It's been about a year since Hollywood studios and consumer electronics makers launched their twin hype balloons of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Although nearly punctured by the popular and trade press, both next-gen DVD formats have succeeded in getting off the ground-but neither has risen much higher above the other in terms of general consumer acceptance.

Regardless of how long it takes for households to come around to HD DVD or Blu-ray movies, both formats offer video producers the ability to add high definition to every other type of project that DVDs are used for today-from demo reels to corporate presentations. For now at least, Blu-ray maintains a lead over HD DVD in the desktop authoring area, with multiple vendors offering creation software, blank media, recorders and duplicators, and players.

Click To Enlarge A simple UI: most of Avid DVD's capabilities are presented to you on start-up.

What you'll need

For my part, I've been following the evolution of the toolsets used to make both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs since NAB 2006. Back then, I was surprised to find a low-priced alternative in the middle of Sonic's NAB exhibit. Avid DVD by Sonic promised motion menus, subtitles, and multiple audio tracks, with high-definition output to Blu-ray disc, for less than $1,300 list.

You may have heard of Avid DVD before: it has been part of something called Avid Studio Toolkit for several years, and Avid editors have been making simple DVDs with it for a while now. Last fall I began what turned out to be several months of testing with Avid DVD, the results of which are still coming in. Although I am skeptical about some aspects, I've found real promise in this toolset.

If you simply want to author HD video onto disc, the Blu-ray version of Avid DVD should fit the bill. You won't be blown away by the software's menu creation features; they produce pages that look just like what you're used to seeing on standard DVDs. Sorry, no pop-up menus or other slick interactive doodads like you'll find on a major studio title.

Think of basic Blu-ray Disc creation as an alternative to carrying an HD tape deck to a corporate sales meeting, and hand-cueing up multiple tapes and clips as needed. With Blu-ray, you can do what you're used to doing with standard DVD playback, and more: instantly access clips, create custom playlists, and play programs unattended from a fixed installation.

Building around the Avid software, you can assemble an end-to-end Blu-ray authoring system that costs under $10,000 in parts. My test setup included: Avid Xpress Pro v. 5.6, Avid Studio Toolkit 5.6, an HP xw8200 dual-CPU PC (with lots of disk space), a Pioneer BDR-101A Blu-ray disc burner-and, oh yes, a standalone Blu-ray player. Later in this article, I'll talk about which Blu-ray players actually worked with recorded discs.

I started with the HP computer provided by my local equipment vendor, Snader and Associates. I installed all of the software as well as the internal Pioneer burner and fired up the Avid DVD application. Scott Epstein, Sonic's Avid DVD product manager, served as my guide. Spellbound Productions in San Francisco provided some beautiful HD content to test: Speed and Angels, a 95-minute documentary about Navy fighter pilot trainees, featuring amazing aerobatic footage shot on HDCAM. In addition to live-action HD video, I had some high-res still images that allowed me to more objectively check the color accuracy and relative sharpness of the Blu-ray format.

The long road to a completed encode

My initial attempt at Blu-ray authoring got off to a fairly slow start. The fighter pilot doc was in a 1080p23.98 uncompressed QuickTime format with embedded stereo audio. The file size was huge-530 GB-and Avid DVD didn't like it at all. It didn't seem to like the embedded audio either, and the app soon crashed.

Click To Enlarge A common warning message in Avid DVD. The software is very finicky about file types: even 48 kHz 16 bit AIFF audio is unacceptable.

Eventually I found a work-around. I imported the QT file into Avid Xpress Pro using the DNxHD 115 codec. Now I had a much smaller file that apparently retained the image quality of the original source. I generated a QT reference movie of the picture track in Xpress Pro, which imported smoothly into Avid DVD. Next, I extracted the audio track and fed it to Apple A.pack for AC-3 encoding. I imported the resulting Dolby file into Avid DVD without a hitch.

Rather than waste time making a menu, I authored a basic play-only disc, and then clicked Burn. I followed my usual practice of making a disc image first, rather than risking a blank Blu-ray disc. I watched the progress of this operation over the course of a full day. The encoding took about 5x real time, or 7.5 hours for the 95-minute show. Then the app had to multiplex the Dolby track together with the high-bitrate MPEG-2 video encode, and write an image. This looked like it was going to take another hour, so I decided to call it a day. In the morning, I had a 23 GB disc image, and I burned it to a blank TDK brand BD-RE rewritable disc in about 45 minutes. (A BD-RE disc is a bit pricier than a write-once BD-R. However, since you can rewrite hundreds of times while testing your product, you'll save quite a few bucks in the long run.)

Click To Enlarge Avid DVD's built-in encoder has limited options for MPEG-2 video, stereo-only AC-3, and uncompressed two-channel PCM audio. Third-party encoders such as Sorenson Squeeze will offer more flexibility.

