Imagion AG realises and releases first European HD DVD
Imagion AG realises and releases first European HD DVD
Monday 14. August 2006
Starting today, Elephants Dream is officially available as the first European HD DVD title beyond the USA and Japan. The HD DVD title, realised by Imagion AG, based in Trierweiler (Germany), thus heralds the start of the next generation formats. The goal of the German authoring studio: to turn this pioneering release into a reference product that impressively demonstrates the vast possibilities of the new format.
The ambition of Ton Roosendaal and his movie production team, who created the animated film with limited funds, was transferred to the developers of the HD DVD. Numerous bonus contents complement the first-rate Elephants Dream HD DVD video stored in full high definition resolution (1080p). In addition to several audio commentaries, subtitles and "Making of" documentaries, a "script-to-scene" feature is also included. However, along with a picture-in-picture Making of documentary that is synchronised with the movie and can be freely positioned on the screen, the highlights of the disc are the various encoding variants. For example, the main film is stored on the disc as both a VC-1 and MPEG-2 video, which allows the user to compare the quality of the formats.
For several weeks already, the computer-generated short film, which was primarily created with free, open source software, has been attracting great interest worldwide and is enjoying a steadily growing fan community. Proog (Tygo Gernandt) takes young Emo (Cas Jansen) on a trip into the depths of a surreal machine world. The unlikely pair makes their way through to the seemingly safest place in the entire machine, only to find out that it also has some surprises in store for them.
The Elephants Dream HD DVD impressively demonstrates just how big the difference between full resolution high definition video and conventional SD video really is. As a bonus feature, the Imagion AG developer team has therefore included an option that allows segments of the movie to be compared in HD and SD resolution. Moreover, as an interactive feature, the user can seamlessly switch back and forth between HD and SD video or select a horizontal or vertical split screen display.
"With our early-on production of this HD DVD, we have definitely taken a considerable risk, since we wanted to utilise many of the new functions," says Michael Becker, project initiator and Member of the Managing Board of Imagion AG (Technical Services), who guided the entire Imagion team through the often difficult process during the past few weeks. "However, thanks to the optimal interplay between our creative heads in Project Management, Graphics and, most prominently, Technical Implementation, Programming and Encoding/Authoring, we succeeded in developing an HD DVD for the European market on this side of the big pond. We are very enthusiastic about the interactive potential of advanced content HD DVDs (iHD) and the capabilities of the available Toshiba HD DVD players, which offer compelling performance even with complex functions such as 'picture-in-picture'. Already today, we are looking forward to experiencing the superior picture quality and the new, exciting bonus features that the new technology finally enables" Parallel to the Elephants Dream HD DVD version, Imagion AG is developing a Blu-ray disc which will also be released shortly.
Elephants Dream (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org
