Your Mother Should Know - Industry Trend or Event

Emedia Professional, July, 2000 by Peter Schworm

The information age has given rise to breathtaking scientific advances. In the fields of medicine, genetics, space exploration, communication, and entertainment, the digital revolution has fundamentally altered our sense of possibility.

As both cause and consequence of an increasingly knowledge-based era, a new notion of personal identity and freedom has emerged, one less tethered to established structures of authority. While it is impossible to predict what a world woven together by the Web, email, and CNN will look like in years to come, it's safe to expect that the vast mobilization of information will continue to expand individual autonomy.

But critics warn that these heightened personal freedoms carry a cost. As traditional boundaries erode, so do long-held collective cultural standards. A coarser, more corrupt brand of entertainment, exemplified by the brand of scatological humor practiced by the elementary school students of South Park, is precisely what defenders of traditional values find such a regrettable consequence.

But if technology has helped create a culture far less squeamish about expletives and explosions in its entertainment, it also provides the tools to shield the more easily shocked from material they find objectionable. Parental control filtering or blocking devices have become television and Internet staples, and, in theory, DVD's branching technology should lend itself to more sophisticated and universal mechanisms.

For example, players equipped with parental control implementation can be set to a specific movie rating level (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17), locking out discs with a rating above that level. More subtly, DVDs encoded with variably rated versions of a given title set can automatically skip over or replace certain material depending on the parental level chosen.

Recognizing the likely consumer appeal of having these options, the framers of the original specification for DVD-Video long ago incorporated parental control capability in their guidelines for the design and manufacturing of DVD players, including support for both lockout and multiple-ratings features in all machines.

Yet this mandate, particularly with regard to the latter option, has gone largely unheeded among DVD manufacturers. For a host of logistical and financial reasons, the parental control and multi-rating features set forth in the DVD spec have been met with staunch resistance, or simply ignored. Furthermore, because few studios have taken advantage of DVD technology to produce multi-rating discs--insisting consumer demand does not justify the extra work involved--manufacturers aren't in a hurry to modify their players, leaving content-cautious consumers in the lurch.

AUTHORING OBSTACLES

Even ardent advocates of multi-rating discs concede that producing such titles may be more costly and time-consuming than existing demand justifies. Studios must shoot extra footage, record additional audio, edit new sequences, create branch points, and synchronize the soundtrack for the alternate sequences. With longer films, the added material leaves insufficient room for both the wide and standard-screen versions without lowering the film quality through greater compression.

To date, those in the industry say consumers haven't demonstrated enough interest to warrant the significant expense of creating multi-rated DVDs, citing the commercial flop of the "V" chip as a case in point. While several multi-rated titles do exist, such as Kalifornia, Crash, Damage, Embrace of the Vampire, Poison Ivy, and Species II, according to DVD Demystified author Jim Taylor's invaluable DVD FAQ (http://www.dvddemystfied. com/dvdfaq.html.), the feature is hardly widely implemented at this point.

"From an authoring standpoint, you are adding about a 25% increase in effort," says Chris Armbrust of Marin Digital. "From a post-production point of view, you may be adding 50%. Adding versions via parental control is like putting two separate stories on one disc with a lot of common material. In some respects, it might be easier to put two separate movies on the disc."

"It isn't easy," agrees Joseph Woodbury, president of Cine-Bit Productions, which produces a downloadable, software-based DVD player that runs on Windows 98/2K and uses DVDScript to allow viewers to skip or mute certain segments. "Creating a true multi-rated DVD (as opposed to having one rating on one side and another on the other) requires that every objectionable edit be identified and the DVD encoded to either skip that sequence or show an alternate sequence."

There is also little consensus in the DVD industry on how to determine post-edited ratings, or how to develop a compatible system for multi-rating discs and players.

But Michelle Serra, a developer of educational titles in DVD and other media who is working on a documentary called DVD: A Disc of All Trades, says demand for the parental control option in DVD has been drastically underestimated.

"There is a demand outside of home-use for parents who don't want their kids to watch sensitive content," Serra says. "The schools, libraries, and prisons all want to be able to choose movie versions that are suitable for or are wanted by the audience. There is an entire institutional market that craves either pre-filtered content or wants to filter its own movies."