UMD-Video pushing creative boundaries

Universal Media Disc is much more than yet another disc to watch movies on the move. It is a new interactive media that pushes authoring’s creative boundaries. ANDY EVANS, founder and director of The Pavement, says why UMD is the ideal transition stage to next-generation HD formats.

Nothing stands still in the DVD industry. What did not seem possible yesterday becomes highly likely today and reality tomorrow. The next big evolutionary jump from DVD-Video could be Blu-ray, HD DVD or something else altogether. The battle for supremacy between these new standards is still being fought.

And adoption of these new technologies doesn’t have to be a jump in the dark, or even a jump into an expensive black hole. There’s a new medium already out there that we’ve discovered is a fantastic transitional stage format for Blu-ray and HD DVD. In many ways it can help you to understand some of the requirements for other technologies.

It is, of course, Universal Media Disc Video (UMD-Video). This high capacity optical medium has been the perfect learning platform for both Blu-ray and HD DVD because it has so many of the same features and capabilities. UMD has helped define and teach us what and how we need to change or adopt our traditional DVD production model so that we are able to conceptualise and deliver these incredible new features and capabilities.

Across the board changes are required to the workflow, authoring process, design and animation, programming, and even skill base of our staff. We found that to maximise the benefits of the new format, we needed a new type of trained employee – a true programmer. Combining their skills with traditional DVD production and business models gave us a solution to aligning what is achievable with UMD with what is commercially viable.

A NEW WORLD

In April 2005 we were approached by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) to help develop the UMD Video format and tools ahead of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) European launch in September last year.

We initially started by trusting our roots and creating DVD style content on UMD. However, it quickly became apparent that this was the wrong approach. We found that making UMDs look and function like existing DVDs was incredibly tough to do, expensive, clunky, and it wasn’t giving us the best from this new format. We recognised that
it required an approach more akin to website Flash creation or computer gaming, but within the world of high quality broadcast.
Finding the right balance allows you not only to create exciting ways for delivering material, but to achieve things that are impossible within the DVD world.

The format’s potential is amazing, and we have developed features such as quizzes, shoot ‘em up games and truly dynamic 3D navigation taking the user into a very different environment than DVD. So, what are the advantages? What makes the small UMD (it’s only 60mm in diameter) so special?

I like comparing it to making the leap from working on a typewriter to using Word on a PC. A typewriter will deliver a story on paper, but its capabilities are limited to that story on paper. With Word on a PC, you can produce the linear story and then you can dynamically enhance the experience by giving intelligence and life to the story.

DVD is so limited in what it can do; it is effectively nothing more
than the stringing together of individual linear pieces of finished
content. Everything is pre-rendered and all experiences, combinations and outcomes are predictable and limited. If you want to change something on a menu screen, for example, you have to actually change the entire menu screen, which also means that all combinations need to be accounted for and created and then put onto the DVD as finished pieces.

UMD on the other hand gives you the ability to strike a balance between pre-rendered graphics and animations and pre-scripted animations. You can give the user real dynamic control over intelligent objects in a way that DVD could never do. You can present an environment where predictability goes out of the window.

Because not everything is pre-rendered, it acts more like a website
where objects can be controlled individually and this suddenly
presents you with a much wider range for delivering content. For
example, changing a UMD menu can be carried out there and then ‘on the fly’ because the PSP itself takes responsibility for managing and animating the changes.

THE RIGHT STUFF

We’re now achieving things with UMD that are just not possible with
the DVD-Video format, and it is giving us a great insight on how to
approach HD DVD and Blu-ray. As we know though, it’s not just the
features and capabilities that will sell UMDs: it’s aligning these capabilities with the right content, demographic and price that will make UMD a desirable commodity. Following suit, these attributes will also be extremely important in stamping the next generations quantum leap from DVD.

Following the launch of PSP and the UMD-Video format there was an initial surge in all kinds of content making its way onto shop shelves. But sales have since been disappointing and currently the traditional sellers of DVDs are looking long and hard to see if UMD-Video is something they wish to pursue any further. Up until now, it’s been more expensive to produce than DVD in exchange for fewer sales – so why bother?

Talking with clients, Sony and the mobile world, we have quickly
realised that it’s not the format that needs a boost to make content
owners money, but the education into the kind of content and
presentation of that content. It’s a new format with new buyers, so it makes sense to tailor the content also. There’s no point producing a UMD that nobody wants to buy, and price seems to have been a critical factor.

The beauty of PSP’s portability and UMD’s interactive capability
gives rise to a genre and experience never exploited on DVD. We
fully believe that providing content in such a way that the user can
dip in and out, choosing what they want, when they want it and how
they want it is the key. For this reason it is quizzes, sporting clips, games, nostalgia or music that are going to be the most successful ahead of the traditional linear DVD two-hour film. Indeed the biggest selling UMD since the medium’s launch in the UK features the 250 Best Premiership Goals, outstripping any Hollywood blockbuster.

