EMediaLive.com

“Workflow,” the hub around which concepts like digital asset management and element ingestion revolve, emerged several years ago as the buzzword in the postproduction of digital media. Workflow for film and video post, and later for DVD evolved from the needs of a nonlinear workspace, but even the random-access landscape of Pro Tools and Final Cut Pro look positively razor-straight compared with the three-dimensionality of the interactive iteration of Blu-ray: BD-Live. DVD can hold plenty of data, but what shows up on the screen is ultimately limited to what’s on the disc, imposing some inherent boundaries as to how the content can be manipulated. The first-generation, unconnected BD disc offers vastly more space for data to start with—upwards of 50GB on dual-layer discs, compared with DVD’s relatively puny 5-to-15-or-so GB capacity. But once the BD player is connected to the internet, the potential becomes a little closer to infinite. And to handle that kind of apparently boundless freedom, a new workflow paradigm has to emerge.

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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The Authoritative Blu-ray Disc (BD) FAQ: Updates

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Primera Announces High-Resolution Bar Code Label Printer

Primera Technology, Inc., a leading manufacturer of specialty printers, today announced its LX200 Label Printer.

LX200 utilizes the latest in monochrome high-speed inkjet printing technology. With 1200 dpi print resolution, the printer has almost six times as many dots per inch as most thermal transfer bar code printers. It prints onto labels, tickets, tags and coupons for a wide range of applications, including those in which higher levels of security, confidentiality and durability are required.

Unlike thermal transfer printers, LX200 uses an inkjet print head instead of ribbons. Thermal transfer ribbons leave behind a record of everything that has been printed. In many applications such as healthcare or government, secure collection and disposal of ribbons is required in order to meet confidentiality and secrecy requirements. Inkjet printing doesn't have this challenge and thus can be a far more secure, convenient and cost-effective solution.

LX200 is shipped with label creation layout software called NiceLabel® SE for Primera. All popular bar codes are supported, including linear and, optionally, 2D bar codes such as PDF417. Fonts as small as 2 points are highly legible and perfectly formed.

An additional benefit of LX200 is that ink replenishment is fast and easy: instead of threading a ribbon, just snap out the used printhead and snap in a new one.

"For almost two decades, thermal transfer printers have dominated the bar code printer market,” said Mark D. Strobel, Primera's vice president of sales and marketing. "But now, our new inkjet-based LX200 is available. For many applications it's a better choice. Inkjet printing has been accepted for virtually all other mainstream applications. With its high-resolution, photo-quality printing, fast print speeds and virtually 100% scannable bar codes, there's every reason why inkjet printing should be a part of this market, too.”

Both pigmented and dye-based black inks are available. Pigmented ink works best with plain, uncoated papers for the most economical cost-per-label. Dye-based ink requires glossy, coated paper that costs more but produces the best print quality – important if printing high-resolution photos and 2D bar codes.

LX200 is priced at US$895 (MSRP). Dye and pigment ink cartridges are priced at US$47.95 (MSRP). The printer is available now from Primera's resellers and distributors in over 85 countries as well as at www.primerastore.com.

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Aleratec LightScribe Burn AutoFlip Burn Disc Publisher Now Shipping

Aleratec Inc., leading developer and manufacturer of "Prosumers' Choice" solutions for the USB, Flash, HDD, Blu-ray, DVD/CD, duplicating, and publishing markets, is now shipping its new Aleratec DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex™. Through January 31st, 2009, customers will receive 200 pieces of Aleratec LightScribe Duplicator Grade CD-R media FREE with purchase by mail in rebate. The DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex is the first LightScribe disc publisher that automatically copies data, flips the disc over and LightScribe labels each disc. It is capable of unattended direct to disc LightScribe labels and disc copies. Just load it with blank LightScribe discs, use your PC to select the disc image and label with the powerful Aleratec Disc Publishing Suite. Enter the number of published discs needed and DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex will automatically produce up to 100 DVD/CD copies with silk screen quality labels with no operator intervention.

"The announcement of the DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex has earned standing ovations from Prosumer, Government, Education, Worship, SMB users, and every sector we serve. To help assure that all customers have their very best first experience, we are offering free Aleratec duplicator grade media by mail in rebate with the purchase of a DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex," stated Perry Solomon, Aleratec President and CEO. "Since the introduction of LightScribe, publishing complete discs meant that the discs had to be manually flipped over after burning data or LightScribe labeling. With the DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex, Aleratec innovations complete the disc loading, unloading, and flipping process automatically. Now true unattended LightScribe publishing is affordable and readily available for anyone looking for an economical way to project their message on attractive, professional, silk screen quality labeled DVDs or CDs."

