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Preparing graphics for Blu Ray

Wed, 2008-09-17 00:35 — Stevey K

Hi All

Being a graphic designer first and foremost and been involved in designing Video and DVD sleeves since the early days a natural extension of my skills was originally (before being able to author ourselves) to design the menus for the authoring houses to use. With help from various books, internet sites (Trai's site was a great help back then) and the authoring houses themselves it was fairly easy to get to grips with the "rules" to create both still and moving menus using Photoshop (and back then) After Effects.

Of course later we actually took on the authoring as well and several hundred discs later....

Now comes Blu Ray. The same kind of situation is arising. We are not at present in a position to create Blu ray discs for authoring (unless something good is on the horizon???) unless we go with something like DVDIT Pro HD which create not much more than a DVD that is hi def as far as I can tell (in terms of the menus and functionality that is - no pop up menus etc)

We can however find folks who can create the discs which we can then "sell-on" to our clients. Of course just because they can create Blu Ray's doesn't necessarily make them designers...

So the question is how would I go about creating the graphics and moving elements for Blu ray menus. I have done a search on the web and there seems to be a paucity of info. From what I can gather the graphics can still be created in Photoshop as starter and I think are presented as PNG's to take advantage of that formats transparency presumably...

But what size do you do them? 1920x1080 at 72dpi? Do you need Title Safe and Action Safe? What if I want moving elements - can I use Motion? What about the overlays? Pop up menus - chapter menus often have a roll over effect where the currently selected chapter "screen" is larger than the rest that roll along...

So many questions!!!!

Hope somebody can help or point me in the right direction - I know Sonic do a plug in for Photoshop to help but I am guessing that i is only for use with Scenarist and knowing Sonic it's extortionately expensive...

I am guessing this question is probably way more complex than I have made it...

Steve

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Thu, 2008-09-18 03:05 — Stevey K

Further research...

Hi Larry

Thanks for this feedback - certainly would be interested in helping out in any way.

Some further ferreting around on the net has thrown up this site: http://www.reykroona.com/?page_id=35

This has some interesting tutorials on creating Blu ray and more specifically the graphics. Starting point still seems to be Photoshop (and After Effects) - fine by me :-) and then the format used is PNG (to exploit it's transparency I guess). It would seem even moving menus that slide in and out use PNG image sequences. It also explore Scenarist's Designer PS plug in for Photoshop which runs scripts to ensure that your menus are in the right format for Scenarist to use (I don't know if that means it can be used in other Blu ray authoring software as well?)

The whole thing however seems to be massively complicated....!!!! Creating the menu graphics isn't it's the hoops you have go through afterwards...

As it stands at the moment my requirements would be for a tool that has the functionality/ease of use of say DVD SP but can leverage the facilities that Blu Ray offers - support for high end audio, Pop up menus and the like and to be able to create an image that can then be replicated reliably.

I am happy to be able to create the actual graphical elements outside of the software (as I currently do with DVD-SP) plus the encodes externally. I need something that can put it all together. I can't see most of my customers wanting flashy games, internet interactivity etc... (course I could be wrong). So my understanding is that is achievable with HDMV. I think what they want is to be able to basically present their films/programmes in high def but would expect that if they were on blu ray they would have pop up menus... anything else I suspect would be a bonus...

Be interested in being involved in any Beta program but don't currently have a Blu ray burner/player for my Mac...

Steve

Wed, 2008-09-17 14:46 — larryapple

Blu-ray Graphics

Hi Steve,

We have been busily working away building the infrastructure needed to author a recordable Blu-ray disc. We also have a start on BDCMF for replication, but have decided that the basic authoring capabilities must come first. So far we have found the consumer apps completely unable to produce anything even slightly compelling, so, unlike in the early DVD Studio Pro days, we have nothing worth "editing after". This means we must do it all.

The higher-end people seem to be fixated on Java, which is understandable in the highly competitive studio environment. But even the HDMV Blu-ray capabilities are amazing, and have not been fully exploited by the professional apps. Blu-ray also permits mixing HDMV and BD-J titles, so there is no reason that much of the "heavy lifting" can't be done in the more efficient and reliable HDMV layers, and Java used for internet connectivity and games.

So back to reality, one of our most important tasks is to build a flexible HDMV menu authoring system. We have been using BDAfterEdit as a research tool and development environment. It is already capable of of displaying and capturing to our database the menu components of existing HDMV Blu-ray discs. A great example of this is "Ice Age Meltdown", authored by MX. All of it was accomplished without using one line of Java!

Standard Definition DVD's have 16 16-bit registers. HDMV has 4,096 32-bit registers. Our intention is to build templates and components that take advantage of this power, without the author needing to learn the "assembly language". Later, when we do Java, we will again build a layer on top to make it easier for the user.

But without looking too far in the future, the first task is to build some flexible menu components, that can take Photoshop images, but that do the menu creation manipulation within our application, not Photoshop. After all, Photoshop doesn't understand anything about motion or menus.

We are very open to your input (and others) towards this goal. We must keep the initial beta group very small, for manageability, and we also will require an NDA. This is because BDAfterEdit exposes or will expose quite a bit of our proprietary technology, and we do not intend to expose it to everyone until we have a product and potential revenue stream. We do expect to release a stripped-down version of BDAfterEdit as a fully-functional demo within a few weeks.

Regards,

Larry

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