Sonic Solutions announced
today that the California Video Center (CVC), wholly owned by Time
Warner, Inc. and a sister company to Warner Bros., has added Sonic as a
Preferred Vendor for the Warner Global Affiliate Program, an alliance of
leading DVD
production facilities to create DVD content that meets high-quality
standards.

In support of this program, CVC is working with major DVD firms such as
Sonic Solutions who develop DVD encoding and authoring tools, and production
facilities who use these tools to create DVD-based content.
CVC and Sonic are also partnering to establish Warner Bros. Authoring
Affiliates, a group of facilities that can provide DVD authoring services —
such as
creation of menus, layout of interactive navigation, proofing and
formatting — to assist CVC in meeting its aggressive DVD production
schedule; to date, CVC is
about to author its 1000th title. Many of these titles were authored on
behalf of Warner Home Video in support of its aggressive DVD roll-out
schedule.

“The goal of the CVC Global Affiliate Program is to encourage broader
development and replication of DVD content while retaining the highest
levels of
quality,” said Darcy Antonellis, SVP, Operations – Technical Operations,
Warner Bros.
“With the unprecedented consumer support for DVD, titles are becoming
increasingly more sophisticated with elaborate menus and complex navigation.
At
CVC, we want our Authoring Affiliates to be able to exploit the full
capabilities of this exciting new medium. Working with companies like Sonic
Solutions, we are
confident that the production tools are now available to deliver the quality
and complexity we require.”

The Authoring Affiliates program has been designed to facilitate the
seamless transfer of projects between production facilities. For example,
CVC may work
with an Affiliate to create alternate versions of a title — U.S., European,
Asian — by developing menus and navigation in multiple languages and then
moving the
project to CVC for final quality checks.
In support of this goal, Sonic Solutions has developed technology in its
DVD Creator system which provides the ability to import assets from a
variety of
sources for authoring into the DVD format, and which can be passed among
multiple Affiliates.

One of the first Authoring Affiliates is COMCHOICE, a Los Angeles-based
firm specializing in interactive multimedia development.
“The DVD market is exploding,” said Bob Hively, COMCHOICE president and
CEO, “and we are enthusiastic to be working with CVC and Sonic Solutions.
We chose Sonic’s DVD Creator system because it gives us the quality and
productivity we need to handle a high volume of top-run titles. As a CVC
Authoring
Affiliate, we can use the Sonic DVD Creator system to leverage our
significant expertise in interactive media production.”
“Warner Bros. is the leader in the release of films on DVD as well as a
pioneer in DVD replication,” said Mary Sauer, senior vice president of
Business
Development at Sonic Solutions.

“Sonic is the leader in DVD production systems, with over 300 locations
using DVD Creator and DesktopDVD systems to create DVD titles. Much of the
content our users create is replicated at Time Warner facilities such as the
Warner Advanced Media Operations (WAMO) plant in Olyphant, PA. With our
complementary activities, it’s only natural that Warner and Sonic
collaborate on this project.”