Antarctica

Has anyone done an icebreaker trip with Quark? If so, I'd appreciate the details.

I will be going on the Ocean Nova in November. I found out a lot of info by searching " quark, antarctica log"" on the internet.

Here's agoo9d link to an actual Quark log I found when searching:

http://www.operationcromulent.com/blog4/albums/QuarkAntarctica/main.htm

This web site makes the dvd's and logs for Quark. They also have a slide show.

http://www.theme.com.au/site/home/index.html

Thanks for the website links - I'll check it out.

I wouldn't get my hopes up about the DVD and Log. It was the only disappointment with Quark, but we can live with it because we never relied on it to begin with. (Not that we weren't upset when we viewed the DVD; we were.)

The company that puts the DVD togeter is based in Australia and claimed that the NTSC format used by the media specialist on our ship was not compatible with their equipment. (Living in the US and using NTSC, I have no problems creating PAL DVD's for family overseas - and I'm an amateur!) The DVD they sent us was extremely poor quality - skipping and compressed footage. The "supposed" log was little more than a slide show of photos taken by the media artist - title slides gave no info other than day 1, day 2, etc; no mention of where, date, or anything else. The narration was not synchronized well, and the music on both the video and photo slideshow sounded more Middle Eastern than anything else and was distracting. Some of the photos were out of sequence.

The "bonus" footage, was more or less promotional, had nothing to do with our expedition or with our expedition staff.

My husband and I sent a very strongly worded letter of disappointment to the Quark marketing manager and president at HQ, along with the two DVD's we got (one for each of us). We did get a "brief email response back that they were going to look into the matter with an eye towards improvement.

Another individual on our expedition, communicated directly with Theme and copied us on both his messages and the responses from Theme. We were not impressed with Theme's response; especially since they seemed to take no ownership for the quality of what they sent out (title of DVD read 2007-2008 ... we were there during the 2006-2007 season ... obviously this had nothing to do with quality or lack thereof of any material they received from our media artist).

Hopefully, your experience with the DVD/log will be much different from ours. But, I guess what I am trying to say here is that you should keep your own journal, and take your own photographs and videos during the trip. Had we not had our own photos/videos, etc., we'd have have absolutely nothing today to help us relive our adventure.

H2so4

Sorry that your log and DVD did not turn out well. The one in the link looked pretty good to me. I guess not being there in person makes many of the pictures special.

Did you see my question on the other thread about what it is like at night.

Robert

If I still had the DVD I'd send it to you so you can see why we were so disappointed. Having no desire to watch it again, we sent it to Quark along with our letter. (The bad quality was especially surprising, since we had seen other videos created by DVD that were really good.) No use crying over spilled milk, however, and like I said, we had our own videos and photos to keep us happy.

Anyway - yes, I saw your message on the other thread and I posted a response, which I can see when I go to the end of the thread ... but oddly enough, the thread summary was still showing you as the last poster. I just copied and pasted my response to you and KANDS again and now it is showing me as the last poster, so you should be able to see my answer.

Thanks