How many DVD titles do you have, and what kind of publishing schedule are you on?
We have about 85 right now, and for the immediate future, we’ll be doing two adult, one adult cable [ie, softcore] version, and one or two “mature” titles, like our Latoya disk.  So that’s four a week.

Are these original to DVD?
All our adult titles are shot for the world television market, but with DVD in mind.  Vivid is the world’s largest producer of adult material for television.  It’s far too expensive to make a multi-angle movies just for the DVD market, so we shoot our movies for television and tape and then, at the same time, shoot the extras cameras for DVD-only.

How do you actually do the multiple camera shoots?
We tend to use two and three cameras at a time.  Very rarely can you use a fourth camera, because it becomes difficult to avoid seeing the lighting setups.  So essentially we do a three-camera shoot much like any TV sitcom does.  We shoot 35mm film for the world TV market, so we sometime use two-35 mms and one Beta SP.  We’re also going to be shooting more 16mm.

How did Vivid get into DVD?
It was a normal extension of our business.  We’ve been in business for 14 years, and we’re as  innovative as the market allows us to be.  Whenever there is talk of a new format or new technology, we are generally the first to try it out.   Film, video, laser, video CD, DVD, DVD-ROM: we work in all of them.  We do sell to the American cassette markets, but our primary worldwide markets are television, hotels, motels, and foreign video.

I got very lucky with DVD.  Back in 1996 at one of the Cannes shows they were talking about how DVD was capable of storing multiple films on one disk, multiple sound tracks, languages, subtitles, and so.  In listening to them, I got to thinking we could do one movie twice and do multiple angles.  So the world’s first four-angle title was Bobby Sox, released in July of 1997.  It was interesting for us that there was this new technology we could do something with.  People like Spielberg would never allow people to change his movies, nor should he because he makes good movies.  But I thought: what a godsend that would be for a voyeur. 

When we produced our first one, we had all the usual suspects from Disney, Warner, and the others come into our booth at CES to play with it.  The guys we have doing our transfer (Pacific Coast) are very innovative.  Lot’s of other people are now doing adult titles, but they’re doing them the same as Hollywood, without angles or any bells and whistles.

Can you tell use a bit about RentProtec?
We’re going to start using Rent-Protect on all our disk starting with The Kiss, and any disks that need to be repressed will also get it.   The system definitely helps protect the disk from damage.  It gives each disk a second skin that has been hermetically sealed to the disk, yet does not interfere with video or sound quality.  You can give it to the dog for a frisbee.  It will definitely extend the rental life of all DVDs.

 By T. Liam McDonald

November 16, 1998