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BD-Live has aspects never encountered in DVD authoring. “You have to consider memory when creating a BD title, for instance,” says Pi Waller, vice president of digital operations at Giant Interactive, a New York City authoring facility that does catalog film titles and television series work for clients including HBO Films. “If you’re going to make two video layers available at the same time, the laser head can only read one at a time, so the amount of available persistent memory in the player has to be considered.” That, along with bookmarking, picture-in-picture, and other features unique to BD-Live, is compelling authoring facilities to re-envision how they approach a title on disc. “We’re still so early in the game,” says Timur Insepov, Sony’s digital content services manager at its Sony DADC DigitalWorks facility in Los Angeles, underscoring how different BD-J is even from the HDMV “movie mode” that the first iteration of Blu-ray works in. Aside from its connectivity and interactivity, one of the main things that sets BD-J apart from its previous incarnation and from DVD are the discrete widgets that can be used in cobbling together BD-J-enabled titles. These Java applications take various forms, such as bookmarking that let users notate points in a film they want to return to, or a real-time progress bar that runs in synch with the film. These widgets could develop a purpose beyond simply amusing the home viewer. (See sidebar.) BD authoring remains a proposition in search of a protocol. Insepov suggests that DADC’s experience with the Universal Media Disc (UMD), devised by Sony for its Playstation Portable game console, provided an intermediary step in the evolution of authoring from DVD to BD. “It was a stepping stone,” he says. “The animations are programmed in XML code on UMD. It’s a much bigger jump to go directly from DVD to Blu-ray.” Sidebar: A Brave New Widget World
Los Angeles-based authoring company Radius60 developed the trivia game included in the BD-Live version of Men In Black and plans to use versions of it as a digital stencil for subsequent titles, in the process creating what might become a new market in and of itself for such widgets, says Keith Prokop, CEO of Radius60. “Since these applications take so long to develop and are so intense to create, it will make sense for BD authoring companies to buy and sell them, just as companies do with engines for games.” Brian Johnson, CEO of B1 Media, believes film studios will need to have a variety of third-party vendors to keep up with the demands of BD-Live, both during the authoring stage and to update title content in the future. “It’s going to be similar to how the web works, with content constantly needing to be updated," he says. Rolf Hartley, who heads up Sonic Solutions' professional products group, says “it makes perfect sense” that a trade in BD application widgets could develop. “We already encourage third parties to write applications that we can sell through our extended developers’ group, such as our partners Click Team in France who make a cool game app for BD Java,” he says. “BD-Live opens up some really cool opportunities for unique third-party developments.” But like all new propositions in digital media, IP issues are already being noted. Prokop says his company has begun copyrighting its Java widgets, for “defensive” purposes. “We feel they are copyrightable,” he says. “With Java coding, you can see our code, so if someone wanted to start using it, or if someone else tried to patent our codes, we’d want to know about it and be in a position to control it.” In the DVD universe, the copyright holder of the title generally owned IP assets, since the entity that created the original movie or television show usually commissions and thus owns any additional bonus content. Between third-party widgets developed in Java and content from the infinite reaches of the internet, BD-Live could become a maze of layered IP owned by a wide range of entities. However, that doesn’t necessarily make it a problem. “It might complicate things,” says Hartley. “But whatever happens, I suspect it will be transparent to the end users, and it will be handled in such a way as to not hamper the adoption of the format. There’s too much at stake.” Workflow
The workflow path is not dissimilar to that of DVD authoring, but with more brachiations. As assets enter the facility, they are digitized and routed to a multi-TB central server from which video, audio and, in the case of BD-Live, Java specialists draw appropriate elements from. All elements are handled electronically once they’re inside the plant. Brian Johnson, CEO of Los Angeles boutique authoring company B1 Media, which developed a complex blackjack game for Sony Pictures’ film 21, says that the ability to outsource aspects of Java-based components to titles actually benefits workflow in many cases. “We can create something like a game and handle the creative and the programming, test it and deliver it to the authoring house as a fully functional JAR file [Java ARchive, a file that aggregates multiple Java files and their related metadata], while the authoring house is working on coding and other aspects of a title,” he explains. “It’s a more compartmentalized process. The emphasis will be on managing the process.” That includes the all-important approvals process. “The staging for that is more complicated,” says Todd Collart, senior vice president for new media at Deluxe Digital Studios in Burbank, which beefed up its OMS online asset management system in response to the fact that elements of interactive titles can now be sent for approvals independently, as opposed to waiting for a title on disc to be finalized for BD-Live authoring clients including Paramount and Universal and. “Throughout the process [of authoring], we’ll need to send elements to third-party vendors, testing facilities, and to the clients,” he explains. “Once the process moves from everything under one