Authoring for HD

The home video industry is once again on the verge of transformative change. ROLF HARTLEY, General Manager of the Professional Products Group at Sonic Solutions looks at the changes Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD will bring to today’s DVD-centric authoring facilities.

This time around, the promise of high definition picture has been the driver for technical innovation, leading to the development of two new formats that offer consumers breathtaking resolution and image quality.

But high definition is just the start of what Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD DVD have to offer. The combination of interactivity, connectivity, and dynamic content integration from the set-top media player allows these formats to deliver consumers an entertainment experience unlike anything that has come before.

At the same time, HD DVD and BD will offer new opportunities – and new challenges – for the business, creative, and technical communities that serve the home video market.

At Sonic, we’ve been deeply involved in helping to define the advanced capabilities of both new formats, and we are totally committed to providing the tools and services required to make this transition as smooth as possible for our customers, the authoring community, and the industry at large.

What follows is a look at how the advent of BD and HD DVD will likely affect that community in terms of the technical, operational, and human resource requirements of providing title preparation services for commercial releases.

Requirements redefined

The best starting point for understanding the requirements of the new formats is a quick recap of what’s involved in making top-tier Hollywood movie titles today, which commonly feature bonus material whose accessibility via PC playback is enabled by Sonic’s InterActual technology.

Encoding and authoring are only one part of the picture. A content list, structure, and navigational design (menu flow) must be developed for the title, graphic artists must design the look and feel of menus, and special features (commentary, “making of” documentaries, etc.) must be created by film and video production and post teams.

Meanwhile, bonus content for PC playback (games, website creation, synchronized storyboard or screenplay presentations, etc.) is conceived and executed by teams whose background and orientation are more rooted in the world of interactive multimedia than in television or home video.

Whether these various tasks are all handled within one company or farmed out to specialized providers, they result in fairly independent blocks of content that are collected together into a finished disc but do not always involve a high degree of low-level interdependence. This is one of the key areas that will be different for HD DVD and BD.

The new formats’ advanced interactivity means that the distinction between menu space and presentation space may be all eliminated with composited contextual menus that allow viewers to select scene navigation, change audio settings, and turn on annotations without interrupting video playback.

The benefit of this new approach isn’t simply the convenience of adjusting controls or the ability to go from anywhere to anywhere with a minimum of intervening steps. More importantly, the viewing experience itself will be enriched by the synergistic presentation of mutually-supporting content.

Special features will no longer exist in their own separate corner, but will be directly accessible while playing the main feature, and synchronized content such as annotations, storyboards, and relevant portions of on-disc documentary clips may even be presented simultaneously using split screen and picture-in-picture capabilities. The result is that much of the bonus content that was restricted to a separate playback environment (PC) will now be fully integrated.

Another major change involves built-in support for connectivity. In a true fusion of on-disc and online delivery, BD and HD DVD both provide a context for integrated playback of non-disc or refreshable material, allowing up-to-date-trailers, links that unlock online bonus content, and time-dependent and contextual promotional offers for purchase of related merchandise.

Marketing departments will no doubt envision a multitude of ways in which these new capabilities can be exploited to generate additional revenue streams, and it will be up to the production community to come up with feasible and efficient solutions for these new requirements. The idea that a title is completely “finished” when its master ships to the replication plant will become a thing of the past.

Building and expanding

Clearly, if used to their full potential, the HD DVD and BD formats will raise the bar of consumer expectations for quality, performance, and flexibility. But what will it take to realize that potential? Not a radical revolution in approach, but rather building on the techniques, workflows, and tools that have proven themselves for DVD while expanding them to address the additional capabilities of HD formats.

The production process for a full-featured DVD is already complex, but the new formats will demand even more skillful project management to handle the much greater coordination required by interdependent content. Specific tasks will still be executed independently, but constant consultation and cooperation will be required to ensure that every aspect of the visual and navigational design is realized in a way that fits seamlessly into a unified whole.

Greater coordination also means that professionals in each specialty will have to “cross-train” to gain more understanding of other specialties, to ensure high-compatibility of material in the workflow chain, because with greater integration each group’s production output will impact the work of others more directly than it does today.

New skills required

The new formats will also require the development of new skills, particularly in the area of programming. Programming already plays a role in the production of DVD titles that include bonus content for PC playback, and also in titles that push the limits of the specification by using DVD-Video’s native language to perform instructions and manipulate data. But BD and HD DVD will bring programming front and center.

The advanced capabilities of HD DVD are enabled by a markup language named iHD will be familiar to Web professionals versed in languages such as HTML, SMIL, and XML. BD, on the other hand, gets its interactive power from BD-J, which is based on the Java programming language. While its learning curve is steeper than that of a markup language, Java packs formidable power and its use is widespread. A full-service facility will need to be able to draw on expertise in both languages.

Beyond more coordination and new skill sets, facilities that want to get into the market for HD DVD and BD services will be dealing with an abundance of raw data, and that may require some investment in faster processors, higher RAM, and lots more hard disk storage. The storage and network infrastructure of many facilities will be put to the test, and we may initially see a return to the days of “sneaker-net,” with hot-swappable high-capacity drives manually transported from one production stage to the next.

There will also be more content to keep track of, and thus an even greater need for implementation of-and consistent adherence to-strict regimes for content cataloging and versioning.

With more options supported by the formats’ capabilities, there may be more room for creative input, which might in turn mean more time spent deciding which solutions make the most sense for a given title. Alternatively, to reign-in the possibilities and keep both production and QA as efficient as possible, there may need to be more reliance on a template-based approach to title design, with the same set of basic features enabled across a given product line releases.

Either way, the first generation of titles for each format’s launch will likely take significantly more time to prepare and test than even the most sophisticated of today’s high-end DVD titles.

While the increased demands involved in working with BD and HD DVD are considerable, the successful introduction of new formats is crucial to the continued growth and long-term health of our industry. That’s why Sonic has taken the lead in enabling the authoring community to prepare for their role in filling the launch pipelines with content.

We’ve joined with the world’s top authoring facilities to create the High Definition Authoring Alliance, which provides its members with vital information, training, pre-release systems allowing a head start on title production, and the opportunity to shape tools and new workflows based on real-world needs.

While no format transition is ever achieved without risk, the potential benefits of preparing now for BD and HD DVD are clear. The major studios have all announced support for at least one of the two formats, and several have already announced specific release plans. Facilities that currently serve the studios will likely want to keep their customers happy by meeting the full spectrum of their needs.

At the same time, the transition might offer a foot in the door to newcomers whose expertise in interactive multimedia gives them insight into how best to take advantage of advanced features. However it plays out, those who sit out this moment of opportunity may find it increasingly hard to get into the game as time goes by.

The Sonic High Definition Authoring Alliance (HDAA) is the first and only worldwide association of top DVD authoring houses dedicated to facilitating the rollout of titles for release in the new HD formats. For additional information on Sonic technology and the HDAA, contact hdaa@sonic.com or visit the sonic website at www.sonic.com.
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