My love affair with DVD

Responsible for the production of the first iconic titles in France, VICTORIA WILLIS has been involved in the life of DVD Video from day one. She looks back over 10 years of trials and tribulations that gave birth to an object of desire.

1998-2008: Let’s indeed celebrate a decade of DVD, even as our industry as a whole tries to figure out the next best thing to generate revenue and keep the film market afloat. For best or for worst, this is a turning point, a time to look back and look forward...

The DVD adventure started for me at the pre-launching phase of the format, in December 1996, when I was asked to write a report for Editions Montparnasse, a French independent video publishing company, that was wondering whether to take the plunge. I still remember gawking at my (then) boss: what on earth did those 3 letters “D-V-D” mean?

Three months later, my report finished and concluding that this would indeed be the format of the future (I would never have been so bold as to presume to what extent), I started producing for Editions Montparnasse what was to be the first commercially released DVD in France. As I found out, others were working away in media companies in France, Germany, Great-Britain, but they were still testing, and I was asked to come out with a real life product, one that people would actually buy and watch in their homes. That is, when at last hardware manufacturers would make the elusive long-awaited-for PAL DVD players available in stores.

Les Enfants de Lumière followed by the DVD of Microcosmos hit the shelves in September 1997, and I was the proud mid-wife.

The interesting thing about the format then was our perception of it. Many of us who started out in those early days were convinced that we were dealing with a hybrid between a video-cassette and a CD-ROM. The high digital quality of sound and picture was undeniable, but we had notions that this would bring about a new way of looking at films, a new narrative structure, new possibilities in terms of intelligent content enhancement… a revolution was under way in the video world that would affect how people related to programmes in their home.

My journey

Ten years later, this vision has been left by the wayside… We went from imagining heavy duty interactive content to mostly finding repetitive EPKs and perennial “making ofs” that few people watched. Other things have fundamentally changed in the DVD world over the past 10 years.

In those very early days, I remember having to convince a director, a producer, a rights-owner that this new format was going to make a difference for them. I would sit them in a room with our test DVD player and state-of-the art wide screen television and flick the picture back and forth from VHS to DVD. Since most video distribution contracts had not included “digital” rights to that point, I needed a green light from people who had never considered VHS more than a rather unsavoury last resort of modestly monetizing their films.

The first couple of years, I remember the sense of excitement, of “being in the know” when I heard that magical acronym pronounced by unsuspecting individuals, in a bus, in a store… “Have you seen a DVD? Do you know what it is?” I was part of a new medium, a new format, a new world.

I remember the long protracted explanations I was given on AC3 and Dolby 5.1 (so often confused with Dolby Surround… misnomers everywhere) by didactic engineers. And then having to sit through meetings with fledgling authoring studios that didn’t have a clue about sound requirements and were trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Being a woman in a technically-bent male world went with its share of condescension, I have to admit.

I remember two trips to Novato, California, and sitting in highly air-conditioned open-space with numerous Japanese Daikin technicians, at a time when Daikin was the burgeoning authoring system on the market. Our first DVD was so complex (over 350 breaks in the video) that the DVD worldwide Forum specs didn’t cover our demands. During those 2 trips I sat around, under a hot California sun, waiting for the coordinator to call me and say: your burnt DVD is ready for testing, and I would then head back in and test, and test, and test until the small hours of the morning. Until I found a bug, and had to inform my dismayed oriental friends that the authoring was still faulty. The Japanese computer wizards, who never slept and ate pizza as would be expected, then huddled in Japanese over the specs to try to figure out how to circumvent the issue.

I remember the first professional gatherings in Dublin, in London, in Paris. I felt part of a group of pioneering people that were working towards the “ideal” DVD with arcane considerations. How should the menu and title buttons on multilingual DVDs function? How should a web-connected DVD be played by a PC? How did one encoding tool compare to another?

I remember when we dreamt of a European DVD; where, thanks to the language and subtitling possibilities, it seemed just a hand-reach away to produce that single DVD for multiple countries, pooling all independent publishers’ efforts, smarts, money. But that was before we realized that cultural and local preferences, national legislation (ratings and release-windows to name but two), and territorial market considerations would kill the dream.

I remember those very early years in the company I worked for and the prizes won for our DVDs on daring and innovation, when the big US studios hadn’t moved onto the format and weren’t yet spending dollars that we could only dream of. At the time, we garnished prizes for graphic design, web-connected DVD, innovative interactivity, best use of multi-language features. Those were the days…

I remember the rapid turn of the market towards vanilla DVDs. I realized that was the way to go: the public wasn’t overly interested in interactive content. Those far-out DVDs with multiple plot endings depending on the choice made by the viewer along the way, the “encyclopaedia” DVDs with hundreds of screens of text (I plead guilty) were not what the public wanted.

