BD title production (NIN)

[Jazar]

Ganked from AVS. Good to know BD has the edge!

quote:
I'm a member on the Nine Inch Nails fan club and I found some interesting info posted there in the forum regarding the band's upcoming Beside You In Time concert release on all three formats: DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray disc. Having attended the concert several times as well as the 2000 tour (and owning the FANTASTIC ...and all that could have been DVD) I'm very excited about this release. Trent Reznor of NIN has always maintained consistent quality releases.

Regarding the "three formats" here's what Rob Sheridan (behind the scenes tech guy of NIN) has to say regarding the three releases:

To follow up on some of the DVD details from Trent's posts above:

- All three formats of the DVD will have the same video content. There will of course be differences in quality/resolution of the video/audio. There will also be some slight differences between the three which relate to technical limitations of each format. This is all very peripheral stuff, and we'll be laying out the exact, detailed technical differences between the three versions as they become clearer. If you're considering purchasing a high def player for this release, you should wait until we're able to see finished, manufactured versions of both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, at which point we'll lay out the pros and cons of each, at least in terms of our release. The discs are still in the authoring phase, but as of right this moment it looks like the Blu-Ray version will have a slight edge over the HD-DVD in terms of quality and technical aspects. I also want to put together a detailed FAQ for those of you who might be considering upgrading to HD and are confused about all this (it is VERY confusing stuff), so hold tight on any major purchases for now.

- But to make it clear: the track listing and bonus content are exactly the same between the three formats.

- As for the technical hurdles Trent mentioned: There have, as always, been many. We chose to put this out in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, both of which are very new and largely untested technologies. On the production end, people are still figuring out what they can even do with these formats, and there has been a great deal of testing and tweaking involved. The current challenge is unfortunately something that we faced with AATCHB as well, and that's the issue of encoding the video. Without getting too technical, video content on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray still needs to be compressed in much the same way video is compressed on standard DVD. The type of compression used is much better suited to movies, which have a lot of scenes of people talking, slow pans, still shots, and other imagery with relatively little movement. Our material is extremely unique in that it is very frenetic, with lots of motion and lots of aggressive strobe lights. Put simply, it is a huge challenge for video encoders, and it's the reason AATCHB had to be split onto two discs: At the time, we couldn't get high enough quality video to fit on one disc. Thankfully DVD codecs have improved since then and BYIT will fit on one disc, but we're still having a great deal of trouble perfecting the high-definition encode. Apparently the authoring facility has already put 200 man hours into encoding our feature, and it still has a long way to go before the quality is up to snuff. There is quite an art form to a good encode that I didn't really have an appreciation for prior to this experience. Adding to the challenge is that the codec they're currently using for HD is still under development. In the end we'll have a great-looking high def product, but it will take every byte of data available on the disc, and it may cost the sanity of a few video technicians.

- One other note: the main feature will be presented in full 1080p resolution. It was shot on extremely high quality professional video cameras - it's NOT upconverted and it's NOT HDV - so it looks pretty f*****g stunning at full resolution.

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming FAQ section to know just what is different between these two releases. They are right though...to most these are untested technologies with a lot of changes happening...

You can view the trailers here at:

http://www.nin.com/current/index.html

go to 9.23.06 NINE INCH NAILS: BESIDE YOU IN TIME to view the trailer in 1080p, 720p, or 480p. You may need to click on it twice. It'll open up in a second window.