roof, as it has been with DVD, to many possible points outside the facility, it’s inevitable that the pipeline will be slower initially.” Storage is plentiful these days; it’s the throughput and other details where the bottlenecks occur at the moment, Insepov explains. “For instance, file format specifications are not widely known throughout the content side yet,” he says. For images, the very high-resolution .png format is preferred for BD-J work but website-level graphics are still being routinely delivered. He notes that while secure content delivery systems such as WAM!NET are capable of handling high-resolution data, the sheer volume that BD-Live demands strains network capacity. Other authors are using FTP sites for secure content transfers. “Throughput and bandwidth are much bigger issue at this point than storage, at the facility level and between the facility and the content owners,” he says. BD-Live and BD-J could affect the very physical layout of authoring. “Until the tools become more mature, you’ll constantly be moving people on to the floor until you find the right combinations,” says DADC’s Insepov. These kinds of fundamental changes will ripple upstream as studios begin to adjust day and date schedules to reflect the new reality of interactive discs. Nebulous Back End
As complex as interactive BD authoring is, Todd Collart believes that the “back end” of the BD-Live proposition—what will become a massive pool of content on the internet connected to individual titles, franchises, and genres—is the elephant in the room for workflow. “You can’t maintain BD-Live content on a title-by-title basis,” he observes. “The tendency at the moment is to look at the [online] content of a title, and it seems manageable at first glance. But once you multiply that by hundreds and then thousands of titles, you have to have a completely different mindset.” The back end content tasks can be Herculean; if authoring a BD-Live disc is like coding a video game, managing a mature online infrastructure for a few years’ worth of titles with millions of unique visitors may be like running AOL or Yahoo. For instance, some content access may have to be restricted on an age basis. And the course of several years, how will studios deal with potentially millions of users of a given title seeking constant new content? “It really will be more like a game environment than a movie one, and the optical disc business becomes more and more like a distribution proposition, with the disc as the key to content that’s delivered online,” Collart says. New Tools
BD-J authoring toolsets are like BD-Live authoring itself: a work in progress. Sony’s Blu-Print software was, unsurprisingly, first to market and has undergone several revisions. Subsequently, Technicolor parent Thomson released BD-Jive, an acronym for Blu-ray Disc-Java Interpreted Visual Expression, and which uses Java to produce a framework that resembles ECMA Script, a Microsoft programming language named for the private standards organization that Microsoft submitted it to and that mimics Javascript in key ways. In September, Sonic introduced Scenarist BD Version 5, an upgrade to its BD authoring software that addresses BD-Live by aggregating third-party interactive programming applications for BD-J available through Sonic’s Extended Developer Group (EDGe). Those apps include BD Fusion from French developer Clickteam, and BD-J Converter from ASV Corp. of Japan. Underscoring the similarity to coding and computer game development, BD Fusion is based on Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion game creation software and enables accelerated creation of BD-J games and menus via a drag-and-drop interface. Sonic’s intent, says senior vice president and general manager Rolf Hartley, is to enhance and simplify the workflow in the production of BD-Live title releases. “Software can streamline the BD-J workflow by removing the need to handcode tedious elements of BD-J applications, primarily animations. This task can take days. A tool like BD-J Converter enables Flash animators to export BD-J animations quickly and pass them to BD-J coders for completion. This tool can save around 70 percent in production time.” That’s a substantial assertion given BD-Live’s much larger time frame. Giant’s Pi Waller compares a 3-4 week standard-definition movie title process to a BD-J process, which can take as long as three months. But BD-Live authors have an even wider range of tactical toolsets to choose from, thanks to the Java aspect, including the use of traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) like Netbeams or Eclipse, non-programming graphical environments similar to Macromedia Director, or rendering engines which utilize standard data formats such as HTML, XML, or SVG. Having a full programming environment available on every Blu-ray Disc player provides developers with a platform for creating content types not bound by the restrictions of standard DVD. In addition to the standard BD-J APIs, developers may make use of existing Java libraries and application frameworks, as long as they conform to Java v.1.3, upon which the BD-J platform is based. The analogy every BD-J-experienced author makes for BD-Live discs is that creating them is more like coding software or building a website, and these processes will likely inform the BD-Live workflow significantly as it evolves. It’s still referred to as authoring, but the reality is far more complex. “Sure, it’s still a disc,” says Insepov. “But everything else is changing.” Dan Daley (danwriter at aol.com) is an experienced journalist and author, covering the business and technology of the entertainment industry for over 20 years. His work has appeared in numerous publications, both trade and general interest, including Billboard, The New York Daily News, Mix Magazine, GRAMMY Magazine, American Way, Spin, History Channel, TravelHost, International Business, USA Today, ArchiTech, and many others.
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