In later years, when the excitement of the new format was long gone, and HD was already being ushered in, I remember still developing and producing DVD content that meant something to the film, to the public and critics, to me. What joy and pride to come out with a beautiful award-winning edition of Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, pristine copy, relevant and stimulating additional content put together by some of the foremost French specialists in Renoir film-lore.

I remember the sad time (not so long ago) when DVD in-store prices started on their precipitous decline, and sales numbers began slipping. Minimizing the cost to produce one of those round silvery discs became the ultimate bottom-line, with no extra to spare.

Ten years is an appropriate birthday to wonder where the future will take us, as we look down two paths: downloadable content and the survival of the packaged (high definition) format.

We are a stone’s throw away from all films available at all times through VOD (or EST, or DTO or whatever you want to call it. Maybe it would be a good idea if we settled the appellation once and for all!). Whether on the PC, or on a TV, people will call up a film for the evening, download a programme for the next-day’s train ride, or watch an episode of a series on their iPhone on the way to work.

We know this is not a futuristic dream but a reality that is unfolding, that needs some adjustments for rights issues, technical conundrums (bandwidth, DRM’s), overabundant platform offers that will be solved in clever negotiations thanks to business savvy and down-to-earth financial pragmatism.

My wish list

So what is left for packaged media? I am sorry to say I don’t see HD as the revolution it is being touted. I may eat my hat in a few years, but I don’t believe the unsuspecting public is waiting to be wowed by HD images and stomping at the bit to duplicate DVDs adoption rate. Of course, if you sit someone in front of a full HD screen with beautiful picture and sound from an impeccable copy of a very recent film, they will be flabbergasted, but what of the reality in their homes?

My experience is that many people who have run-of-the-mill DVD players don’t have them set up correctly for their television sets. How many of you have gone into a friend’s or a family member’s house and realized that they are watching 4/3 films in wide-format, totally oblivious to the fact that the characters on the screen are slightly plump around the middle? Who hasn’t seen subtitles cropped at the bottom because the TV picture is zoomed? In other words, the public at large is not tuned in to the ultimate quality, and most of the time, they don’t really see the difference or care. Going from a clunky plastic VHS to a sexy shiny round disc was a revolution, going from 5.1 sound to 7.1 is not something most people are waiting for.

Proponents will of course defend the marvellous interactive content that HD is going to bring. But why would HD interactive content captivate an audience that never really saw the interest in SD interactive content? OK, granted here it is smoother, more seamless; you can have the director’s face in a corner of the screen as he is giving you the details of how he shot that precise scene underwater with live sharks… But very few people listen to audio commentaries, and unless they get to see the director being eaten alive by a shark, this is not going to be more of a selling point than “interactive content” was on a DVD.

After the novelty of picture-in-picture wears off, of beautifully layered menus, of web connection (which, need I remind anyone, exists on good old fashioned DVDs and has never been a sales breakthrough, at least from my experience) how compelling will the gimmicks and gadgets be? It is not the technology which makes a point, it is what is done with it.

So what next? Since my crystal ball is rather murky these days, my only take on the future at this point is what I look forward to as a movie-loving member of the audience.

I look forward to films being available easily, on my TV or PC (when I travel), on demand, on the go, on the spur of the moment. I look forward to real (MPEG2 equivalent or higher) quality encoding for these downloadable films thanks to quality conscious providers and bandwidths that do not limit the file size.

I look forward to downloading a film in the evening that someone told me about during the day, catching up on missed programmes, taking a peak at the latest, hottest Hollywood stars. I am looking forward to having that film or programme or actor’s performance linked up to content-rich web-pages that tell me more – if I feel like pursuing the experience – in a way that a DVD, or even a BD, however complex, will never do. These pages will be wiki style movie/television encyclopaedias, constantly updated, full of video excerpts, newly found snippets of rushes, information, the director’s last words... These pages will be a mix and match of user-based and professional studio-produced content.

But I also still believe in the continuation of the physical format: after years of DVDs, I look forward to even more beautifully packaged editions of wonderful films. Cinema is an art form of dreams and shared experiences that has been with us now for over a century. Films are part of our lives, forge our memories and inhabit our inner worlds. We quote them, we relate to them and through them. I believe in the keep-sake value of a medium and art-form that enrich and enhance our lives, and that we go back to over and over again.

I dream of DVDs, high-definition or not, that I want to own and share with my children and my friends. I dream of movies or television programmes that I have loved, accompanied by challenging and stimulating content, gorgeously bound collectibles, art-books with glossy photos, provocative interviews, ground-breaking insights of the type that make you want to go back into a film and discover it afresh. I dream of an object of beauty, within and without, that has value in all senses of the word.


Victoria Willis started out in the production and post-production industry, both in Europe and North-America. In 1997, after producing the first DVD to be commercially released in France for Editions Montparnasse, she subsequently set up the company’s DVD department where she oversaw the production of more than 500 DVD titles. Starting in 2005, Victoria headed Editions Montparnasse’s VOD web-site development. She is now a free-lance project consultant for packaged media and online-distribution....

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