FEATURE-RICH MEDIA

The versatility of UMD-Video is illustrated in content being pioneered by The Pavement.

Quizzes

Christmas 2005 saw DVD quizzes and games flying off shop shelves,
confirming that the genre is a winner. It’s a trend that looks set to continue, with even more choice available this year. The restrictions of the DVD format and the need for everything to be pre-rendered, combined with many early DVD players failing to measure up technic ally, have led to a recognised de facto ceiling to the capabilities of DVD games and quizzes – whether in the quantity or type of questions, the amount of players or the interactive capability.

With UMD, however, quiz games can be taken to a whole new level. The only limit on the number of questions in a quiz is the physical data size of the UMD. So it could reach tens of thousands with no worries about compatibility because there is currently only one playback device – the PSP. The web-style presentation and dynamic control gives the user much more control; thousands of questions can be randomised for playback to give a varied experience with each play.

Single and many-multiplayer quizzes can incorporate a range of question types, including standard text questions with multiple-choice answers, video and audio based questions with timed answer responses, truly random bonus questions, and picture reveals. Scoring methods include simple numeric scoring, reducing “lives” or a combination of both.

3D Space Navigation

DVD menus are limited in what they can achieve, most of the time
relying on good design for differentiation and to improve on the
illusion of real interactivity. Because everything is pre-rendered, it makes it virtually impossible to give any level of dynamic control to the user. UMD-Video allows for providing an environment that the user can control.

A good example of this richness is our 3D Star Gazer in which the user is placed within our own solar system where they can navigate around, literally flying towards and past planets using the standard Up, Down, Left and Right buttons of the PSP. Planets get larger the closer you get and they even maintain a real perspective with the other planets. This example could be developed in many ways including to allow planets to be activated for further information as you get closer to them.

Break Mixer

Because UMD menus are a combination of pre-rendered graphics and ‘on the fly’ scripted animations and operations, it is possible to provide an exciting environment in addition to the main content. Our Break Mixer demonstrates how you can combine these two aspects. In
essence, the user is presented with a screen showing a timeline where audio clips taken from an extensive on-screen database of beats and samples can be placed, building up a personalised break.

The user can browse, select and preview the samples before placing them on the timelines. They can change the ‘tempo’ of the break to suit their playback, ‘submit’ a break and be scored on how good it is, and ‘load’ an existing break to see how good it could be. OK, so it’s not a professional audio mixing desk but it does demonstrate the dynamic capabilities of UMD-Video, and actually adds value to the right content.

Jukebox

‘Program Your Gig’ first appeared on The Pavement’s music DVD for
Underworld back in 2000. It essentially allowed the user to program
the playback order of tracks or playlists on the DVD-Video much in the same way we’ve always been able to program the order of playback on a music CD. Whilst it added a great new dimension to music DVDs, it had its limitations: firstly the number of tracks you could program was restricted; then the actual cost of including such a feature was high; and finally because everything is pre-rendered it was almost impossible to collate the track names into a visual list as they were chosen – the menu combinations could be in the 1,000s. UMD-Video makes this feature much more powerful, removing both the limitations and the exponential cost as track numbers increase.

You can now create this feature much more easily, add and delete tracks to the play list, attach thumbnails and add track names to the list – previously impossible for DVD. The only limitation to the amount of content is the physical data size of the UMD.

Shoot ‘em Up

The UMD-Video format can be pushed hard and currently we are starting to achieve almost game-like menu structures and environments. While they are in no way as rich or complex as PSP games, they are far beyond what we’ve ever seen with DVD. We are starting to achieve on UMDVideo what you can currently do with Flash games on the internet. For example, in our shoot ‘em up demo, the user takes control of a space ship travelling along the screen using the standard Up, Down Left and Right control.

Hitting the enter button allows the user to shoot up any objects getting in the way, such as enemies or asteroids. Being hit starts to reduce the health status of the ship, but by collecting health packages occasionally flying by, you can soon build it back up again. Shooting asteroids causes them to break into pieces that can still catch you out if the debris hits. There are even power ups that if collected give the ship temporary increased fire power.

Font Generator

Imagine you wanted to create a lot of text on a DVD, even the entire
text of a book for reading. Every single word would have to be designed onto fully pre-rendered menu screens so that the user could
flip through the on-screen pages. The time taken just to create these screens would be considerable.

However, we have developed a unique way to present a lot of text that is fully user controllable on a UMD screen. Essentially, a single menu screen can be created with an area for displaying text.
The entire text of the book is then incorporated into the programming of the UMD and is presented on screen as and when the
user wants it. The words are written to the screen when they are needed, in the desired font, in the desired place and at the desired pace. Simple buttons allow the user to navigate back and forth through the book, and we can even include a search function to enable the ‘reader’ to quickly jump to key words in the text.
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