Digital Meld

Earlier this morning we discussed Nine Inch Nails sharing boatloads of original content with their fans, and it seems Trent and company seem to just want to keep on giving. In the past week NIN has released four live Hi-Def videos from their current live tour. The videos offer an amazing and unprecedented view of a rock concert experience. The footage is all shot by NIN art director Rob Sheridan who seems to simply roam around the stage letting the lens of his Canon 5D Mark II be his guide. The video is then left unedited and mashed with a mastered audio mix of the song courtesy of Blumpy.

The videos are quite astounding and offer a view that I don’t believe has ever been seen before from any musician. Seeing the footage in high definition on Vimeo offers a sneak peak into the world of a rock star. You can actually get a sense of the power and controlled chaos of being on stage and performing in front of thousands of screaming fans; it is quite intense. It seems that there really isn’t any rhyme or reason to how the videos are being posted as the most recent video posted was actually the first one filmed. I’m guessing the timing of postings revolve mainly around the audio mixing.

However, the most impressive video posted doesn’t even involve the intense music, it is actually a behind the scenes look at a mid-show power outage in Sydney Australia on 02/24/09. In the 4 minute and 27 second video you can see Trent Reznor addressing the crowd with a bullhorn regarding the power outage and how they intend on finishing the set once power is back. Then the shots go to backstage where NIN security informs the band of the "escape plan" if the power doesn’t come back and the crowd gets restless. Check out the video below:

I thought it was cool of Trent to swap the track listing around to start the set back up with the amazingly intense 1,000,000, seeing as they "rocked it too hard and the power went off." You can check out all of Nine Inch Nail’s live on-stage HD videos via Vimeo. It should be noted that to watch the videos in full high definition you’ll need to visit Vimeo and watch the videos from there; Vimeo disables HD embedding which of course sucks.

Here’s to hoping NIN continues to post videos from various tracks throughout the entire tour… and hopefully they’ll offer a torrent of all of them at some point.