Movies on DVD: The big squeeze
USA Today, 11/28/98
LOS ANGELES -- Unabashed movie fan Arlen Vranic sees six or seven films in the
theater each month, but that pales in comparison with the number he watches as a
quality control technician at Sony Pictures' DVD Center.
At the heart of the DVD creation process
are movie fans like Vranic and a lot of
technicians who are sticklers for detail.
That makes sense because making one of
the new, crystal-clear video discs takes
much more care than does transferring a movie to VHS videocassette.
For example, although a computer actually does the compression, or squeezing of
the digital data so that an entire movie fits onto one 5-inch disc, a technician must
program the computer's functions. So, at many points in the process, video
perfectionists must watch the complete film to make sure it works properly.
"It gets kind of crazy. To stay focused, you're always looking for things," says
Vranic, 33, who edited corporate films before joining the facility in Culver City in
March. "You get people here who care about movies."
Think getting paid for watching movies sounds like the perfect job? There's a major
drawback: He and his co-workers must watch the same movie, from Godzilla to
The Mask of Zorro, over and over and over. Each movie made for DVD may have
several sets of subtitles, as well as multiple languages and soundtracks -- not to
mention additional footage and screen configurations.
Plus, the DVD Center makes discs that are shipped all over the world, so each may
need regional customizing.
"Right now, we watch every title on average 15-20 times. When we started with
only four quality control people, sometimes it was 40 or 50 times," Vranic says.
Seated in a row of open cubicles, he and others put DVD movies through their paces
at Sony Pictures' state-of-the-art DVD authoring center on the Sony Studios lot.
Specifically designed for creating DVD movies, the center, built in 1996, houses the
compression and authoring equipment, soundproofed rooms and viewing stations
devoted to various steps in the creation process.
At the quality control viewing stations, Vranic and the others don headphones and
fixate on their three monitors -- one PC and two TVs, one standard, one widescreen
-- "to watch the films and ensure everything is as picture-perfect as possible," Vranic
says.
Watching a film repeatedly can be mind-numbing, says Vranic's supervisor, Don
Eklund. One of the center's first DVD movies was Jumanji. "I think (Vranic) had
to watch it 80 times," Eklund says. "You mention it and he still quivers."
To view a videotape, you just pop it into a VCR and press play. But a DVD opens to
a menu that directs users to a "play movie" option, along with other features.
"Nothing in DVD is automatic. Even if you just want to make a disc that someone
can put in a player and it will play, someone has to program that," says Steve
Thompson, general manager of Santa Monica's Cinram POP DVD Center, which
authors discs for MGM, New Line and others.
The DVD menu is created in much the same way as a multimedia PC program might
be, says Sharon Braun, creative director, new media, MGM Home Entertainment.
"But we feel kind of limited because (viewers) have to use a remote."
Recently, Braun finished creating a snazzy menu for a special edition of Tomorrow
Never Dies. Its interface resembles a Bondian secret agent watch, and simulates an
onscreen retinal scan of the viewer. "We wanted the whole set of options to feel like
a gadget itself," she says.
A movie typically comes into the specially built Cinram POP DVD complex -- POP
stands for its original name, Pacific Ocean Post; Cinram is the name of its Canadian
disc pressing partner -- on a digital tape. A time allocation sheet is created in
Microsoft Excel to track how much space on the DVD is given to the movie and
other features.
The making of DVDs has created a new job description, that of "compressionist."
Cinram's compressionist Morgan Holly uses an encoder (a big black box that looks
like a stereo amplifier), which compresses the movie using a formula called
MPEG-2 (created by the Moving Pictures Experts Group).
Video can be compressed because film can be redundant -- frame to frame, not
everything changes. An encoder, says Cinram's Thompson, "saves a frame and
looks at the next one to see what is different. MPEG really works by predicting what
the motion will be."
Today, Holly is converting A Fish Called Wanda. In a scene in which Jamie Lee
Curtis moves and the backdrop doesn't change, the MPEG-2 encoder stores only
her movements, for instance.
Later, a compressionist may change the amount of bits allotted to a scene so that it
looks better -- the more bits that are allocated, the closer to the original master film
the MPEG-2 encoder can get. "There are parameters you can dial in, and that's what
the human will do," Thompson says. "Morgan might go back and say the computer
didn't make a good decision here."
After that stage, the compressed version of the movie is saved on the center's
network. Its fiber-optic high-speed connections link the center's hive of rooms to the
network hub, a collection of hard disk drives that hold a third of a terabyte (or 330
gigabytes).
Throughout Cinram, various projects are at different stages of progress. In one
room, DVD developer Annie Chang uses a Silicon Graphics workstation and a
software program called Scenarist to create the All Dogs Christmas Carol DVD.
Farther down the hall, DVD executive producer Allan Fisch is in one of the
sound-isolated rooms, doing quality control on A Bridge Too Far.
Just around the corner at POP's sound studio -- it also has a high-speed data link --
technicians might be remixing a movie soundtrack to Dolby Digital. The result is a
soundtrack that flows to six speakers -- five full-range speaker channels for front
and back left and right, center and a low frequency subwoofer (so-called 5.1 channel
sound). The studio has remastered and remixed film soundtracks for Dolby Digital
home theater; credits include Mission Impossible, Pulp Fiction and Eric Clapton
Unplugged.
Perhaps three months and a minimum of $100,000 later (for major titles), a DVD is
ready for testing, first in a still-computerized form and then as a "check" disc.
Cinram-authored DVDs might be pressed at their own plant in Anaheim or others
such at the Panasonic Disc Services Corp. plant in Torrance, Calif. Slightly more
than a year ago, Panasonic finished its new $50 million DVD plant -- 10 Japanese
DVD technicians provide a core of expertise -- and it is currently making about 2
million discs each month. Today, the plant is open 365 days a year, and new
production lines are being added as DVD demand grows.
Technicians dressed like those in Intel commercials work in yellow-orange "clean"
rooms, where the initial stages of DVD mastering take place. At the other end of the
production process, movie discs like Barton Fink, A Bridge Too Far, Species II,
The Beguiled, Great Outdoors and Rambo III await printing and packaging.
"A DVD looks like an optical disc, but works like a hard drive," says Robert
Pfannkuch, president of Panasonic Disc Services Corp. "It's the media of the
millennium."
By Mike Snider, USA TODAY |
