Sonic Solutions announced today that Vidfilm Services in Los Angeles has expanded its DVD production capabilities by adding additional DVD Creatorvideo and audio encoding equipment from Sonic Solutions.
Since it began offering DVD services in February, Vidfilm, a large international post production facility, has used Sonic’s DVD Creator to encode and author roughly 100 DVD titles for a number of major Hollywood studios, including approximately half of the movie titles that were available at the Divx launch earlier this summer.Sonic and Vidfilm have collaborated to develop new variable bit rate encoding algorithms for higher quality DVD video streams and to streamline the parallel DVD workflow model which Sonic first introduced in 1996.
“Our major studio clients demand a very high level of quality and efficiency,” said Richard Andrews, president of Vidfilm, “and to satisfy them, we need to deliver the best possible picture and sound within very tight deadlines. ”We’ve achieved this by working closely with Sonic Solutions in the development of their new encoding algorithms and in the refinement of the DVD workgroup model that Sonic has pioneered. We serve the larger film studios — the most demanding clients in the world — and the support provided by Sonic Solutions has been instrumental in our success.“”DVD production can be very complex and requires different types of talent — video engineers, audio engineers, authoring specialists, and QC technicians — all working together,“ said Rick Gruber, VP of Advanced Technologies at Vidfilm.
”Our first step is to yield the best quality picture, and Sonic has provided us with excellent tools to tweak and optimize video streams.“ To deliver the volume of DVD titles demanded by its clients, Vidfilm worked with Sonic to install a DVD Creator production workgroup in which various tasks — video encoding, audio prep and encoding, QC, authoring, and DVD emulation — can be completed in parallel on a group of DVD Creator modules. ”At the same time that we prepare the video for one project, we also need to simultaneously prep and encode audio, author, emulate and QC for other projects,“ added Gruber. ”We accomplished this by creating a networked group of systems with seamless access to files across the network, and Sonic provided the technology for this parallel streamlined DVD production process.“