Sam, I'm sure the DVD probably has better than YouTube 360p quality - so I wouldn't let that bother me. After listening and watching, I'm going to disagree with Gary and Matt - because I'm guessing you didn't know the stuff the speaker introduced in the 7 minute section.

I agree that he's not a polished speaker, but you will probably learn something valuable about gain staging from this particular lesson, and why it makes sense to run mixes as near zero as possible - at least in a live setting, and if you are going to mix using a control surface (which I'm guessing you do not have).

He also makes very good points about EQing tracks in a mix, not solo'ed.

If you can get past the fact that it's pro-tools centric and migrate the concepts to PG products (which, if you understand the concepts behind his talk, you should be able to do) then I would say it might actually be a decent investment. Certainly it's cheaper than signing up for classes at SAE.

For homework before buying the DVD, spend time on the SAE site - there's lots of good material there.

I'll come around to a main question however - why are you interested in this DVD? The answer should not be something along the lines of "I want to do this for a living". If the answer is, however, to improve upon your existing mixing skills, then I say go for it. Don't go to Starbucks for 10 days and you've paid for it.

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