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MillimeterNeed for Speed
Oct 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Philip De Lancie
Automation in DVD Production If you work with as many assets as we do," says Terry Barnum, director of digital media at Digital OutPost in Carlsbad, California, "it becomes crucial to make computers - not humans - do the computing." That's essentially the impetus behind attempts to introduce automation into the process of creating DVD-video titles. The idea is to achieve more efficient utilization of both personnel and equipment by dividing the production chain into areas that require human intervention and those that do not, then setting up systems for running repetitive, tedious tasks in the background or at off-peak hours. The extent to which this approach is practical in real-world DVD production depends on the nature of the titles handled by a given facility.
"To really automate all stages of DVD development properly is an enormous undertaking," Barnum says, "and a large investment in time and resources." But as daunting as the task may be, Blaine Graboyes, COO and creative director at Zuma Digital in New York City, sees the need for automation - where feasible - as a matter of survival. "There are two choices here: slave labor or automation," he says. "I guess high prices are a third option, but the client would never pay, and someone else would take the job for a loss."
Productivity and Reliability The most obvious goal of automation is to boost productivity. "For DVD facilities that create multiple titles per week, or per day, automation is the key requirement to maximize throughput," says Mark Ely, VP of business development at Sonic Solutions in Novato, California. "Most facilities find that automation, with manual adjustments along the way, can lead to both higher volume and better quality."
The quality factor comes into play because computers, once properly set up, can repeat tasks correctly with a consistency that humans are unlikely to match. "In theory," Graboyes says, "an automated system should have a high level of quality, as the computer ensures that the correct procedure is followed every time. If you have a procedure involving 500 steps, an operator could easily mess up one or two, but a computer would ensure 100-percent accuracy."
Graboyes says that this improvement in consistency and reliability has so far proven to be the most tangible benefit of Zuma's automation efforts. "We've written some simple tools to automate the creation of encode scripts for the Sonic Solutions encoder," he says. "This allows a producer to create a spreadsheet of clips with timecode in- and out-points, and then output a script with encode parameters, such as MPEG type, bit rate, and audio formats. Using the spreadsheet to export info to an encode script may save only 20 minutes of time, but it guarantees reliability by keeping the information in the correct place."
Randy Berg, general manager of Rainmaker New Media in Burbank, California, agrees that reliability is a major factor. "Humans can make mistakes," he says, "so if automated processes can remove some of the element of failure, you can output more product and make more money." But Berg also points to the productivity factor. "DVD production is a manpower-critical business," he says, "and highly skilled operators are few and far between." Automation makes the most limited resource - people - go further.
Rainmaker's production supervisor, Brad Middleton, adds that automation is "a necessary step in those facilities where staff are not on-site 24/7. Automation allows us to continue to move projects forward outside of regular business hours, such as overnight or on weekends."
Theory vs. Reality While nearly everyone agrees that automation is a good thing in theory, the extent to which it can actually be implemented at a given stage of production is an open question. "Which areas of the DVD-video production process most lend themselves to automation? That depends primarily on the type of DVD title that is being created," says Mark Johnston, technical manager at Daikin Comtec in Novato. Breaking possible projects into categories such as A movies, B movies, complex interactive projects, and archival applications, Johnson says each has their own level of appropriate automation.
Some facility operators remain doubtful, however, that automation can actually be applied to enough of the title-creation process to make a big difference. "We have four full years of experience and hundreds of completed DVD titles," says Jeff Stabenau, president of Crush Digital in New York, "and we have found few practical methods for automating the process. Automation does not play a significant role in DVD workflow at Crush."
The core obstacle to automation, Stabenau says, is the individuality of each title. "Most of our DVD projects remain very hands-on, requiring a great deal of individual creative and technical input," he says. "Even projects that are simple - a movie with 10 chapters, a trailer, and filmographies - require numerous subtle decisions and choices that cannot be determined automatically. The only type of DVDs where the process can be simplified is where a single video - say, a director's reel - is converted to DVD for playback."
Berg agrees that DVD production involves many variables that can make automation a challenge. "We originally developed some templates," he says, "so that we could offer clients cost savings if their projects fit into a particular style. But we soon discovered that very few projects fit the templates well enough to satisfy either the client or the operators who had to conform the pieces. Our clients love to see creativity and new tricks, so the majority of our titles are still unique in flavor and style. A machine will never know what the client wants."
Berg adds, however, that this uniqueness does not impact all stages of DVD production equally. "Our service," he says, "can be divided into four distinct areas: design, encoding, authoring, and QC/QA. Automation is possible to some degree in encoding, authoring, and design. But QC/QA - 25 percent of our job - is mostly human-error detection. We would not trust a machine to make subjective decisions about our work."
