Panasonic will open the first Blu-ray entertainment disc authoring service at their Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory (PHL) in Universal City, California, on July 1st.
The BD-ROM authoring service launched by Panasonic will facilitate the production of Blu-ray Disc titles, so that consumers can experience High-Definition movie entertainment at home.
As Panasonic have been authoring DVDs in the US since 1996, it has accumulated a great deal of digital content authoring knowledge and experience. Panasonic have now installed state-of-the-art Blu-ray Disc authoring equipment at PHL.
This includes a specially developed MPEG-4 AVC encoder, and a Blu-ray Java authoring system, allowing creators to reproduce near-original, high-quality video with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI).
Some Hollywood studio experts believe that the new encoder, capable of more than twice the compression of conventional MPEG-2 encoding and outputting 1080p HD format, gives results comparable to the original.
"Our engineers worked closely with Hollywood movie studios to develop the Java-BD authoring system," said Kazuhiro Tsuga, Executive Officer in charge of Digital Network and Software Technologies of Matsushita Electric. "We listened carefully to movie studios to help us create easy-to use and high- quality BD-ROM-based entertainment titles. To make them even better, we want to engage in an ongoing dialog with the Hollywood content providers."
"Panasonic plans to offer Blu-ray Disc authoring-related services to major movie studios and other content providers to accelerate the releases of more Blu-ray titles," said Mr. Tsuga. "The introduction of the Blu-ray authoring services and Blu-ray players completes the creation of an environment in which consumers can enjoy stunning High Definition video on their Panasonic HD plasma TVs at home."
or, indeed, any other HD TV.
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