Click To Enlarge Nearly 8 hours after beginning my encode of a 90-minute HD feature, this message was extremely gratifying.

In pursuit of playback

Whew! I now had my first homemade Blu-ray disc in my hands. But what was I going to play it on? I had heard that recorded Blu-ray discs, unlike replicated BD-ROMs, could not include the format's AACS copy protection and therefore wouldn't play back on a standard software or hardware-based Blu-ray player. Not wanting to take this rumor for granted, I plunked down $900 at Walmart.com for Philips' BDP9000 set-top Blu-ray player. A week later I got the player, hooked it up, and was quickly disappointed: the LCD status panel reported "wrong format."

Judging from my subsequent e-mails with Philips' support team, Blu-ray recordable discs are not yet ready for prime time. Apparently the Blu-ray Disc Association had just recently introduced the spec for playing back write-once BD-R discs as well as BD-REs. Philips plans to implement these new specs in its products sometime this year. Such a development pace jibes with the early history of standard DVD-R: compatibility was a huge problem for 4.7 GB discs for a couple of years, until manufacturers started rolling out more sophisticated players.

I returned the Philips to my local Wal-Mart in San Leandro, CA for a full refund. I got back in my car, and drove up the freeway a few miles to the nearest Magnolia Audio Video store. There I found Blu-ray players made by Panasonic, Pioneer, and Sony. Although the Sony player rejected my disc, both the Pioneer and the Panasonic units played it back beautifully on a giant plasma screen. I decided to get the Panasonic, which at $1,299 list was about two hundred dollars cheaper than the Pioneer.

Improvements in compatibility and performance can be as simple as downloading a little .exe file. Like other consumer electronics makers, Panasonic periodically issues player firmware updates. To keep your machine current, all you need to do is download the firmware files, burn them to CD-R, and insert the disc in the player. Likewise, Sonic provided me with updates to Avid DVD over the course of my test. Just before I submitted this piece, I installed an update that eliminated problems working with very large QuickTime files, or with embedded audio. Where the earliest "pre-shipping" version of Avid DVD tended to crash on me every other day, the current one had become solid as a rock. Since getting the newest version, I have found the time to author more elaborate menu-driven Blu-ray discs, working playlists and slideshows into the feature-set.

Click To Enlarge Notice the Metadata track (labeled as "M1") on the Avid Xpress Pro timeline, showing DVD chapter points, with markers showing where chapter thumbnails are selected. (Courtesy Spellbound Productions)

Conclusions

I plan to do further disc compatibility testing as new players come on the market. In the coming weeks, I expect to have played homemade discs in WinDVD, PowerDVD and Nero Blu-ray software players. Dell has a new Blu-ray equipped laptop, the XPS-M1710 Red model, and at CES 2007, Sony introduced a new VAIO PC, the RM1. I began testing Blu-ray recordable disc playback in the Sony computer just before this article went to press. I installed CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra player software, and it has been working nicely. I will continue testing the VAIO and plan to try other players in the near future. (See DV.com for updates on Blu-ray player testing.)

In the meantime, I've done some limited testing of picture quality-and it's already clear that Blu-ray surpasses what's possible with standard-definition discs. I compared resolution charts encoded using Avid's high-bitrate MPEG-2 codec for Blu-ray with the same charts encoded in lower-bitrate MPEG-2 for SD DVD. The fine detail areas on the latter disc looked like fuzzy gray blobs, whereas the Blu-ray version showed a clear delineation between closely spaced black lines over a white background. In other words, Blu-ray rivals tape-based HD formats, at least in resolution.

I fully expect this new technology to improve rapidly and become more user-friendly than the first-generation gear mentioned here. I am also looking forward to the offerings of the HD DVD camp, once they introduce a recordable disc drive. For now it's good to know that high-definition discs have become practical for those of us outside the Hollywood bubble.

Click To Enlarge I cropped and enlarged a section of a homemade resolution chart to show the clear delineation in this image derived from a 1920x1080 MPEG-2 file encoded at 30 Mbps.

Click To Enlarge Here is the same chart, created at 720x480 anamorphic, converted to 8 Mbps MPEG-2, captured as a frame grab from VLC Player, and enlarged in Photoshop to approximately match the size of the HD image.

