E3 Report


		By Guido Henkel

	Recently, Atlanta hosted the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and became the central focus of the worldwide electronic entertainment industry. It attracted, in the main, computer games industry people, though they were by no means the exclusive attendees. E3 is and has been the perfect venue to show the public and the rest of the industry what to expect in the coming months and years, much as the Computer Games Developers’ Conference (CGDC) did two weeks earlier.

	It was an extremely busy event, laden with highlights and parties the Sony party was the most memorable, having commissioned both an elaborate fireworks display and a performance from the Foo Fighters. E3 was a great opportunity to catch up with the state of the industry, not to mention the added bonus of meeting many of my long-time friends there. And just like CGDC did, E3 proved that DVD is all over, marking a significant change in software publishers’ stance on storage media.


	Most of the impressions I gained from the “Computer Games Developers Conference” were stressed during E3, making it clear that the industry is embracing DVD in all its diverse forms. DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, and DVD-Video were all over the place. The latter, obviously, played a minor part in this exposition, which is heavily geared towards the gaming industry. Still, there was plenty of information on DVD-Video available.

I once again went by to see my friends from Creative Labs, who have done an excellent job in the past 10+ years in pushing technological advancements. In addition to showcasing their DVD-ROM kits, they put some stress on their DVD-RAM drive, released just in time for E3 and probably available in stores as you read this. The disc can store 5.2 GB of data, which is less than a regular DVD-ROM disc can store; still, as a storage medium, DVD-RAM is a significant step forward, by far exceeding current storage capacities of ZIP, JAZ and other currently available drives. Don’t expect to be able to copy your favorite movies from one disc to another; the formats are different and

since DVD Video is not a linear format like VHS, it requires extensive authoring to make sure everything is working properly (which I’ll get into a little further down).


	When I left the hall I went by the booth of a company called “OptiDisc”. Based in London, OptiDisc produce a simple protection method for all kinds of optical discs, like CD-audio, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW and DVD. Their product, called “CDfender” acts as a barrier against scratching and damage to the playing surface that would otherwise ruin an unprotected disc.


	It is an inexpensive and easy-to-apply protection that is made from a special polycarbonate film that attaches to the playing surface of the disc and remains in place during play. The interesting thing is that this transparent film which seems to stick to the disc statically is made of a material that has the same optical characteristics as the CD itself. It also effectively fills existing scratches and thus repairs the scratch damage for as long as the film is in place. It seems simple, but it’s a highly effective solution. You just peel off one side of the protective cover, put the transparent film on the disc with some simple guiding aids, peel off the other protective cover and you’re finished. You have a protected or repaired disc! It is, by the way, just as simple to remove the cover from the disc, in case it gets scratched or stained. “CDfender” will be

available by the end of June from the company’s new production facility in Wisconsin, so keep your eyes open for it!


	The most interesting experience at the show was courtesy of Panasonic. They had a huge booth in one of the halls, and they dedicated a significant portion of it to their DVD facilities. They were using this space to advocate different products and services they offer, like their authoring and compression services. Some of their vendors also offered insight into their works, and I was very pleased to see a presentation of a “Nagano Olympic Games” DVD, showing many of the games’ highlights and making heavy use of the multi-angle capabilities of DVD. Their attendance at E3 was clearly designed to make an impression, to make sure everyone knows that DVD is becoming more and more important, and to tie the knots with the gaming industry, which no doubt will have an extensive use for Panasonic’s DVD experience and technology. In the center of their DVD area, Panasonic also demonstrated a complete DVD authoring system.


	David Luberda, one of Panasonic’s senior product engineers, was kind enough to spend quite some time with me, explaining and showing me every step that is required to create a finished DVD video disc. He had the patience with me asking stupid questions, and I tell you it was quite an experience to realize just how much work goes into a single DVD release. At first, David showed me simple things, like copying the digital video master off the tape, how compressing the video works, and how data throughput is checked and regulated within their software. Image compression makes up a huge portion of the software and had an endless array of parameters to adjust. It is a great package with an intuitive graphical user interface that makes it rather easy to navigate, but with all those settings, it no longer surprises me that some discs in the market have a problem or two.

