DVD -> DVD-lab PRO 2.51 -> VOBs combined into a single file -> combined VOB split into video and audio tracks -> PCM audio restoration in Audacity 3.7.5 (EQ, hiss reduction, slight reverb and stereo widening, realigned to single-disc use) -> re-authored in DVD-lab PRO 2.51 to a DVD9 with a basic menu NTSC 4:3 102:38 min. A B+ / A-
Intro / Hell Bent for Leather Grinder The Hellion / Electric Eye All Guns Blazing The Sentinel Metal Gods Night Crawler The Ripper Beyond the Realms of Death Riding on the Wind / Drum Solo A Touch of Evil Victim of Changes Painkiller The Green Manalishi Breaking the Law Living After Midnight Heavy Metal Communication You've Got Another Thing Comin' (slightly cut in the middle)
So here it is, the audio restoration of Priest's only full-length 1990 pro-shot video that I was supposed to release at least five years earlier for the 30th anniversary of this concert. While the video quality was pretty good, the audio always felt really narrow and stuffy. I initially started working on this in 2019, and had plans to have the video track professionally restored by Bucksawz (who authored the Visual Metalogy Deluxe Edition). Unfortunately he was busy at the time and eventually I sort of forgot about it as 2020-21 featured pretty big changes in my personal life.
Every now and then I noticed the files on my computer and thought about finishing the project, but never got around to it. That was until this November when I was in a really productive mood and finally decided to have another go, especially as another anniversary date for the concert was approaching. Instead of using my 2019 edit I redid the audio from the original source to make sure the final product wouldn't sound too processed, then created some basic cover art and reauthored the DVD with a basic menu. The source material was a two-DVD version of the original so it had less video compression to begin with. Funnily enough, the final audio edit was made exactly six years after my initial attempt.
I also tried to make some minor edits to the video portion in Shotcut (just slight contrast adjustment and noise reduction), but for whatever reason I could never get DVD-lab to read the edited file. It's not a huge loss overall as those fixes wouldn't have amounted to much as I'm much more skilled in audio restoration anyway.
The audio still has issues but without multitracks available for a proper remix I think there's very little more that can be done to this recording as a whole, aside from maybe a bit of polish to the video portion which I wasn't able to do. Considering the original source (venue in-house feed never meant for wide release recorded on a consumer-grade VHS) I think it's very enjoyable now if you play it loud on a good setup with a subwoofer. Any dropouts, glitches etc. were already there in the source material so nothing could be done to them.