Click To Enlarge This image was given to me as a 3 megapixel digital still. I downscaled it in Photoshop to 1920x1080, encoded it to Blu-ray MPEG-2 spec, and then made a frame grab. Back in Photoshop I cropped it to what you see here. (Courtesy Curtis Corum)

Click To Enlarge This image originated from the same file as the HD version. I downscaled it in Photoshop to 720x480 anamorphic, encoded to SD MPEG-2, and then made a frame grab. Back in Photoshop I enlarged the image to approximate the composition of the HD version. (Courtesy Curtis Corum)

Click To Enlarge This is the original 3 megapixel image, uncropped, before it went through the Blu-ray and SD-DVD conversion process. (Courtesy Curtis Corum)

NOTES ON TEST IMAGES After completing over a dozen simple Blu-ray Disc (BD) projects, I was curious to see how the same images would fare when played back from up-converted standard-def DVD. In our screening room at Video Arts, we have a Sony VPL-VW100 HD projector, which can adequately fill a 10-foot-wide 1.78 aspect screen. I invited visitors to look at SD and BD versions of the same content, played on the Panasonic BD player. Most of the time, viewers reported a significantly better picture from the BD disc. (Due to the low light levels reflecting off the screen, I could not adequately capture the experience with a digital still camera.) I was able to capture the analog output of my Panasonic BD player, but it didn't look as sharp as the HDMI out. I was unable to make frame grabs from the player's digital output. In the end, I made frame captures from the source MPEG-2 files that were used to make the discs. The resulting images roughly approximate the experience of being in a dark room watching a Blu-ray disc and an SD disc on a large high-end display.

TESTED GEAR AUTHORING SYSTEM Avid Xpress Pro 5.6 with Avid Studio Toolkit, installed on an HP xw8200 PC with an Avid Mojo box for SDI video input/output PLAYERS CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra (software player) WinDVD BD (software) Samsung BDP1000 Philips BDP9000 Sony BDP-S1 Sony PlayStation 3 Sony RM1 VAIO PC Panasonic DMP-BD10 Pioneer BDP-HD1 DISC WRITERS Pioneer BDR-101A (installed in authoring station) Sony BWU-100A (installed in a Sony VAIO PC, used for disc copying and playback) BLANK DISCS TDK 25 GB BD-R (write-once) and BD-RE (rewritable) Maxell 25 GB BD-R and BD-RE Verbatim 25 GB BD-R and BD-RE DISPLAYS Sony VPL-VW100 1080p projector Sony SDM-P234/B 23-inch LCD monitor

BDAV OR BDMV? Avid DVD and Sonic DVDitPro HD utilize a new application format called BDMV, short for Blu-ray Disc Movie. The minimum feature set for BDMV allows for all the things you get in SD-DVD, such as menus, scripting, multiple audio and subtitle tracks, and alternate video angles. You get some of these features with the Avid/Sonic BD product-but a whole lot more with high-end authoring systems like Sony's Blu-print and Sonic's Scenarist. Among other things, you get multiple independent picture layers for background video, foreground video, subtitles and something called "presentation graphics." Speaking of graphics, in high-end BDMV systems, you can do overlay graphics in 256 colors, rather than the paltry four colors available in SD. Scenarist and Blu-print can animate on and off-screen using a variety of transition effects as well. For advanced interactivity, the BD spec adds on Blu-ray Java, which integrates with the BDMV application. But don't expect to see the capabilities of Java added anytime soon to basic authoring apps; the big Hollywood authoring houses are just beginning to play around with Java for studio releases. There is another, much more basic framework for video content on BD-R and BD-RE discs. BDAV, or Blu-ray Disc Audio/Visual, was originally intended for off-air HD program recording. Unlike BDMV, there is no provision for creating menus in this alternate framework. Set-top players that can read BDAV discs are only available in Japan at present, but stateside, prosumer PC apps-such as Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus and CyberLink's PowerProducer Next-Gen v4-allow you to convert HDV footage to Blu-ray using BDAV. A BDAV disc that I created with the Ulead software played just fine in a Sony VAIO PC, but as of mid-March, BDAV remained an unrecognizable format in my Panasonic set-top.

Avid DVD by Sonic (part of Avid Studio Toolkit 5.6)

DVD and Blu-ray Disc Authoring Software, Avid Technology

$1,295

DV Score:

Pros:
The world's first budget-priced, professional next-gen authoring application. Much easier to use than Hollywood-spec systems such as the Sony Blu-print or Sonic Scenarist. Outstanding image quality.

Cons:
Excludes advanced interactive features such as scripting, pop-up menus, and animated buttons. Requires transcoding for 48 kHz/16-bit AIFF audio files. HD encoding is very slow.

Bottom Line:
Avid DVD is ideal for work-inprogress review discs and simple HD presentations--and the price is right.

By David O. Weissman

Avid DVD comes bundled with the latest Windows-only incarnation of Avid Studio Toolkit, which also includes Avid 3D and Avid FX. All of these programs integrate tightly with Avid's Media Composer and Xpress Pro editing systems. In turn, the NLEs have "Send to DVD" scripts that send metadata from an editing timeline into Avid DVD. You can insert chapter points into DVD timelines automatically, as well as add thumbnails to chapter menus. Avid has clearly designed Studio Toolkit to compete head-to-head with Apple's Final Cut Studio and Adobe's Production Studio; but this review zooms in on the Blu-ray authoring features of Avid DVD.

