Industry practitioners speak

In a series of Q&As, professionals in all facets of the packaged media industry share their views of things past, present and yet to come. The first guest is WILL TIMBERS, founder of London-based production and authoring house Pink Pigeon.

What is the main difference working for a corporate client as opposed to a home entertainment customer?

We started in 2002 using Apple software. We get inquiries across a whole range of needs, from PowerPoint presentation to DVD for exhibition. The number one consideration for all our clients has always been picture quality, more than interactivity, which is not to say we have not done two or three instructional titles.

At the beginning, everyone was always concerned with budget. Working with an artist in a museum is inherently a more collaborative relationship than working for an entertainment client.

With museum, you work in the context of displaying picture in one particular environment. It’s producing the best quality for that setting, not for a standard across a range of playback devices, TV, etc. We are not restricted as to how the video should be displayed in terms of video codecs and playback systems.

Does Blu-ray have resonance with these types of clients. Do museum see potentials; do they know enough about the format?

They hear that BD is better quality. BD is good for selling a high-resolution edition of a video work. You can sell BD as part of a video art installation itself that you can move from place to place.

Are you offering Blu-ray services?

For us, we are not yet ready to commit the heavy investment necessary to service BD customers ourselves. To the majority of our clients who as asking for a Blu-ray disc, at it’s not many, we try to understand what their real needs are, what they will be using BD for. We can help them develop the project in a different way. BD interactivity is a big learning curve, and we subcontract other companies for it. But, for the video quality side, we can handle it perfectly well. That’s not much of a step beyond what we have been doing with high definition video codecs.

Only in two instances were we not able to satisfy a client who asked for a Blu-ray. We have not reached the tipping point yet for us to go fully-fledged BD. If they are a home entertainment client, at this stage we are not able to help them and recommend others.

Any lessons from DVD that should be applied to Blu-ray?

We were not early adopters of DVD. Because of the options we took, we elected to do quality product without the expenses of some of the early software. Applications like DVD After Edit helped us to bridge the gap in that respect. We are not early adopters of BD. We did not get into UMD either. Other companies' experience of UMD made us more cautious as to how we should take on BD. Though I think UMD probably served as a good stepping stone to BD.

We want to make sure we invest in a technology that will be around. We are currently looking for sophisticated software for interactive functionality being developed for BD.

Do you see packaged media losing out to online distribution?

Both packaged media and online delivery will co-exist and do very well. People like to own objects. Now you go to see a band and they will sell you on your way out a CD of the show, the audio recording on the fly of the concert. Manufacture on demand caters well to impulse buying of physical media. Online material certainly adds value to it.

What kind of job would you like a client to commission you to do?

I would like to do more music DVDs where track can be played in different orders, enabling the consumer to create their own selection. I would like to do more interactive titles, getting involved very early in the production, so that the interactive sections can become a major feature of the DVD.

What about a disc where you could fit the entire recordings of four or five camera feeds of a football match or a concert, so viewers can change the camera angle ‘live,’ rewinding, playing back from a different angle, etc. BD offers more capacity for this. Online delivery is not suited for this experience, yet.

What are you most proud of?

I enjoy getting involved in a problem and find a solution. When I know how one thing works, I ask myself how I can do it better. I like to be a detective of sort. I had developed my own excel calculator to encode assets on a DVD-9, for manipulating the position of the layer break – how do I alter the bitrate to reach a natural interruption of the content to switch layer. Another thing was the ability to create a playlist of chapters by simplifying the script to make it more template-based, adjustable to different projects. I had great fun understanding how DVD works.

Contact: www.pinkpigeon.net
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