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MillimeterAuthoring DVD with Daikin's Scenarist
Jul 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Jeff Stabenau
DVD players have been on the market for one year now, and the leading DVD authoring software has been Daikin's Scenarist. This software gives DVD-Video its interactivity and lets the viewer navigate between menu pages and different movie scenes or previously unreleased footage.
In addition to feature films, our team at Crush Digital Video has been developing more DVD projects for the advertising and publishing communities. For example, we used Scenarist to author a DVD directory of production company show reels for a new guide called "Digital 411." We used Scenarist's interactivity to create a "CD-ROM-like" feel for a video-based product designed for stand-alone DVD set-top players.
We have been using Scenarist for the past two years and presently have the package installed on a Silicon Graphics O2 with a R5000 CPU and 128 MBs of RAM.
The machine is hooked up to a SCSI chain that has three 23 GB Seagate drives and a Pioneer DVD-R. For the Digital 411 project, we used Scenarist 1.5.1, which has been in release for a few months. We have found this version to be relatively stable-something I am glad to see. Our first beta version was .25, which basically allowed you to open the application, import a few files, and sometimes close back out of it. Progress was rapid, however, as Daikin released at least one upgrade every month for the first year.
The first step in the authoring process is to collect the assets that will comprise the DVD. We create menu pages using the standard Adobe graphic programs and digitize video and audio on Sonic Solutions' encoding equipment. Our team uses the DVD Studio suite along with Dolby Digital audio to create MPEG-2 video streams. These files are imported via FDDI connection from the encoding stations.
Once we import all the elements of a DVD project to the authoring station, the process of creating the interactivity begins. Using a menu flow navigation chart, we implement buttons on top of the menu pages that will link to different categories as well as to each show reel. These buttons are made by blending two different graphic layers within Scenarist. We then program navigation commands for the button areas of the screen. This stage is the heart of DVD authoring.
Scenarist's interface is very non-intuitive, and the application does not guide you towards what works well or even what might work at all. Essentially, Scenarist is an implementation of the DVD-Video specifications-a large book containing not only the physical dimensions of the disc, but the capabilities of the players, the file structure, and the application layer of DVD-Video. You must know your specifications ahead of time and then use the application to create the interactivity needed for the project. Scenarist does not provide any templates nor does it allow you to create your own. Features such as "copy" and "paste" are not even available for commands or other parameters. Therefore, each DVD project contains a certain amount of reinventing the wheel.
DVD is perfect for presenting a simple, high-quality index of dozens of show reels from production and special effects companies. You can skip backward or forward instantly between any of the reels. All of the video quality looks as good as Digital Betacam, and the audio sounds incredible. This is the type of project that DVD was created for. It combines superb quality with simple interactivity for use with a DVD player on a normal television set.
The basic DVD navigation technique is to define hot spots on the menu page as buttons. This button can be defined for numerous options ranging from playing a specific video clip, to selecting random media clips, to slightly more complex commands that remember where you are and allow conditional selections of media to be made. We link each button to its option and then use Scenarist to check each link through simulation. The simulation feature is a non-real-time environment that lets you check the accuracy of links and jump commands.
Once we have created all of the links, we use Scenarist for the premastering phase. Premastering is a process that multiplexes the audio and video streams together and builds a DVD-compliant disc image. The premastering for the Digital 411 disc took three hours.
Burning the disc image onto a DVD-R is the final step of the process. You can only insure that all of the authoring is accurate after this step. Once the disc is checked for quality, the disc image is ready to be transferred to a DLT (Digital Linear Tape device) and sent out for mass replication. If only a few discs are required, additional copies can be made directly from the DVD-R.
Although Scenarist is the programming choice of many authoring companies, it has several pitfalls. One must always pay careful attention to where one steps or clicks in the Scenarist program. For example, the button that tells the program to transfer the disc image to DLT is right beside the button that starts the three hour disc image creation. If you simply touch the wrong button, the previous work is blown away.
But despite a difficult interface (which is being revamped in an NT version), Scenarist does allow you to make fully interactive and compliant DVD-Video products. The fact is that DVD projects are big, and the challenges presented by DVD authoring go well beyond what any program will be able to simplify. Projects like this that incorporate hours of digitized audio and video, thousands of subtitles, and menus-all seamlessly joined and linked together in a format that is still hazy at the edges-are always going to be a large amount of work. I do, however, look forward to the day when the authoring process will provide greater flexibility and speed.
Jeff Stabenau is President of Crush Digital Video. Founded in 1996, Crush Digital Video was the first DVD studio in New York. Today, the Crush team performs a broad range of digital services for DVD and other media, including the Internet, corporate presentation, and kiosk services.Crush Digital Video is located at 147 West 25th Street, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10001. Phone: 212.989.6500. Fax: 212.645.9093. E-mail: Info@CrushDV.com
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