Abyss Diary - The Compression Stage


	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 January 12, 2000


	It has been some time since we last visited the production of 20th Century Fox’s Special Edition for “The Abyss”, and a lot has happened in the meanwhile. “We are now in the compression phase!” the disc’s producer Van Ling greets me enthusiastically as we

speak about the progress that has been made in the past weeks. “We are in the heavy authoring stage,” he explains to me, “and it’s coming along very nicely.” Within the next few weeks DVCC, the Digital Video Compression Center in Universal City, will take all the elements Van has been preparing over the past months and encode them so they can be used on the DVD. Every bit of video, every bit of audio and every single frame have to be compressed and encoded so that DVD players can use it and play it back correctly. Considering that there are over 20 branch points that in the movie need to be taken into consideration, and the fact that the special edition supplement disc consists of over 4000 frames of images and text, this means that some heavy duty development has to go into this title.



	Van Ling doing some ground work


	To realize the ability that viewers will be able to chose between watching the film’s 140-minute theatrical cut and the 168-minute long extended special edition cut of the movie, Van Ling and his video editor Lauryl Duplechan have spent endless hours to locate every single difference between the two versions. They break all these differences down in a chart form that allows the authoring facility to create correct branching conventions for the DVD. “What we do is to give DVCC a guide so they where the breakpoints are. We define where the minimum branch point is from were they could branch from between the two versions. A lot of this work is a combination of trying to find out where the differences are in the film, and how the authoring can accommodate this. In the end the authoring software calculates

where it needs to break exactly, because it ultimately depends on how the material is compressed. If it is highly compressed it may use a different split-point that in a less compressed segment.”

The original list they compiled contained 32 branch points but it was reduced to 20 to reduce stress on the player’s capabilities. Rather than having the player jump back and forth between a number of short branches, they combined them into one longer branch area. This makes the authoring less complex and therefore prone to fewer player and authoring errors.


	o far most of the work that had been done on the branching was almost theoretical in nature,

although it felt like very real work to Ling and Duplechan when they spend their wee-hours laying out the correct branching points. But they have not been able to see if everything they did works out as expected.
“I won’t be able to look at the result until they have authored it,” Ling explains with a laugh. “I am confident though. The folks at DVCC are doing a great job, considering



	The Abyss cast checks Van’s branching point list... yeah, right!

this is probably the most complex title they have ever done. I haven’t seen a full build yet, but they’ve been very diligent about the endless parade of materials and files that I delivered to them. Uncompressed, I think we generated about 35Gb worth of menus, animations and stills. They need to put it all together now.” To make sure problems can be solved quickly and efficiently, Van is consulting with the Compression Center every day to check the daily progress.


	Another very laborious element of the release is the extensive still gallery that has been converted from the existing Laserdisc box set. “I never realized how much was there,” Ling tells me when he points out that the still consists of more than 5000 images and text-frames. For the navigation through this plethora of images and information, Ling designed a simple navigation system that helps keep the screen free of navigational buttons and allows viewers to select the level of detail they wish to see. “With your remote control you simply skip back and forth between the images, and from a menu you can select the depth of information you want to experience,” he explains the procedure. Compressing all these images for use on the DVD is a very arduous process however. “When you deal with stills, on most authoring systems you have to deal with every single still frame as an individually-compressed unit of data,” he explains, “And every frame has to have its navigation programmed manually. When you have 5000 frames, that is a LOT of work!” In total these

supplements on the disc run for well over 2 hours, and because of the redesign, Van feels that they add much more value to the title than the ones on the Laserdisc did.


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