Stuart Little Event


	A look at the creation of the Stuart Little Special Edition

	When film fans talk about “The Mouse” they usually refer to Mickey Mouse, but in recent times, there is a new kid on the block that has charmed its way into the hearts of moviegoers, young and adult alike. The name is Stuart Little, and this little furry rodent has just seen his first adventure in a feature film by Columbia TriStar. Now, in collaboration with the film’s director Rob Minkoff, the studio has prepared a beautiful DVD for the movie that will be released one of these days. Not only does it contain a magnificent version of the film itself, but also a series of entertaining and informative supplements that make “Stuart Little” a remarkable release. Recently, Columbia TriStar Home Video, a Sony Pictures company, invited selected members of the press to the Sony Pictures Studio lot in Culver City to sit down with director Rob Minkoff and Sony staff members who have been involved in the production of this DVD. Before getting together for a rather informal meeting with the mastermind behind the film, a tour through the sacred halls of the Sony Pictures DVD Center was on the program, which is located in the Capra building on the Sony Studio lot.

After a brief introduction, Leslie Haas, VP and General Manager of the Center who helped setting it up more than three years ago, took the small group on to a tour through the entire center, starting with the facility’s DVD screening room. This is a home theater-like room with state-of -the-art equipment. Designed to be the “perfect” listening and screening environment, the room has been designed, adjusted and calibrated with the help of sound guru Tomlinson Holman, whom many of you are certainly familiar with as the “TH” in “THX”.

From there the group went on to see the main equipment room of the center where digital masters are served into the network. It is basically a room filled with computer monitors and professional video stations, as well as several machines that are used to feed the audio mixes of films from tape into the system network where they can then be worked with. This room is the heart of the facility as it does not only serve for the DVD production, but for all digital content delivery, including high definition television. As a result is contains a vast assortment of video and audio



		The compression room, where the video material is encoded for use on DVD.

decks to cover all available professional formats of the industry, ranging from D1 and D2 to Digi-Beta to 24-track audio masters on reel tape machines. Working in two shifts, the Center is working on more than 60 projects at any one time, which includes a large number of foreign language work, as we should see later.

After that we got a glimpse at the video compression room. Here, compressionists use the raw data fed into the system to compress the video stream that will be used for the DVD. Relying entirely on proprietary software, here lies the secret of the high quality of the DVD transfers we get to witness with almost every one of their releases anew. The soft- and hardware used to compress the video is unlike any other system in the market and achieves much lower data rates while maintaining a high level of quality throughout. Sony Pictures is able to work with rates as low as 3.2 mbps and still get a great picture quality out of it. “Stuart Little” for example has been compressed at a 3.75 mbps bitrate, which is astoundingly low considering the superior quality of the release. In multiple passes the video is analyzed, compressed and finally tweaked until it holds up to the scrutinizing eyes of the compressionists.



	Here all the materials that will have to go on a DVD are assembled and tracked in long elaborate lists.

Preparing a content-rich DVD obviously takes some coordination and at the Sony Pictures DVD Center there are people who are dedicated to make sure all the elements come together in time and fashion so that the final disc can be assembled at a given date in order to make the production deadlines. Armed with project management software and database applications, flowcharts and elaborate content listings are prepared that are then used by the different people working on a project, like the menu artists we got to visit after that.

Using mostly Adobe PhotoShop and After Effects, the menu work at the Sony DVD Center is done on PCs exclusively. Skilled artists create the many menu screens we get to see when the discs are finally revealed. As we were there, we got the chance to take a look at the menus for “Men in Black” and “Bicentennial Man,” a release the DVD Center is preparing for Buena Vista.

