Abyss Diary - A multi-story presentation


	In this exclusive section we will follow the development of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment’s “The Abyss Special Edition”. In irregular updates we will keep you informed whenever new developments occur and new information becomes available, so make sure to check by frequently to keep up with the latest development on this highly anticipated title.


		by Guido Henkel November 16, 1999


	oon however, he put his imagination to work and proposed what is called a "multi-story presentation" of the film. As most of you certainly know, two very different versions of “The Abyss” exist to date. The first one is the 140-minute theatrical cut of the film. In 1992,

three years after the movie’s initial theatrical run, James Cameron decided to create a director’s cut of the movie that would better match his vision than the time-constrained theatrical cut.


	Adding 28 minutes of footage to the film, the new cut had substantially more impact and more plot points than the shorter theatrical version and has since become the preferred version of most fans. Van’s thought was to use DVD’s branching capabilities to create a DVD that allows viewers to choose which version they want to watch and be able to seamlessly do so, an idea that immediately struck a chord with the folks at Fox. There have been a few other movies before, using


	DVD’s seamless branching, like ‘Kalifornia’, ‘Crash’ and the ‘Star Gate Special Edition’ from Artisan, on which Van has also worked as a consultant. “Star Gate was the practice run for what we’re doing here,” he points out excitedly. “Especially, since we will be doing the same thing for

the ‘Terminator 2 Special Edition’. But from a creative and technical standpoint, ‘The Abyss’ is a real challenge, because we have a special version that is effectively 30 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.”

Sadly DVD’s capabilities of seamless branching are implicitly hampered somewhat by the current player generations’ limited memory, almost always resulting in a minor stutter when branching from one stream to another. Unless manufacturers start adding memory to the players for larger read-ahead buffering - which would incidentally also make layer-switches finally seamless.


	he DVD specifications ask for the ability to interleave segments to quickly jump from one path to the other, and it is as a result part of every DVD player in the market. It is essentially the same thing that happens during multi-angle presentations. The major

difference is that multi-angle segments always have to be of the same length, whereas in the case of “The Abyss” by nature the two paths have entirely different lengths and require different kinds of authoring as a result.


	Although all this is essentially part of the DVD specifications, it is still a tricky business to get it all to work correctly on all player configurations, Ling explains. He has spend many hours talking to specialists from DVCC, who are authoring “The Abyss”, and WAMO’s compression centers to make sure he has all his bases covered. At this point he doesn’t expect serious problems, mostly because the procedure was well planned and prepared. “When I talked to

DVCC about “The Abyss” I made sure to think of all the things that could possibly go wrong and they had answers for everything. After all, they did ‘Kalifornia’, so they’re familiar with the issues on a smaller scale.”

Now actually the producer of the DVD project, rather than a consultant, there was yet another major obstacle Van had to overcome for this multi-story presentation. Unfortunately the quality of the telecine transfer of the theatrical version from 1989 was not nearly as good looking as the transfer of the special edition that was done many years later. The quality of telecine technologies had dramatically improved during that time and as a result, branching from one version to the other would have been clearly visible. The difference between the two versions was so striking that it was in fact distracting from the actual experience.


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