Video title production 2.0

Inefficiencies in conventional DVD title production are derived in large part from the fact that so much of the work is performed manually. STUART GREEN, CEO of ZOOtech, says why it does not need to be so with new tools that keep creativity up while bringing costs down.

You would think that the lucrative home entertainment market would catalyse investment by innovative companies bringing improvements and cost-benefits to the industry in the same way that consumer software companies have produced easy-to-use tools for creating home movies on DVDs. At least, that’s what I thought when ZOOtech first began working on technologies for professional DVD-Video title development in 2002. I was surprised by what we found.

As a software tool developer, we first looked at DVD-Video as a potential platform for deployment of interactive entertainment products. Seeing an opportunity in the market to create an “interactive DVD” (iDVD) product category, we set about developing a purpose-built professional software tool that enables iDVD titles to be created quickly and easily, and significantly more efficiently than other DVD production tools on the market.

The result – DVD-EXTRA STUDIO – has since been used to create the majority of iDVD titles produced and published in the UK and elsewhere, including leading consumer products such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Now That’s What I Call a Music Quiz, Question of Sport and Telly Addicts.

We found that Hollywood studios and other video publishers were interested in DVD-EXTRA STUDIO to create complex interactive bonus features for regular title releases. This gave us our first exposure to the way in which mainstream DVD titles are conceived, the post-production companies commissioned and the projects managed. Without a legacy in video production, we were able to look on the industry through fresh eyes from the perspective of technologists rather than operators.

What we found was an industry in which there has been very little innovation since the birth of DVD. What struck us most was the inertia of the post-production companies who are wedded to the same tools, processes and workflows that have been established and operated largely unchanged over the past ten years.

You might imagine that the powerbase within this industry lies with the studios and publishers who commission production of new titles, but we found something unexpected.

It is unusual for the studios to actually perform the production work themselves, preferring to outsource to companies such as video post-production facilities and compression and authoring (C&A) houses. This gives rise to a surprising balance of power in favour of the service providers whose superior knowledge of the technology can be used to their advantage.

Service providers can call the shots when it comes to deciding what is and isn’t possible – there is a degree of ‘blinding with science’ that has gone on in the past and continues today. Service providers are naturally protective of their revenues and motivated to keep billing hours high; in an industry where the established practices are cumbersome, inefficient and time intensive there is little incentive on the part of these service providers to introduce efficiencies. Since the studios have known no better, inefficient practices have prevailed largely unchallenged.

Many of the services provided by vendors have become commoditised over the course of the past ten years, particularly compression and authoring. C&A services were once highly prized in a market when demand exceeded supply, which resulted in high prices. With the availability of more affordable software tools, this has enabled many new companies to set up as C&A facilities and consequently the services market has become much more price competitive.

Vendors all offer services based largely on the same industry standard toolset giving rise to very little differentiation between the suppliers. Consequently, the last few years have seen reductions in prices at the cost of vendor margins rather than any real improvements in workflow efficiencies.

A fundamental dynamic of any service industry is the opposing forces of supplier and customer – any customer is motivated to minimize the number of hours of work incurred and the hourly rate paid, while a supplier’s objective is to maximize billing hours and the hourly rate charged.

In an industry like video title production where there is an imbalance of technical knowledge, content owners can be aggressive in driving down hourly rates, but are not necessarily well placed to challenge the methods employed to perform the work itself. As a result, more competition leads to reduced margins for vendors whose businesses inevitably become cost-conscious, precarious and unable to invest in the future.

In short, video title production has been inefficient, but for vendors whose services are based on outdated technology, their interests are best served by maintaining the status quo.

The inefficiencies in conventional DVD title production are derived in large part from the fact that so much of the work is performed manually. Consider for example the task of DVD authoring itself, during which all of the individual elements of a disc are assembled together, incorporating programming and formatting to yield functionality in line with the consumer’s expectations.

