Some Simple Questions on a Complicated Subject

When Jim Taylor first discovered an industrial laserdisc player, back in 1979, he realized its random-access capabilities were something special. Almost 20 years later, as the fledgling DVD format enjoyed a groundswell of popular support, Taylor became DVD Evangelist for Microsoft, moving later to positions at DVD-authoring software developer Daikin U.S. and to the one he still holds at Sonic Solutions, where he is chief of DVD Technology and General Manager of the Advanced Technology Group. Along the way he became a maintainer of the online DVD FAQ – and a tireless Internet advocate on behalf of the format – and even wrote a definitive book on the subject, DVD Demystified.
Just out from McGraw Hill is a sequel to that book, called Blu-ray Disc Demystified. With co-authors Charles G. Crawford, Christen M. Armbrust, and Michael Zink, Taylor takes an exhaustive look at both technical and practical considerations of the new HD  disc format, and what it means for producers and developers looking to use it to its best potential. If you’ve taken a professional interest in Blu-ray, and how it differs from its predecessor formats, you’ll only have to flip through the book for a few seconds before you find that it’s answering questions you never knew you had. For those thinking about making the leap to HD disc authoring, we asked him a few of the easy ones.

Q: If I’m producing a project with Blu-ray Disc as the target delivery format, what should I keep in mind during the shoot?

A: Blu-ray players are usually connected to progressive-scan displays (LCD, plasma, etc.), so progressive content will look significantly better than interlaced content. Shoot in 1080p format if at all possible. 24 fps will give more of a film look, but 30 fps is fine as well. There’s tons of room for extra content (especially in standard-definition format), so don’t hesitate to keep extra footage or a have an extra camcorder capturing ancillary material.

 Q: Let’s say I have lots of experience in compression and authoring for DVD, and I’m ready to add Blu-ray services to my offerings. What’s the most common mistake you see newbies make that I should strive to avoid?

A: I think the biggest mistake is underestimating the cost. Moving to Blu-ray requires new authoring software, new encoding software, new HD video equipment, Blu-ray players and HD monitors for testing. HD encoding is much slower than standard-definition (SD) encoding, so that factors into the cost as well. In addition, mastering costs are quite high, especially because of AACS [the Advanced Access Content System for DRM], which is mandatory for BD-ROM discs and adds a few thousand dollars to every disc run. Also be careful about jumping into the advanced features too quickly. The basic HDMV format is very similar to DVD-Video, so it doesn’t require much of a retrain. BD-J, on the other hand, requires a completely new skill set as well as a new set of content preparation tools.

Q: Many companies have created HD video masters for standard-definition DVD releases. Are those HD masters automatically Blu-ray ready?

A: It depends on the format and exactly what “HD” means. In most cases, HD masters are Blu-ray ready, especially if they are at 1920×1080 resolution in uncompressed or intermediate digital format. But if a master is already in MPEG-2 HD, for example, it may not exactly match the constraints of the Blu-ray spec and will need to be processed or even re-encoded to be compatible. Masters in higher-than-Blu-ray resolution (2k or 4k, for example), will need to be downconverted and encoded, but they’ll look superb if handled well. Masters in 1280×720 resolution may transfer to Blu-ray with minimal or little processing, but they won’t take full advantage of the resolution of the Blu-ray format.

Q: What’s BD-Java – and does it mean that I have to hire a Java programmer to help create my disc?

A: Technically it’s called BD-J, but it is based on the Java programming language. As I mentioned before, using the HDMV format allows you to ignore BD-J. However, if you want to add cool interactive features to your disc or make an Internet-connected BD-Live disc you need BD-J. And yes, it requires a Java programmer, plus a complete rethink of how you design and build a disc. BD-J discs are a lot more like complex Web sites than like DVDs: they require quite a bit of programming and dozens or even thousands of graphic elements that must all come together to create menus, pop-ups, display pages, and so on. Unless you already have programming experience you will need help from a programmer to make a BD-J disc. This will change down the road as Blu-ray authoring tools become more sophisticated and allow you to stitch together pre-programmed “widgets” of BD-J code using a simple graphical interface, but until then BD-J development is not for the faint of heart.

Q: I keep reading that the wave of the future is HD video-on-demand and digital downloads, so why should I care about Blu-ray, anyway?

A: If you look back at predictions of the death of CD from Internet-delivered music, it’s easy to see how people get carried away by the promise of new technology and new paradigms, seriously underestimating the inertia of established technologies. Consider that MP3 files became popular around 1996, developed into the Internet’s “killer app” in 1999 with the release of Napster, were legitimized and commercialized in 2001 by Apple’s iTunes, yet when Blu-ray was released a decade after MP3 came to life, CDs and DVDs still accounted for more than half of music sales compared to downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones. And that’s music downloads, which had a roughly 10-year head start on video downloads, that don’t lend themselves as well to downloading and playing on portable devices.

Blu-ray player and disc sales are doing quite well and will clearly establish an installed base large enough to sustain a healthy market. There’s still a huge disconnect between playback environments ‘ home theaters, living rooms, cars, and so on ‘ and Internet-connected devices. Tens of millions of HDTVs aren’t even connected to HD cable or satellite, let alone the Internet. All those disconnected HDTVs are connected to DVD players, and even more will end up connected to Blu-ray players. Just like DVD, Blu-ray discs and players are simple and reliable: hook up the player, pop in a disc, press play. Sure, eventually, on-demand video and digital delivery will replace physical media, but in my opinion that’s much more than a decade away. Consider the simple example of Barack Obama’s inaugural address, where pretty much every attempt to stream it over the Internet ran into major problems. Blu-ray is probably the last mainstream packaged media format, but it has plenty of time for a prosperous run.