Apr 22 Podcast #475: Zediva and the Blu-ray Process
Recently we were talking with an old friend of ours who works for a movie studio in the Blu-ray production facility. This got us thinking about what it takes to create a disc filled with all that high definition goodness. Today we are going to take a high level look at what is entailed in producing a Blu-ray disc.
Amazon Prime: Stream movies and save on shipping; it's a no-brainer.
Listen to the show
Today's Show:
Blu-ray Reviews:
News:
- Sony Ships 2011 Bravia LCD Line
- Why Has Blu-ray Failed to Catch Hold?
- DLC Projection Screen Which Can Be Used In A Brightly Lit Room
- TV Replacement Cycles
Other:
- Discovery to Dump HD Theater
- From Doug: Use your mobile phone or laptop as a remote control for a DirecTV DVR
- Ebert's Art Film Revolution (1987)
- Blu-ray 3D Spending Booms This Year in U.S. and Major European Economies
Zediva
A few weeks ago we did a story on a new service called Zediva. Zediva is a service that wants to bring new releases of popular movies to the Internet at reasonable prices. They have developed a new technology that essentially assigns a DVD player with a physical disc of the movie you want to watch to you. Its the physical disc for each stream that is the loophole Zediva is hoping to exploit for getting around licensing agreements. That point is still under contention and may do in the service. Regardless, the service has become so popular that Zediva has restricted new users. We happen to have been given the opportunity to sign up and so we thought it would be a good time to put the service through its paces!
Who can use Zediva?
You can access the Zediva service with a Mac or PC as long as it has a minimum of a dual core processor with a 2GHz processor and 2GB or RAM. For mobile use you need Android 2.1 or later. The movie player is Flash based. They do not support HTML 5 yet but they are working on it. You need at least 1Mbps for the service and faster speeds equals better quality.
Cost per Movie
Each movie credit runs you $1.99. Most movie cost one credit to rent so if my math is correct, each movie costs $1.99. Zediva runs promotions from time to time so the actual price will vary but figure on $2 a movie. The really cool thing about Zediva rentals is that you have 14 days to complete a movie. Right now Zediva only rents DVDs, they do have plans to rent Blu-ray in the future.
Movie Player
The Flash based movie player lets you control the DVD player connected in the Zediva data center. You have typical transport controls, FFWD, REW, and Play/Pause. They work pretty well but there is a small lag and it takes a little getting used to. They also have a jump back function that goes back 60 seconds. You can cycle through languages and turn on subtitles. You have to be real patient using these. It takes a little time for the language or subtitle to change.
They give you an option to turn on previews, but honestly, why would you do that. That setting is in the preferences portion of you account settings. You can’t get to the main DVD menu so there are no special features available to you.
Movie Selection
At this time Zediva has 126 movies available for rent. The service is focused on newer more popular titles. This is Zediva’s top ten movies:
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Tron: Legacy
- Little Fockers
- Tangled
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- The Tourist
- Black Swan
- Skyline
- Due Date
- The Fighter
Coming Soon:
- Looking For Fidel
- The Green Hornet
- The Dilemma
- The Rite
- God Went Surfing with the Devil
Picture Quality
Picture quality is pretty good. You are starting with DVD quality so there is no concept of HD at least now. With our high speed connections at home we had a completely acceptable experience watching on computer monitors. The max bit rate is 3Mbps which for an H.264 stream is pretty decent. Audio is only two channel but since your watching on a laptop or Android device its acceptable.
Should you go for it?
Zediva has similar movies to Vudo, Amazon, and Apple. The alternatives also have HD at an additional cost. The real advantage to Zediva is price and the length of the rental. The SD version of The King’s Speach goes for $3.99. That’s two dollars more than Zediva. Plus you can watch your movie selection for two weeks. That’s 13 days longer than Amazon. We say why not use all of the services.
The Blu-ray Process
Recently we were talking with an old friend of ours who works for a movie studio in the Blu-ray production facility. This got us thinking about what it takes to create a disc filled with all that high definition goodness. Today we are going to take a high level look at what is entailed in producing a Blu-ray disc.
Content
The first and most important part of the Blu-ray disc is the content. Its the whole reason you buy the disc. When most people think of content they think of the movie itself. But we all know that is just the beginning. Regardless of the type of content high quality source is required. For newer movies shot in digital it consists of a file or multiple files that can be up to 1.5 TB of uncompressed video.
Older movies that were shot to film must be converted to digital. More recent high profile films use a process known as the 4K process. The studio starts with original 35mm prints that are scanned frame by frame at 4,096 by 4,096 pixels. Then each frame is processed to eliminate scratches and stray marks. Finally, the color is adjusted.
Its quite amazing how good the final product looks. With that said, some movies were never shot with HD in mind and may have issues. Close Encounters of the Third kind looked fantastic for most of the movie’s outdoor shots. But we found some scenes, especially the final sequence, out of focus at times and it looked cheesy.
Just a point of reference, the restoration of Casablanca cost more than a million dollars so this is not a cheap process. For some less popular films, studios will use a lower resolution scan. In fact some older movies barely show an improvement over their DVD counterparts. There are plenty of lists online that you can reference before buying a Blu-ray version of an older movie.
Compression
Now that you have the raw digital files of up to 1.5TB you need to compress it down to something that will fit on a Blu-ray disc. Each disc can hold 25 to 50 GB depending on whether its a single or dual layer disc. Most features are coming in at 30 to 35 GB in size.