In LightScribe optical drives, the laser burns one side of the disc while labeling or data writing. LightScribe discs have a data side and a LightScribe label side, both imageable by the same laser. To record data label, discs must be flipped over and re-introduced in the LightScribe drive.

"A key prosumer disc publishing requirement is to fully automate both data recording and labeling processes," said Kent Henscheid, LightScribe Marketing Manager. "This new Aleratec innovation delivers fully automatic operation and affords the benefit of unattended LightScribe disc publishing to a wide array of users, including small business."

The Aleratec DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex (Aleratec Part No. 280111, Ingram Micro SKU V06234, Tech Data SKU 90844M), proudly assembled in the USA from components sourced globally, automatically records data and LightScribe labels discs completely unattended at a low Estimated U.S. Retail Price of $1049.

A $100 value Free with the purchase of an Aleratec DVD/CD RoboRacer LS Duplex, customers can get 200 pieces of Aleratec LightScribe Duplicator Grade CD-R media (2 - 100 packs Aleratec Part No. 110116) by mail in rebate for purchases made before 1/31/2009. See www.aleratec.com/rebates.html for terms and conditions.

For the convenience of the volume customer, Aleratec Duplicator Grade LightScribe Media is available in 600 packs:

LightScribe DVD+R 16x V1.2 Duplicator Grade Media 600-Pack
Aleratec Part # 300115, Ingram Micro SKU R86781, Tech Data SKU 25375I
ESP $499.00
LightScribe DVD-R 16x V1.2 Duplicator Grade Media 600-Pack
Aleratec Part # 230117, Ingram Micro SKU U06776, Tech Data SKU 25374I
ESP $499.00
LightScribe CD-R 52x V1.2 Duplicator Grade Media 600-Pack
Aleratec Part # 110120, Ingram Micro SKU R86782, Tech Data SKU 25376I
ESP $285.00

A wide variety of Aleratec LightScribe Duplicator Grade media is also available in 100-Packs including LightScribe CD-R 52x V1.2 Duplicator Grade Media 100-Pack (Aleratec Part # 110116, Ingram Micro SKU K88068, Tech Data SKU 58357H) at the new low ESP of $49.99.

The full line of Aleratec solutions, and accessories is featured at AAFES, Adorama, Amazon.com, B&H Photo Video, Best Buy, Buy.com, CDW, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Insight, J & R, Mac Connection, MacMall, Meijer, Micro Center, NewEgg, Office Depot, PC Connection, PC Mall, PC Nation, ProVantage, Quill, QVC.com, Ritz Camera, Staples, Tech Depot and Wal-Mart in addition to other leading U.S. retailers. Government and Education customers may purchase from Government and Education Specialists including AAFES, B&H Photo Video Gov, Best Buy Gov/Ed, CDW-G, CompuCom, EnPointe, GovConnection, GTSI, Insight Gov, PC Mall Gov, Pomeroy, Sayers, Shi.com, Softchoice, telcobuy, TIG, and Unisys. All products are available to resellers in the U.S. through D&H Distributing, Ingram Micro, and Tech Data; in Canada through D&H Canada and Ingram Micro Canada; in Latin America and the Caribbean through Tech Data Miami.

Complete information available at www.aleratec.com.

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OWC Announces Industry's First External Blu-ray Drives with "Quad Interface"

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading Mac and PC technology company, announced today its new line of OWC Mercury Pro™ Blu-ray "Quad Interface" external drive solutions. The first Blu-ray external drives on the market offering a "Quad Interface" of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA, the OWC Mercury Pro drives feature 4X Blu-ray disc write speed for burning up to 1 gigabyte of data per minute; a data transfer rate up to 150MB per second; Plug and Play connection flexibility; and the convenience of compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh systems.

Burn up to 50GB per Blu-ray Disc and Read/Write to All Optical Media
Immediately available and priced starting at $499.99, the Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive solutions are ideal for consumers with large amounts of High-Def or other video, photos, music, and data files that they want to archive or retrieve using optical media. Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives read and/or write virtually all optical media, including BD/BD-R, DVD/+/-R/RW, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW. The drives provide the well-known advantages of Blu-ray, such as high-capacity storage (burn up to 50GB per disc, enough space for a four hour High-Def movie); full high-quality HD Picture; and Surround Sound capabilities. In addition, the new OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives now have write performance twice as fast as previous Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive models.

Pricing for OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray Write and Read external drive solutions:

OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583: $499.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables and two 25GB BD-R discs.
OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583T: $579.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables, starter media, and full retail version of Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (Mac OS X).

OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray "Quad Interface" external drive solutions have been fully tested for compatibility with most Apple and Windows built-in and third party DVD/CD tools and players, including Apple iTunes, Apple Disc Burner, Apple iDVD 5, Apple DVD Studio Pro, EMC Retrospect Express, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero Burning.