Using the traditional and widely adopted approach to authoring, this requires highly trained (and expensive) professionals to operate sophisticated and highly specialised software applications, performing work that is repetitive and error-prone.
The challenge in any service organisation is in matching supply with demand; in the case of traditional DVD authoring where proficient operators are expensive and in short supply, this translates into a risky business for service vendors, particularly as the services have become commoditised. Capacity of labour intensive services is very difficult to scale up or down to accommodate the seasonal and long term fluctuations in market demand, which in turn leads to vulnerability of profits.

In a buyers’ market it is in the interest of any service provider to secure customer commitments to volume and throughput; when a market is in decline such commitments are hard to come by. These market forces have led to a situation that is difficult to sustain for both content owners and service providers.

In the home entertainment market until not much more than a year ago DVD-Video was the only game in town. We are now seeing the consumer choices available for viewing video content diversifying rapidly. For packaged media, the new high definition formats – Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD – are providing a long anticipated opportunity for service providers to relive those heady early days of DVD-Video.

But playing in the next-generation game comes at a significant price – new software and hardware tools, improved infrastructure, greater network bandwidth and higher storage capacity are just some of the demands that amount to a substantial investment in capital equipment which few can afford.

In addition to Blu-ray and HD DVD, IPTV, Video-on-Demand, Download-to-Own, iPod, UMD, HD VMD and others represent further opportunities for studios and video publishers to ‘package’ and distribute their products.

While wider choice is great news for the consumer, within studios and publishers it translates into more platforms to support, more costs to incur and greater uncertainty in the market. The impact of piracy on the studios is enormous, with many now working towards the panacea of ‘day and date’ release so as to minimize the time window within which video pirates prosper. But for large studios such ambitions are currently a pipe dream due to the complexities and time taken for the production of each title across many territories.

A NEW WAY

Over the past two years, ZOOtech has been developing a revolutionary new suite of tools to transform the video title production process, and is now working with exclusive partners to deliver significant benefits to studios and video publishers. The sections below describe some of the specific tools and the benefits they bring to the industry.

Through a patent portfolio that now numbers over 60 applications, these new tools implement a range of proprietary algorithms that automate hitherto manual processes, and centralize functions that are traditionally performed in a disparate way. Through our service partners we are able to offer a solutions-based approach that brings substantial benefits to all companies involved in the commissioning of video titles.

In contrast to traditional software licensing models, ZOOtech’s pricing does not require any significant up-front commitment to cost on the part of its partners or customers. Rather, fees become payable as titles are produced with its toolset, resulting in a total cost to the customer that represents a saving when compared with conventional title production.

A characteristic of this model is that ZOOtech’s interests are clearly aligned with those of the content owners, since its motivation is to maximize the number of titles produced using the toolset rather than the sales of the tools themselves. Content owners benefit from a much shorter turn-around of title production leading to realisation of the goal of day-and-date release.

DVD REGIONALIZATION

To make multi-language publication of DVD titles much simpler, we created the Regionalization Tool which automates menu translation and multi-version publishing. Worldwide DVD publication often includes many versions for various territories, with each language version needing menus to navigate through the disc’s content. In traditional production each menu requires translation and separate preparation which is time consuming, labour intensive and therefore expensive.

Our Regionalization Tool automatically extracts the translatable text from each menu and inserts translations back into the menu – complete with automatic formatting to accommodate differences in text length. In addition, the operator can then easily create a template for the project which automates the process of generating all menus for each title in all the required languages – producing fully releasable assets in a fraction of the time. The tool also supports motion menus which can be created and localized more quickly and cost effectively.

In independent benchmark tests this tool has been demonstrated to reduce DVD menu production time by up to 90%, enabling significantly shorter time-to-market for consumer products.

AUTOMATED AUTHORING

The production of professional quality DVD-Video titles has traditionally been a complex and expensive undertaking, requiring technical specialists trained in complex software tools, such as DVD authoring systems. Due to the sophistication of typical commercial DVD titles, which incorporate trailers, chapter menus, subtitles and dubbed audio for multiple languages, etc., the production systems employed for this purpose are highly complex and require a considerable level of expertise for their use. Consequently, traditional DVD production is a labour intensive, time consuming and expensive process.