Production Management
This is where the menus, sub-titles, and audio are brought together. Everything from the spelling, text colors, and disc navigation is done in this stage. The mantra for Production Management is “Discs should be easy to use”. But as we all know that isn’t always the case. Some disc are full of so much BD-Live stuff that it takes forever to get the actual movie on screen.
Authoring
Blu-ray discs are far more interactive than DVD. They have the capability to support the Java Programming Language through BD Live. BD Live requires the player to have an Internet connection and at least 1GB of storage. BD-Live features include chats with the director or actors, games, downloadable featurettes, quizzes, and movie trailers. It is in this stage that BD Live features are added.
QA
This is probably the most difficult stage in the production of a Blu-ray disc. Everything in the previous stages must be validated. The disc can have no video artifacts and the audio must be correct. All audio streams and sub titles are validated. Some discs can have 30 text streams and 10 audio streams and they all have to be tested independently. For a 2 hour movie it would take 80 man hours to validate and that’s if everything passed on the first try. Validating a Blu-ray disc takes ten times more effort than DVD.
Other issues QA has to deal with is that there are a number of players out there and there is no way to validate on all of them. That’s why some discs just won’t work on some players. Sometimes the issue is with the disc and sometimes the issue is with the player. That’s the reason why your Blu-ray player is always updating software. In almost all these cases the issue deals with BD Live. If all you care about is the movie most of the time the disc will play, most of the time. There have been cases where not having an Internet connection caused the BD Java engine to render the disc unusable.
Send to Duplication House
The final step is to send the master to the duplication house for mass production.
The preceding is a generalization of the process the studios go through to make a Blu-ray disc. There are slight differences between studios and mastering houses but regardless of where its being done a lot of effort goes into each disc that may end up costing you as little at $10!
Reader Comments (4)
I think it is very obvious why bluray adoption is very slow. I know you've mentioned that bluray players have dropped in price, while this is a good thing, it is NOT the most important factor. The biggest reason is price. For the longest time the casual customer, the folks who do regularly buy dvd's have looked at the price of dvds next to the price of blurays, this is sticker shock on a regular basis, and that is what pushes people away. Sure there are a few sales here or there and the price very slow drops, but in regular stores the customer see's blurays for 24 bucks, sometimes 20 bucks if they are lucky, but for the most part, they see the deal, and it is blurays cost more!!!!
It doesn't matter if the bluray player is 40 dollars, if the price of the content doesn't go down, people will stay away. Imagine if itunes sold mp3s for twice as much as they do now, because it is "digital technology!", it is new!! Customers want the new thing at the same price, upgrade is expected as a given, people had a backlash against cd because of the premium, and I think they just are far less tolerant of such price premiums now, if the price premium continues, people will just continue to buy dvd.
I'm really excited about movies being recorded in 48fps. I'm not one of those 24fps movie purists...I think the motion judder and blurred image on fast pans at 24fps is stomach-churning and always takes me out of the movie. I'm a big user of frame interpolation technology to reduce motion blur on movies. Despite what the purists say, there is nothing magical about 24fps...in fact it is pretty much the bare minimum and was chosen as the slowest usable framerate in order to economize on expensive film stock. With today's digital recording and projection technology it's definitely time to leave 24fps back in the 1920's when it was first introduced.
I'm pretty concerned about the "Soap Opera" effect filming in higher framerates will cause. I doubt you'll notice this when seeing 'The Hobbit' in IMAX 3D or RealD 3D, but when you get that blu-ray at home months after, I'm afraid the filmic quality will be gone if they don't master the 2D version at 24 FPS. I would never buy an LCD or LED due to the motion blur caused by the low refresh rates anyway, so films always look perfect to me in their original 24 FPS on my Panasonic Plasma.
I've never used frame interpolation since I own a plasma, but whenever I see it used on films in stores or at other peoples' houses on LCD's and LED's, it just makes films look terrible. It's not as noticeable when used on sports or certain TV shows, but when it's used on movies, it actually makes me feel a little sick (literally). It causes some kind of odd sensation that makes me feel a little queezy.
What I wish more Hollywood directors would focus on is higher RESOLUTION, not frame rates. Start filming these big-budget event films in 75 mm, or even IMAX film stock. I'm sure it would cost much more than filming at high frame rates in digital, but film would be much more attractive with increased resolution as compared to increased frame rates. Do with you want with 3D, I couldn't care less. But when it comes to traditional 2D films, don't make it look like a soap opera. And when the Blu-ray comes out, master the 2D version in 24 FPS.
@Adam
I agree, the "soap opera" look is undesirable. However, I never associated it with the frame rate of video...I think it has a lot more to do with the intensity and uniformity of the overhead lighting. I think soap opera sets are highly overlit so that the actors can go anywhere (day after day after day of filming) and you can still see their faces perfectly illuminated.
I have not seen frame interpolation on an LCD television; I am using it on my Panasonic PT-AE3000U LCD front projector at over 100" diagonal screen size. I feed 24fps from Blu-ray and the projector interpolates 3 additional frames and outputs the result as 96fps. What I notice is that motion blur and judder on camera pans are dramatically reduced, and even on stationary shots with moderate moverment, detail in closeups of people's faces is improved. It doesn't look anything like a soap opera...it just looks cleaner and more "high def" to me. Since the video processing time is longer, I do have to use about 100 - 150ms of audio delay to correct lip sync.
Evan Powell has written some interesting commentary about 24p here:
http://www.projectorcentral.com/judder_24p.htm
and about frame interpolation here:
http://www.projectorcentral.com/frame_interpolation.htm