For more information on the OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive solutions, go to <>

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One Stop Systems Introduces its MediaVault RAID Arrays for Commercial Applications

One Stop Systems, a global provider of industrial-grade computing systems and components, today announced the introduction of its latest storage line, the MediaVault RAID arrays for commercial applications. The MediaVault products include desktop and rackmount RAID arrays with SCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), or PCI Express interfaces. They include a 5-drive capacity, 3-1/2" drive desktop array, a 40-drive capacity 2-1/2" drive desktop array, a 10-drive 3-1/2" drive rackmount array, and a 16-drive, 3-1/2" drive rackmount array.

The 4105 and U320-R products feature 5 removable drives, removable power supply and easily supports 10-bit HD applications. The 4105 has a Fibre channel interface while the U320-R has a SCSI interface. Both support user selectable RAID 0 or RAID 3.

The 4210 and the U320-RX both support 10 SCSI drives in a 3U rackmount chassis. Both support user selectable RAID 0 or RAID 3. The 4210 has a Fibre Channel interface while the U320-RX features a SCSI 320 interface.

The 4440 supports four removable modules each containing ten 2-1/2" SATA drives. The system supports quad 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces with Fibre HUB technology for daisy chaining of multiple RAID systems and user-selectable RAID 0 and RAID 6. The 4440 features unique vPOD architecture with capable data rates in excess of 4K film resolution files, 2 streams of 2K resolution or 4 streams of uncompressed HD 10 bit.

The 5116 expands your PC, server or workstations based on the new PCI Express (PCIe) external expansion and cable connection standard. Powered by RAIDCore technology, the 5116 offers a greatly enhanced RAID feature set including on-line capacity expansion, RAID level migration and flexible drive numbers and sizes.

All of the MediaVault products are immediately available from One Stop Systems. Prices vary depending on configuration. Call One Stop Systems for specific pricing and delivery.

"The MediaVault product line is an excellent addition to the One Stop Systems family of industrial and commercial computing systems," says Steve Cooper, president of One Stop Systems. "The choice of Fibre Channel or SCSI interface adds flexibility to the products and the 5100 series products provide the latest in PCI Express-over-cable technology. The MediaVault name has long been known for its reliability in the film, video, audio, and broadcasting markets and One Stop Systems will continue to provide the highest quality manufacturing and workmanship that characterizes all One Stop Systems products. In addition, One Stop Systems always provides the highest level of technical support for all its products.

www.onestopsystems.com

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Plasmon Inc. Announces Successful Completion of Private Equity Buyout

Newly formed Plasmon Holding LLC announced today that it has completed a management buyout and organizational restructuring of assets from Plasmon PLC, a trusted source of data archiving systems for over 20 years. The transaction is intended to capitalize and re-position Plasmon over the long term to achieve its strategic objectives as a leader in the rapidly growing enterprise archiving solutions market.

Plasmon Holdings LLC is a new privately-held U.S.-based Delaware Corporation backed by a U.S. private equity firm. The new holding company has acquired Plasmon Inc in the U.S. and specific assets owned by UK-based Plasmon PLC in order to aggressively pursue new technology and go-to-market strategies and maximize Plasmon market share in the long-term data storage market. The new company will maintain the use of the Plasmon brand identity and is committed to globally addressing the current and future needs of all Plasmon’s worldwide customers and partners.

"This transaction is the evolution of the strategic process that we began earlier this year. Plasmon has exceptional intellectual property and an unmatched value proposition with which to address the rapidly growing need for archiving as a core layer of the IT infrastructure," said Steven Murphy, CEO of the new company. "We are reaching beyond our traditional role as the deep archive ‘component’ of widely used content management applications to provide complete archive turnkey solutions. Our newly announced focus on ‘3-2-1 Archive Best Practices’ for accessible and secure long-term data storage provides exactly what the enterprise IT market is looking for: at least 3 single instance data copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is removable, long-lived and powered down. With this approach, our customers simultaneously meet all their business needs for historical and fixed content data, including rapid access, very long-term secure retention, and disaster recovery, all in an economical solution," said Murphy.

"It is remarkable that a deal of this significance in the storage market was brought to fruition during this tight financial environment" said Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "However, our research suggests that the need for long-term corporate data storage will drive customers to archive over 100 exabytes of data over the next three years, so it may not be remarkable. Plasmon offers a unique integration of magnetic disk, long-term optical media and archival management software to address this challenge."

Under the restructuring, Plasmon Inc, formerly a U.S.-based subsidiary to the UK company, will become the worldwide headquarters. The "new" Plasmon will offer its market leading archiving solutions and services in all global territories. The company plans to use its new organization and financing to enhance its core Archive Appliance solution and leverage its recently announced relationships with NetApp, IBM-FileNet, and a range of market-leading content management ISV’s.

www.plasmon.com

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