Enter DVD

In the mid-ish '90s, I toured Steven Spielberg's facility on the Warner lot where he was aggregating and processing thousands of hours of video testimonies for his Survivors of the Shoah project. Each field tape was simultaneously copied to a Betacam master and two SP copies — one for the archive and one for the family (they got a VHS cassette — remember those?). There was a fourth copy compressed to a standard called MPEG-1. These files were to be the backbone of the searchable, interactive archive that Spielberg's team was building. The goal was to provide access to the archive from locations throughout the globe and eventually via the Internet.

At the time, there was already talk of the upcoming MPEG-2 standard, but the Shoah couldn't wait. The age of the survivors and the ambitions for the project brought a certain urgency to the schedule. When MPEG-2 became available, the compression gear would be switched out, the newer testimonies would be MPEG-2 and the older MPEG-1 testimonies would be re-encoded when, and if, there was the time and money. Such is life on the video frontier.

Around the same time, I was also touring facilities that offered a newfangled service — DVD compression and authoring. The infrastructures attached to this service were expensive. Facilities had encoding rooms filled with five-figure compression gear, presided over by six-figure compressionists. DVD authoring suites fell somewhere in cost between an Avid suite and a color correction suite — they qualified as capital investment.

You know the punch line. Today your teenager can make an MPEG-2 clip of his or her own particular testimony and output it to DVD. Simple.

Our reporters and reviewers have been following the MPEG/DVD phenomenon for some time now as it has rapidly gathered steam. This month we have put together several related articles. In our Intelligence column, you can read TrendWatch's data and market analysis on the continued rise of DVD adoption and intent-to-purchase data for DVD authoring software. In the Edit section of the magazine, Steve Mullen reviews the basic technical principles of compression. In the Shoot section, Barry Braverman and his colleagues at Burbank's Video Symphony training facility road-test hardware and software options for encoding film and video footage to DVD via MPEG-2. In the Integrate section, Jeff Sauer reviews the latest DVD authoring software from Ulead. Well known as one of the lowest cost options in consumer-level DVD authoring, Ulead now picks up on the trend in professional DVD with a pro-oriented product. And in our Display section, Beck Finley reports on an art school event that showcased the presentation potential of combining camera phone footage, DVD, and plasma screens.

We're at an interesting point in the evolution of DVD. On the one hand it is becoming a ubiquitous and fundamental format, almost taken for granted as the delivery medium of choice for just about everything. On the other hand, there is still plenty of room for misunderstandings and mistakes that can turn professional-quality video into professional-quality disappointments. Our goal with this coverage — and all our coverage of DVD — is to illuminate the pitfalls and options that apply to professionals and help you take advantage of an exciting format without having it take advantage of you.