After splicing up the video into many small segments, the segments are compressed, arranged, and linked. The advantage of using small segments is clear. Whenever you have quality issues and need to recompress, you just tackle the specific segment and run the MPEG-2 encoder over it. This saves hours and hours of time, compared to other systems where movies need to be recompressed in their entirety. The next step is associating the audio with the images. Again, audio is spliced into segments and via SMPTE time-code locked with the image information. This needs to be done for each individual language track. Chapter stops are the next step in the process, and, again through time-codes, the chapter stops are located and inserted in the environment. I asked David if it was able to determine where an RSDL layer change should occur, as many RSDL discs in the market have some really weird layer change

placements. Panasonic’s authoring system not only tells you where the layer change occurs, it also allows you to set the change to an exact position and make it a cut or fade, to make a transition more seamless. The software allows playback right off the hard drives so you can see and evaluate what you have done… or forgot to do, for that matter.


	Next stop: closed captions and subtitles. They are, like language audio tracks, directly associated with the video segments. While closed captions are computer generated and only need to be linked in with the segments, subtitles require a lot more work. They are imported as images and time coded as sub-pictures with the video segments. Simplified, this means that every line of subtitle you see on screen has to be created as an image with a transparent background that will then be copied on top of the video image. The advantage is that you can use whatever font or character set you wish; the disadvantage is the time it takes to create all these images and make sure the text is correctly centered, colored etc. Everyone who has spent some time arranging tens or hundreds of screens like that in Photoshop knows perfectly well what I mean.


	Once all that is done, we have a perfectly running movie, but what about the menus? Welcome to graphic design. The menu design is a completely different beast and takes a lot of time, work, and skill. Menus are pieced together from many individual bits and pieces. The images begin as still images, imported from Photoshop, with buttons painted on them. Another sub-picture image is then created, used to show the button when it is highlighted or selected. All these images are imported into the software and set up so that the software knows how and where to place them. A pull down menu lets you select the remote control key that will activate the button and the action that will happen once it is activated.


	Now, what if we want to create chapter stops with video sequences playing inside the background? Ever noticed that all the video clips in menus start repeating themselves after a while instead of running all the way through the movie? Here’s the reason why. All the video sequences you want to insert in the menu screens need to be edited, scaled down to the width and height and compressed. You’re not actually seeing a small version of the real movie as it may seem, you are watching independent, prepared small clips only. After that each clip is chroma-keyed into the background image. This means that an area in the background image contains a certain color let’s say solid blue for argument’s sake and we tell the software that we want to play the “Chapter 1” clip in all areas showing blue. Another area, green, could hold the “Chapter2” clip and so on. The software makes it all relatively easy, but there are so many steps involved in creating these menus that I don’t even want to think about how long some of them must take from start to finish. Luckily, the software allows you export all these settings, which makes it easy to re-use a menu

	design for a completely different disc. Exchange the menu and button graphics but name them the same, load them up with the settings from another disc and voila, we have another working menu. This powerful feature also allows the author also to export chapter stops and other nifty tricks. Ever wondered why sometimes the chapter stops are slightly off on the widescreen version as opposed to the pan&scan version (Simitar’s Godzilla would be a good example here)? Now you know why. They simply use one set of chapter stops for both sides of the disc but the film transfer is off by a few frames, causing the chapter stops to end up in slightly different places than anticipated.

Once we have finished all this work, an identical image of the DVD disc is generated out of the thousands of files we have created and arranged and tied together within the software. This image file can then be used to burn the actual DVD disc. It is that simple…
If you have about $150,000 to spare, you can get this system sometime in the upcoming months to create your own DVD video discs.

These were the most interesting DVD attractions from E3. On the software side, there are a couple of titles coming out that utilize DVD technology namely, “Riven”, though I still haven’t figured out how anyone could be entertained by that. Other titles are “Dracula Unleashed” and the “Sherlock Holmes” adventures, games that had been released on CD-ROM some years ago and clearly suffered from the limited video capabilities of PCs at the time. Maybe DVD makes them more enjoyable games, as deep down in the core their were actually pretty solid.

Closing my adventure to E3, I would like to thank David once again for spending so much time with me. Leaving the hall, I stumbled into a nice little game for the Playstation that surprised me quite pleasantly. Midway are preparing a game called “Jackie Chan Superstunt” and, while it’s not going to change the course of history, it looks like a lot of fun you control a low-polygon 3D character who moves, jumps, punches, kicks, flies, ducks, and runs just like Jackie Chan. There’s no mistaking this as a fine tribute to a very talented and dedicated man who has been overlooked here in the US for far too long.

The VSDA conference is just around the corner and I am sure it will produce a lot of exciting news, so stay tuned. We will keep you posted... and by the way, please excuse the poor quality of the pictures. Those disposable cameras have a flash that might be good to illuminate the inside of a Coke can, but they can hardly keep up with real world demands. Next time we’ll have better ones. Promised.



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