Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc

[Marwin]

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) president Benjamin S. Feingold today announced that authoring has been completed on the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was compressed and authored in MPEG 2 full high-definition (1920 x 1080) by Sony Pictures' Digital Authoring Center (DAC) and is now being shipped to BD hardware companies for player testing.

Utilizing Blu-ray's unprecedented storage capacity, the Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle disc features dynamic menus with full resolution graphics and animation, superior audio and unparalleled picture quality. "We are confident this achievement will help everyone understand that Blu-ray is real and poised to enter the marketplace," said Mr. Feingold. "Blu-ray will bring the highest quality HD experience possible to the home."

"We are extremely proud to deliver on the promise of Blu-ray. This is an important step for our industry in order to begin mass production of high-definition movies in the Blu-ray format in the near future," said Don Eklund, Senior Vice President, Advanced Technologies, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

"Sony Pictures authoring tools, together with our unmatched expertise, have made the first Blu-ray Disc a reality and we are thrilled to ship this prototype disc to BD hardware manufacturers for testing," said James Mercs Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Authoring Center, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

[zombie]

Good catch Marwin!

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is an odd choice but the message is clear, BD is about to become the standard for HD on disc. I would have went the whole nine yards and distributed a nice HD Fifth Element but hey, it's not like I wouldn't love the opportunity to demo CA:FT on BD if I had the chance. I wonder if this means this title will be among the launch titles.

[Patrick]

Outstanding! It is strange they picked Charlies Angels though, course... what better to first see in high def than 3 Beautiful ladies kicking butt.... yeah that was a good choice. Its just great to see Blu-ray moving along. Way to go Sony.

[phloyd]

CA-FT is one of the worst movies ever made. Though it is nice to see that they are progressing and that I won't be buying all of the movies on first release.

Of more interest to me is that they are using MPEG2, which I think is very interesting. It is something also that the 'smaller disc' promoters will not be able to do. Does this mean that advanced codecs are not good enough yet? Or are they just taking advantge of the extra space?

It also shows that DTheater titles could easily be made into Blu-ray titles since they are already encoded to MPEG2.

Cheers!

[Alex Pallas]

Sony really has no taste when it comes to stuff like this

[Guppa]

Of course it's good that they take a crappy movie with decent picture/audio potential to start with since the discs that are authored in the beginning probably won't be as good as later discs.

[Marwin]

Originally Posted by Alex Pallas

Sony really has no taste when it comes to stuff like this

This isn't really about choosing a great movie, it's about testing hardware. As the press release states the movie was authored for testing purposes, not to be one of the first BD movies released (it still might be). The reason they chose Charlie's Angels is supposedly because it has many fast motion, slow motion and vibrant pieces both in terms of colors and design which makes it good for testing. I'm sure there will be plenty of other movies to choose from when Blu-ray is actually launched

EDIT: Maybe I'm reading too much into the "testing" part of the release, but that's the way I see it.

[Gorkab]

Yep, choosing MPEG-2 provides an example of the quality, I'm sure that after, they will provide an MPEG-4 encoded BD to show them the difference, and it must be really huge !

[thunderhawk]

H.264 all the way mate