To encode and serve Dishing the DVD service bureaus - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, July, 1999 by Jan Ozer

With offices in Vancouver and Burbank, Rainmaker is a full-service postproduction facility with movie credits like Titanic, Free Willy 3, and Batman & Robin; television shows like The X-Files and Millennium; and prominent DVD movies like It's a Wonderful Life, Snow White, and Needful Things. In addition to straight encoding and authoring, the company offers a range of DVD creative services, including creating motion menu backgrounds, animated menus, motion menu chapter buttons, and other similar effects.

In addition to high-level white papers like "How to Select a Service Bureau," the company offers a range of helpful documentation, including an Artist Documentation package detailing how to create menus and still images for DVD production. All projects start with a DVD Job Spec Sheet, all incoming assets are inspected, and quality control testing involves playback checks, link checks, and logic checks. So far, the company has produced 20 corporate tides and completed 175 entertainment tides in-house.

IN THE END, THE WINNER IS ... YOU

Though our tests clearly demonstrated qualitative performance differences between the various companies, none passed through the process unscathed. All service bureaus were extremely professional and prompt, and we appreciate their participation in this experiment, which should do much to educate reader and service provider alike.

The first thing you should know when choosing a service provider is that all of our participants can certainly get the job done. If you're new to DVD, working with a local company will definitely make the job run more smoothly. However, in this day and age--when people invest their fortunes, buy cars, houses, and airline tickets over the Internet --you can probably get a $1,500 DVD project accomplished via phone, email, and fax.

Many of the lessons we learned during this project reinforce older lessons from our MPEG-1 days, but some are new. Here are our top five:

1. Use the best-quality input you can afford. This means selecting top formats like Digital Betacam and hiring professionals to make sure sound and lighting are optimized.

2. Before creating your menus and slide shows, get input from the service bureaus about how to optimize graphics for DVD display. We didn't, and our slide show and certain menus were suboptimal as a result.

3. Make sure the service bureau knows your target platform for DVD playback and test early and often on that target platform. Make sure the supplier performs final quality control tests on that platform.

4. If you're new to DVD, you probably won't grasp the format's true capabilities until you actually play a tide. For example, viewing our project on DVD spawned many ideas about project flow, which we would have reworked had we gotten the chance. For this reason, you should build one or two DVD-R prototypes into the budget, or plan on spending some time at the service bureau using the emulation capabilities of the authoring program to test playback.

5. In addition, it's very difficult to catch some errors until you have the project in front of you. This is another reason to build prototypes or emulation testing time into your budget.