Most of the DVD titles produced each year by and on behalf of studios and video publishers are surprisingly similar to one another in their functional design, and typically include the same basic features and structure. However, each DVD production project is traditionally undertaken independently, without capitalizing on the commonality that exists between multiple titles produced for each studio client.

The commonality between many DVD titles produced by or for a single studio or client allows some economies of costs and time-to-market to be achieved by adopting a template-based approach to DVD production. In such an approach, a studio would define a relatively small number of templates and each title would be based on one of these definitions.

A template defines the overall structure of the title (rather than its contents) in terms of the menus it incorporates, the configuration of bonus features included, the user operations applied to each video sequence and other aspects that contribute to the functional design of the title. The template itself does not necessarily incorporate any particular appearance, and the number and material within the audiovisual assets themselves will typically change from one use of a template to another.

The mechanics of conventional DVD production are very complex and sophisticated, requiring highly trained professional operators to perform authoring and other functions. However, much of the work that is done for templated titles is routine, repetitive and well suited to automation. ZOOtech’s Templated Authoring System (TAS) exploits these characteristics and delivers a solution that is effective, efficient and highly reliable for undertaking quickly and easily many projects that have hitherto been costly and laborious.

TAS capitalises on the fact that the majority of the labour-intensive, expensive and lengthy steps in the development of template-based DVD titles are highly repetitive and deterministic in the sense that many of the operations performed by compressionists, producers, authors and others are mandated by the parameters of each project. That is to say, the variability from one title to another is a function of the different assets (eg. the movie) that are incorporated, together with the number and relationship between each of these elements.

Accordingly, TAS is provided as an easy-to-use tool for producers and others involved in the definition of DVD titles, and its operation does not require any technical expertise on the part of the user. When using TAS an operator will simply complete a form to provide the information that is specific to the title, such as what audio and subtitle languages are included, the number and identity of trailers, the arrangement of bonus features, and many other parameters that make a title unique. Once all of the information has been provided, the system itself will check for validity of the data and create the disc image fully automatically. In this way, TAS dramatically streamlines the production process.

In independent benchmark tests TAS was shown to reduce the time taken to produce a complex Hollywood title from several days to just a few hours. The benefits of this system are the following:

The time taken to produce each title is significantly shortened, since the process is managed efficiently by the system and many steps previously performed manually are automated.

The labour cost associated with the development of each title is significantly reduced, since authoring and other manual steps are eliminated.

Titles are produced right-first-time since the majority of production is performed systematically without requiring human intervention.

Work performed by outside agencies and facilities is more reliable and adherent to client standards since the documentation used to drive the production process is created automatically and work output is verified for compliance by the system on delivery.

Multiple territory releases incorporating consistent features are produced without incurring the time and cost normally associated with such production since all territory editions can be produced from a single template definition.

TAS is designed as a platform-independent system capable of generating output in a variety of formats, initially DVD-Video with forthcoming versions in development to support Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. This means that customers can not only produce multiple territory versions at the same time, but those versions may each be output for several different video platforms.

A NEW BREED OF SERVICE PROVIDER

Solutions based on ZOOtech’s unique and proprietary technology platform are available in conjunction with its exclusive service partners. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the toolset enables much flexibility in the way in which title production is resourced. In some cases, ZOOtech’s studio customers are adopting use of particular tools internally to bring certain production in-house, thereby enabling greater savings to be made. In others, the range of solutions is provided by ourselves and our service partners.

We advise clients to ensure that their adoption of its solutions is optimised to yield the maximum benefits at the best overall price. The result is that customers benefit from high scalability without significant commitment; the pay-as-you-go pricing model means that up-front investment is minimised and costs are incurred only as services are used. In addition, customers can expect to save money when compared to engaging a traditional vendor to do the same work.

ZOOtech’s tools are already deployed in Hollywood where its customers are radically reducing time to market and making significant cost savings.

To find out how you can benefit from unprecedented productivity in video title development, visit ZOOtech online at www.zoo-tech.com....

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