Last week the THX Best Practices Laboratory for Windows Media® hosted a special HD DVD authoring session at its Raleigh Studios facility in Hollywood. The Best Practices Lab (BPL) offers the Hollywood community an environment in which to objectively evaluate new technologies for professional post-production and consumer applications.

The HD DVD training, designed to get authors and compressionists up and running on the production of HD DVD titles, provided instruction to 93 people from 51 companies on the end-to-end HD DVD workflow and the latest technologies from Microsoft and industry partners. This overall workflow included encoding video in VC-1, adding advanced interactivity based on Microsoft’s HDi™ and formatting HD DVD discs for replication. Specifically, the encoding session taught content authors how to properly encode with VC-1 using the latest parallel encoding tool (PEP) from Microsoft. This breakthrough tool, currently being used to author HD DVD titles by some Hollywood studios, is designed to drastically reduce encoding time and significantly reduce bitrates while still providing extraordinary high-definition video quality.

Attendees also received training on Microsoft’s HDi authoring. This training educated content authors on how to add unique advanced interactive menus and scenarios such as those advertised recently in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” where street racing can be tracked using an on-screen real-time Global Positioning System (GPS) display. The in-movie experience uses picture-in-picture to show viewers how the movie was filmed — all without interrupting the movie.