The thing about CiM is that it's very bootleg-ish at best. After two incredibly successful and well produced concert films they really didn't need to pull out another one, and mostly when it was clearly not planned (I have no evidence on this, but basically the montage feels like Portnoy going like: ok boys, let's see what we've got and put it all into one big package).
You're not too far off on your guessing. You are correct in that they originally weren't going to put out a live video release since they had just done L@B and Score (never mind 5YiaL and LSFNY before it with only the SDoIT album cycle not having a live release). But by the end of the tour, MP changed his mind and decided to do a release anyway.
IIRC, a lot of this was due to songs that played on that tour that had not been documented or were significantly different from what had been released on an official live release up to that point - several of which probably would not have gotten cycled back into the master setlist for a number of tours. And of course there were all the SC tracks, too. He had pro-shot video footage of 6 different shows, so he figured he'd put out more of a compilation release similar to 5YiaL rather than not have any sort of official document of that tour at all.
I remember it came out around the time Within Temptation released Black Symphony, which was a fantastic video. Then months later Maiden released Flight 666. And I thought "c'mon DT, these are quality releases, what the heck are you doing putting out a video like CiM?"
Actually MP warned everyone upfront *not* to expect the same quality as what we saw with L@B and Score. So it wasn't as if this was some hidden secret and he was trying to pull the wool over the fans' eyes.
Didn't the Record Label want a DVD. So MP had to dig through videos and audio. I remember him saying this due to the differences in the Audio for Blind Faith and Surrounded. The Video is from a different show as that had better video quality and the audio had better audio.
No - I don't believe the label had anything to do with CiM at all. The differences between the audio for BF and Surrounded were for a completely different reason. MP explained in my interview with him in 2009:
Putting together that set, I had based the song picks on the video footage I had. I looked at what was best represented on video and I picked the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. I had my list of all the videos that were being edited for the video and I sent Kevin Shirley the list of what to mix the audio from. And he mixed what we thought was the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. We synced it back up to the video, only to find out that it was from a completely different show – somebody sent him the wrong tapes, and we couldn’t find the Toronto audio. So the audio for Toronto was missing and here we were with this mixed audio of Blind Faith and Surrounded, and we had no idea what show it was even from. So even to this day, I have no idea of what show those specific performances are from.
Not too long ago, while listening to a bunch of recordings from that tour, I finally figured out that recordings of those songs on CD are actually from the Calgary show on 2008/05/09, so that mystery has been solved.