Sonic has announced the release of Scenarist BD Studio, a new cost-effective and full-featured Blu-ray Disc production workgroup designed specifically for authoring facilities looking to kick-start their BD production and business services.

Scenarist BD Studio includes Scenarist, Scenarist Designer, Scenarist QC and Cinevision. The authoring features include comprehensive Profile 1.0 support, create professional pop-up menus, support Blu-ray Disc specification as well as nuilt-in Rimage BD duplication. Encoding features includes AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2 Video encoding, provides digital vision DVO Brickwall filtering and built-in Blu-ray Disc legalisation and support flexible input.

Also, Sonic's Extended Developer Group has released BD Reauthor – a productivity solution than can open and edit unencrypted Blu-ray Disc titles using Sonic Scenarist. With BD Reauthor, any BD title created with any authoring application becomes a 'living archive' that can be accessed to extract assets or used to update and refresh a completed title in Scenarist.

"BD Reauthor is a must-have utility that provides competitive advantage for any studio or professional BD authoring facility, speeding up title revisions and production at an unprecedented rate," says the company.

BD Reauthor can analyse and open an existing multiplexed (unencrypted Blu-ray Disc title (HDMV or BD-J) to create a fully functional authoring project, complete with elementary assets – ready for further authoring work within Scenarist. It can be used to expand on titles from partner company who may have used entry-level or 'Phase 1' authoring systems – like Adobe Encore, Sonic DVDit Pro HD, or Sony Blu-print – to beging a project and take the title to a new level using Sonic Scenarist.

Also, the new software automatically checks imported titles for typical problems and spec incompatibilities and provides users with the opportunity to fix an problem automatically.

More information on www.sonic.com

Story filed 17.11.08