Screened late last year on ABC Television to some considerable acclaim, Australia - Eye Of The Storm is a four-part documentary series that aims to illustrate how Australia's climate is affected by the larger scale of the massive and often reliable weather patterns of the Earth as a whole - how weather events thousands of kilometers away can shape what happens with the weather in Melbourne, Broome or Brisbane, for example. But much more than that, the series, also looks at how these events impact on everything in Australia - the people, the forests, the deserts, and of course the animals and other living creatures that inhabit the land.

The four 50-minute episodes in the series are each themed around one major weather event - in order, La Niña, Southern Exposure (this deals with the effect storms from south of Australia can have on our mainland), El Niño and Monsoon. Each episode has been produced and photographed by different teams of people, and each has its own character - quite appropriate given the very different nature and end result of the phenomenon on display in each case.

Sounds, well, rather boring, doesn't it? Luckily, it isn't - these are very skilfully made documentaries, and there's much revealed here that's fascinating and eye-opening. The photography - especially in the first episode, La Niña - is stunning, including time-lapse photography and some astonishing point-of-view shots, as well as inspired wildlife photography. This is interspersed with news and archival footage, which only serves to illustrate just how good the contemprray photography is.

The only real downside here is the narration; while it's very welcome to hear a female narrator on a major documentary series like this, Australian actor Rachael Blake (best known for her role as Maxine in the ABC's superb Wildside) doesn't sound all that interested in the script she's reading, and even gets inflections wrong on a couple of occasions. It's by no means a bad job, but something seems a little lacking in the narration, especially given the amazing visuals that accompany it. There's also a tendency for the producers to spend time on seemingly trivial things, as though they edited together as much footage as possible and then tried to figure out how to tie it all together; but while this diffuses the point at times, these sections still provide some fascinating information.

All up, a remarkable achievement - especially visually - that will keep closet weather documentary nuts like this reviewer perfectly happy for nearly four hours.

Eye Of The Storm's four episodes are all presented full-frame, as broadcast; while a tad disappointing, this is how the series was shot and screened originally. The film-to-video transfer, done of course at the time of production, is very good, especially in terms of colour resolution; the news and archival footage is of course going to look a little bit sub-standard, but that's to be expected.

The video compression here is acceptable, especially given that there's 200 minutes of full-screen video on this dual-layered disc; there is the odd isolated example of pixelisation, but it's nothing overly distracting.

Audio, meanwhile, is a pleasant surprise - the default track is a full Dolby Digital 5.1 mix mastered at the top-end 448kb/sec bitrate, and a surprisingly active one at that. Kudos to the series producers for being forward-looking enough to do this mix. For those who want the TV sound as originally broadcast, the surround-encoded Dolby Stereo track is here as well. In both, narration is always perfectly clear and legible, while the many and varied sound effects and music really fill out the sound stage involvingly.

Two criticisms, though, of the disc mastering itself (done by Oasis Post): first, the rather clever authoring technique used - basically, the four seperate titles used for each episode (and they ARE seperate, on analysis of the disc structure) - have been merged in authoring and appear to the player as one big, long, 200 minute title. This means that the viewer cannot search through the disc based on run time, though each episode is extensively chaptered. And secondly, the 90 second ABC Video trailer that opens the disc is non-skippable. This is unacceptable, and may well have been an ABC decision given their penchant for sticking lengthy trailers at the start of their sell-through VHS tapes. Regardless of who's responsible for this, it should not be done on sell-through product, period.

Don't let minor grips like that put you off picking this one up, though. Australia - Eye Of The Storm is one of those rare occasions where the content is good enough to forgive some minor video issues and authoring complaints. And DVD is, as always, the perfect delivery medium for TV series.