How long does it take to produce a BD?

[mdtulp]

Anybody have an idea on how long it takes to prep a disc for blu ray? Is it a matter of going frame by frame and remastering them in high def? If its a quicker process im wondering why the studios arnt just whipping these babies out.

89 blu's and countin

[dobyblue]

Speaking for Warner...once a title is encoded it takes one month for replication, packaging and distribution to stores.

Some people think if you miss the window for replication that you're stuck for a few months, but this is not the case...at least not with Warner.

[WickyWoo]

Some people think if you miss the window for replication that you're stuck for a few months, but this is not the case...at least not with Warner.

It takes anywhere from 2-6 weeks to get a new slot, unless you shuffle into an existing booked slot, depending on the time of year and capacity load

[dobyblue]

This is what I've received from Warner.

Our replicators require 1 month for HD and BD plus packaging and shipping to vendors.

I believe the packaging and shipping is in addition to the replication, but the replication process, for Warner, has a one month turnaround.

If the others are 2-6 weeks, that's still a lot better than the six month delay some others from another forum have suggested.

[WickyWoo]

That's replication. Not authoring, restoration and compression, which is what the OP was asking about.

The only time you get 6 months is when they're slotting it into another promotion of some kind.

Restoration time is completely dependant on the title. How old is it? How much money are they willing to spend? How good a shape is it in? They can spend months and months scrubbing and painting by hand or they can run an automated process and kick it out the door in a relatively speedy process

Compression and authoring can be as little as 2 weeks on a very basic title. If you want to bump quality, include extras, complicateed BDJ stuff, then that exponentially increases the time. At this point, a good guideline is:

Weeks for a basic title (2-4)
Months for a loaded title. (6+ weeks)

[jk1138]

Good info, this is something they should sho on discovery channel

[WickyWoo]

Good info, this is something they should sho on discovery channel

Trust me, it's really boring to watch It would not make good TV unless you think watching people code, or sitting there tweaking frame by frame (look at the color grading thing on Se7en, except far more repetative and dull) would interest 99% of viewers When you can be there, ask questions, do a little of it yourself, it's very educational. But passive viewing? shoot me, that's why they all have music going (unless they're doing sound)

Unlike game development, most of the creative side goes on before the authors ever even get their hands on it. They get shipped a stack of tapes and a design spec and make it happen 98% of the time. And what happens before that is pretty run of the mill "Go to subject, ask subject questions, go to next subject, edit into something coherent, shove commentary people into booth and prod them until they say something interesting (there are very few Kevin Smith/Kenny Johnson/Jodie Fosters in this world that just seem to do it well by themselves), edit, use rogain to try to retain hair falling out from stress, lather rinse repeat"

[181]

To the OP, probably purely for marketing reasons. If you reproduce every movie on Blu-ray instantly, you may lose focus on particular movies, lose a steady stream of income from newly released titles, and your consumers would have no movies to look forward to.

[iNCREDiPiNOY]

I want to see How is it made? on Discovery Channel, lol!

[Anthony P]

For an older movie the first step is to prep the film. It needs to be fixed up, cleaned and touched up (time degrades everything) The time will very a lot depending on condition of the film and the final quality you want.

Then once you have a film master that is acceptable you need to scan it to make a digital master

Then you need to take that digital master and compress it. And then you need to fiddle with the compression.


You also need to decide what you want, maybe create some extras.....

the next step is to create a replication master,

once everything is known and almost done you need to create test disks to make sure everything is OK.
then you need to replicate it and distribute it.

It all depends what you want as a final product. For instance for most DVDs the scan's where at 2k, the encoder tends to do a better job when it down converts while encoding because it understands the importance of each pixel in the final product better. that is why they want 4K masters. On the other hand if you want to cut corners you could start from the 2k master created for DVD for the disk (Universal did that on some HD DVDs and it shows).

PS and then there is the politics, X owns the music rights, Y owns rights for some part in some countries. Many times when there are delays (title anounced but taken off the list) it is because of negotiations that got blocked somewhere.

[hardcore_canadian]

It's too bad that because of this process, we'll probably never see a good amount of movies in HD. Older movies, lame movies that we only really own on VHS as it is.

[Anthony P]

why not? it did not stop studios from going through the same process for DVD.

[Sean4000]

John Lowry is a master of this field. Anyone see the first 20 Bond films from the ultimate James Bond Collection? He restored/remastered all of them from the original camera negatives. That's the key. Well one of them. Time does damage film, but generational copies also lead to a loss of clarity and color data. I've spent way too much time researching this subject BTW. For DTS images, the first step is a hand inspection of the entire negative. Seriously, they go through the whole thing on a double hand cranked reel. Troublesome frames are marked for later hand repairing. Lowry generally scans at three resolutions, highdef/2K or 4K. The first 9 Bond movies were restored at 4K while the remaining 11 were mastered at 2K/HD. Casino Royale was edited using the Digital Intermediate process which is 4K mastering of a brand new negative. Total time spent restoring all 20 Bond films with the aid of 1000 Apple computers: 2.5 years.

Goldfinger looked just as good as Casino Royale I swear to God. We're all going to be amazed when we see thse films on Blu-ray.

That is of course if MGM is BLu-exclusive. Are they?