An audio technician then invited the group to his little kingdom where he takes the audio mixes from the system and compresses them for use on the DVD. Interestingly, unlike the video streams, audio streams are compressed in real-time, something that is currently impossible in the video domain due to the computational power required. These audio preparation rooms are fully equipped to handle a variety of formats and as we informed you earlier, Columbia is also preparing their first DTS titles there at this point, including the DTS version of “Men In Black.” Calibrated, perfectly muffled for the best possible acoustic reproduction, the audio tracks are treated with the same importance at Sony Pictures as the video. The audio is cleaned up entirely to make sure it stands up to the listening environment of a home theater and the studio also makes sure to use re-mixes of the soundtracks that have been prepared for near-field listening. Since big movie theaters have a very different acoustic behavior than home theaters and living rooms, this ensures that the movie has a balanced mix for the DVD presentation that has been adjusted for that particular presentation. Only very few studios, including New Line Home Video, go through this process currently, but the result is more than obvious, as these corrected mixes do not have the imbalance between effects, music and dialogue found in many directly converted releases.

Once the disc is finished and assembled, the DVD Center uses emulators to test the disc. These hard disc based emulators avoid the need to burn DVD discs to test the product and as such allows for much faster turn-around times. In rigorous quality assurance programs the disc is then tested with these emulators thoroughly. Every button, every menu entry and every switch is checked, while every line of text on the screen is proofed. Since the DVD Center is also working on international projects it is important to have international and multilingual staff members here, who can truly evaluate the product. It may be a tedious process and I am sure most of these QA folks can’t stand to see the movies they’ve been working on for a couple of years after watching the movie so many times with subtitles and multiple language tracks on. Remember, Columbia discs oftentimes have 6 or more subtitle tracks, all of which have to be checked, as well as numerous audio tracks. For European releases, the number of subtitles and audio tracks can literally explode! One the project makes it through this stage of QA successfully, physical discs are burned and re-checked on a large number of player models to ensure compatibility.



		Animated and enthusiastic, director Rob Minkoff talks about the creation of “Stuart Little”

But since this whole event was about “Stuart Little,” it was time to meet the maker of the mouse. Rob Minkoff was already awaiting the group of press members to talk about the movie, and to show everyone the actual DVD. After some interesting anecdotes about the film and its creation, a visible excited Minkoff went through the disc step by step to introduce and explain the extras that are on this feature-laden disc. It was the first time he saw the final disc himself and it was very obvious from his animated talking that he is not only very proud of the movie, but also of the DVD.

After all, “Stuart Little” is the most elaborate DVD Columbia TriStar has released so far. It is also the third disc so far to contain DVD-ROM content - the other two being Ghostbusters and The Thirteenth Floor and a lot of work has flowed into this release that is also offered in two separate versions, one featuring an anamorphic widescreen version, the other in pan and scan. Minkoff was involved in the creation of the DVD from the beginning, while work on the actual movie was still under way. Together with Sony staff members, who were also attending the vent to answer questions, he conceptualized the DVD and the supplements that went onto it. Taking a DVD release into consideration during the film’s production came very naturally to him, as he explained. To him DVD can offer the viewers so much, and with the advent of DVD in particular, more and more people are getting interested in behind-the-scenes information. He even acknowledges the fact that special edition DVDs and Laserdiscs have produced a completely new breed of young filmmakers who practically learned their art through the supplements found on these releases.

“I think the thing that is so great about special editions on DVD and Laserdisc is that many young directors use them almost like film school classes,” he notes. “It is a great way to get an insight into the work process of experienced directors.” As such Minkoff found it important to share his considerable knowledge in the field of animation with the world, hoping that his work could inspire others.

At the same time a title like “Stuart Little” caters to a variety of people, from the youngest viewers to the most discerning viewers, which made the disc a perfect title to test the waters with separate widescreen and pan and scan releases. While Columbia TriStar is fully committed to release anamorphic widescreen versions in the future, it is also important for the studio to know, what level of acceptance pan and scan releases have so that they can potentially be offered as additional releases in the future. Since special editions use up most of their space with



		The team behind the DVD faces the crowd for question.

supplements, a release that contains both film transfers and all the extras on one disc are not practical at this point, as DVD-18 replication capacities are not existent and not expected to grow significantly in the near future.

After everything was said and done, it was clear that this release is an indication for things to come. Although “Stuart Little” is Columbia TriStar’s most elaborate special edition to date, it was clear that bigger things are already on the horizon - and “Men In Black” came up more than once in that respect. For now, “Stuart Little” serves as a shiny example what a great and inspired movie and a motivated team of experts can do to create a DVD release that is truly remarkable.




				April 11, 2000


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