In contrast, Graboyes believes that there can be a role for automation in testing, helping - though not replacing - a human operator. "We would like to have automated testing tools that just live on the network," he says. "Whenever video is encoded to a network drive, it would verify the audio and video stream for compliance. Then when a Video_TS or disc image is created, it would automatically test that as well. As long as these types of systems generate a report and sound alarms for problems, I see no reason to have an operator required for such tasks."
Authoring, Encoding, and Output The production stage that Graboyes sees as being most impacted by the individuality of the projects is authoring, where the navigational flow of projects are defined. "Automating authoring is tough," he says, "because it requires either a template approach or some very complicated systems. The simple stuff is easy to automate, but the difficulty is automating very complex projects, which is most of what we do. Some of our projects use very advanced interactivity, with literally thousands of pre- and post-commands. It would be quite complex to create a system to completely automate such a process."
At Zuma, the alternative to full automation is what Graboyes calls "the brute-force approach. We have over 30 authoring systems, so that we can utilize multiple systems for different stages of a project. One engineer can easily drive three or four machines: author on one, burn on another, test on another, and make DLTs on two more."
As for automation in the more classic sense, Graboyes says that for now the main areas of focus at Zuma are encoding and outputting. That seems to hold true at other facilities as well. "Compression has greatly benefited from automation," Middleton says. "Second-shift staff can start the automated passes of an encode as they leave in the evening, which will then be ready the next morning for first-shift staff to bit-rate edit. The same goes for archiving assets or writing DDP DLTs; these may be started in the evening, and are therefore ready to ship first thing the next morning. This allows us to use the authoring machines to author during standard business hours, rather than tying them up writing media."
This approach makes sense to Johnson, who says that "the back-end processing - the multiplexing, formatting, and premastering - is the most suited for automation. Whether it means using a fiber-channel DLT array or a DVD-R replication system, very little human intervention is necessary for this stage of the process."
At Digital Outpost, meanwhile, high-volume video-on-demand customers and video clients who need material at a variety of bit rates have spurred development of an automated approach not only to encoding, but also to the overall production management process. "We are in the process of building a facility-wide system that tracks a project from tape arrival through compression, authoring, formatting, and delivery," Barnum says. "The pertinent data for each job, such as timecodes, digital audio and video parameters, will be stored, and the settings will be accessed via a Web interface at each step of the production process. We're expecting to see a significant increase in throughput when this system is fully operational."
Custom and Vendor Tools So far, most of the automation routines used in the field have been developed by end-users rather than by the vendors of DVD tools. Often these custom efforts are simply intended to address specific in-house situations. "Sometimes we build programming scripts to fix odd problems," Berg says, "such as subtitles that are supplied to us with improper timecode. Rather than manually fixing command lines one at a time, a program can be written to correct and ripple the proper numbers."
Other custom solutions give operators a head start in completing common production tasks. "We've written code in-house for SGIs, Linux machines and Macs," Barnum says. "For instance, we wrote software that automates the creation of simple menu screens. Our tool automatically builds DVD menus with thumbnail images of the source material, creates subpictures and link information, and then feeds it to an authoring program which builds links to chapters."
Aware that increasing productivity is a major customer concern, the major DVD vendors have also been working to address this need. San Jose, California's Spruce Technologies, for instance, has recently introduced DVDTransfer for making simple linear-play DVD videos with regular chapter points. "The process is fully automated from VTR control through to DVD-R burning," says marketing consultant Pete Challinger. "A single button-press prerolls the tape, encodes the video, generates chapter points, creates a legal Video Title Set and a disc image, and writes it out to DVD-R. The main applications are for DVD dailies, approval copies of spots, and low-cost archiving."
Sonic Solutions, meanwhile, has just made available the AutoSonic automation option for DVD Creator version 2.2 and DVD Fusion. The system is built around the AutoSonic server, which is connected via Ethernet to one or more encoding, authoring, formatting, and DVD-R/DLT writing systems. "Users can open a template project, enter in the names and timecodes of material to be encoded, and then dispatch the job to the AutoSonic server," Ely says. "The server dispatches the job to available encoders, drops the encoded files into the template, and formats the DVD project for either real-time preview or automatic writing to DVD-R or DLT. The user can log on and see the production jobs running, change their priority, or halt them in place. AutoSonic also sends out e-mail and pages when tapes need to be changed or when systems need attention."
At Daikin, automation efforts are primarily focused on enabling customers to more easily implement custom approaches. "Both Scenarist NT and Scenarist SGI use a text-based script format that allows companies to develop proprietary tools to automate the authoring process," Johnson says. The company's latest initiative, the Scenarist Automation Layer (ATL), is based on the same engine as Scenarist NT, but is intended to be driven by the user's own custom front-end software. "At NAB," Johnson says, "we were able to show how even a DOS batch file could be used to automate the production of an entire collection of DVD discs." Johnson expects ATL to be adopted by large-scale tape-to-disc or video-archival operations. "There is no question," he says, "that automation systems will continue to help reduce the costs of DVD title production in the future."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