DV reviewed one of Avid DVD's predecessors, Sonic DVDit 6 Pro, back in December 2005. In many areas the feature set remains the same in 2007. You can create your own menus in Photoshop and After Effects, or use the templates provided by Sonic. Making slideshows and playlists is a snap. Unlike Apple's DVD Studio Pro, however, Avid DVD does not offer scripting, which allows disc behavior to vary with differing user inputs. Nor does it easily facilitate transitions between menus. Nevertheless, the software's new Blu-ray authoring features trump these limitations. You can import high-definition movies at various frame rates, in both 720p and 1080 (interlaced and progressive); add HD-sized menus; preview projects; and burn to Blu-ray discs. It takes a long time to make these high-definition discs-judging from my tests, about 5x real time-but in the end, the image quality makes it worth the effort.

Video encoding is limited to MPEG-2, albeit at very high bitrates, up to 40 Mbps. Although you can choose VBR or CBR (variable or constant bitrate compression), you can't manipulate the GOP structure. However, Avid editors ship with Sorenson Squeeze 4.5, which has presets for Blu-ray encoding. Squeeze allows you to adjust more parameters than Avid DVD's built-in encoder-but if you stray too far from the Squeeze presets, your file might not be Blu-ray compliant. Ideally, Avid DVD would allow you to import Blu-ray compliant video in other formats from third-party compression tools. MPEG-2 isn't the only codec specified for the Blu-ray format; AVC (derived from MPEG-4) and VC-1 (derived from Microsoft's WMV-9) are much more space-efficient.

Although the authoring tool is currently limited to the Blu-ray format, Avid promises HD DVD support will be added in the near future. The company also promises to support (at some point) the VC-1 codec as importable media for Avid DVD.

According to Scott Epstein, Avid DVD's product manager, the software will create a CMF image file with AACS copy protection. With this-and an AACS license-you can send your Blu-ray project to a replication facility. Right now, Blu-ray disc pressing is far more expensive than standard DVD manufacturers-only a handful of big-time Hollywood replicators can handle Blu-ray orders today-but it's essential if you want a disc that will play back on any Blu-ray player. Otherwise, you can record and duplicate your own BDR or BD-RE discs-but you then have to ensure that your client is equipped with a compatible player.

If you need to make next-gen discs now, and you don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, Avid DVD is an excellent choice. If you're not an Avid user, you can purchase the standalone equivalent, Sonic DVDit Pro HD, for under $500. (Of course, if you do this, you will miss out on the additional features and tight integration of Avid Studio Toolkit.) Either way, you'll get a simple, easy-to-use high-definition disc creation system.

Pioneer BDR-101A

Blu-ray Disc/DVD Writer, Pioneer Electronics

$995

DV Score:

Pros:
As the first Blu-ray drive on the market, it dependably writes 25 GB BD-R and BD-RE media.

Cons:
The drive's 2x Blu-ray burn speed is substantially slower than standard DVD writers. Will not write to 50 GB discs. Will not write to CD-R media.

Bottom Line:
The BDR-101A could be the drive of choice for early adopters, reliably burning discs from major media brands like TDK, Maxell, and Verbatim.

Requirements:
Windows XP or Windows 2000; CPU speed of 150 MHz or greater; 128 MB RAM or greater.

By David O. Weissman

Click To Enlarge

Way back in 1997, if you wanted to break into the brand-new authoring business with the world's first DVD burner from Pioneer, you had to pony up $17,000. Nine years later, Pioneer's first Blu-ray Disc writer, the BDR-101A, has arrived at a price that puts HD video disc creation within reach of most every video professional.

In these early days of the Blu-ray Disc format's introduction, the BDR-101A records only 25 GB capacity media (both write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE discs), even as dual-layer, 50 GB versions come to market. Burn speed is a little slow; a full disc records in about 46 minutes, which equates to a speed of nearly 72 Mbps. I found no substantial difference in write speeds between BD-R and BD-RE media.

The drive is also capable of reading and writing to standard DVD±R (single and double layer) and DVD±RW discs. With the proper software, it can play replicated BD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs. The ATA interface drive installed easily in an HP xw8200 PC running Windows XP-not the most state-of-the-art, highest-speed machine. I didn't test to see if this drive could be installed in a Mac, and at the time of this review, Pioneer's in-house engineering team hadn't either.

The tested unit came with Roxio Digital Media, a basic app that allows simple data copying, but not authoring. (Note: Pioneer is not promising any bundles with Mac OS X software, or any authoring software, at this time.)

The Pioneer drive was a reliable performer with numerous successful burns using Avid DVD Blu-ray authoring software over a period of several months. Although pricier than some of its competitors, the BDR-101A is a good choice for those who prefer the market leader brand status offered by the Pioneer name.

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