Panasonic Authors Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray Disc

Panasonic announced that its R&D facility, Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory (PHL), worked in partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment to author the feature-only Avatar Blu-ray Disc (BD) and DVD.

According to the statement, Avatar is the first new Blu-ray release from a major studio to be produced without special features, trailers or promotional content, freeing up the maximum disc storage for the film and corresponding menu to ensure the best possible video and audio quality.

The Avatar Blu-ray discs and DVDs were authored and produced in PHL’s Advanced Authoring Centre located in Universal City, California. Panasonic’s video research lab builds on its experience, spanning more than 15 years, in working with and meeting the demands of Hollywood film professionals. The centre offers a total end-to-end production system, including capturing full HD content, Panasonic’s own MPEG-4 AVC video encoding technology, and BD-J disc authoring.

In order to deliver Avatar in full HD quality, the film master entered PHL’s Blu-ray encoding suite where it underwent a high-definition compression. Once the content was encoded, the digital files were transferred to PHL’s Blu-ray authoring engineers where the menu screen and title navigation were programmed and images, audio, and graphics were compiled. The movie then went through an extensive verification process as the image and sound quality were checked against the strictest criteria, including final review and approval by Twentieth Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment.

“We are proud to offer filmmakers a complete end-to-end Blu-ray encoding and authoring solution of the highest quality in order to deliver a breathtaking cinematic experience in a home video format to consumers worldwide,” said Jeannine Patton, Vice President and General Manager at Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory. “Avatar really pushed the boundaries in terms of cinematography detail and colour space, so it was vital that the Blu-ray and DVD versions of the movie really brought the beauty of Pandora to life. In working with one of our long-term partners, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, we are delighted to have created Avatar on Blu-ray and DVD in amazing high-quality, and we’re confident that Avatar fans will enjoy re-living the Pandora experience from the comfort of their own homes,” concluded Patton.

“To provide consumers with the ultimate high-definition experience of Avatar we needed to use an authoring partner that had the technology, expertise and experience to showcase the images and colour in the highest possible quality,” said Vincent Marcais, Senior Vice President International Marketing, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. “PHL has a long history in working with filmmakers to deliver cutting edge, end-to-end authoring services, this coupled with the leading technology offered by Panasonic made it the best partner to offer Avatar on Blu-ray disc globally.”

For more information visit: www.panasonic.net ; www.avatarmovie.com