>Never heard about button sequences being a possibility! does that mean the menus were tracking the sequence of keys inputted or you structured menus in a way that allowed sequences to work (e.g. tons of spots at the end of a menu that all just overlap so the user doesn't notice)?
this is exactly how it worked. a bunch of buttons stacked on top of each other so that if you didn't get the sequence correct, the enter button would do the default (for each of the buttons in the sequence).
No, I was never into writing blogs or anything like that. For years, I was a solo developer, so the last thing I wanted to do was spend time writing about work after work. This was also the dark days of the internet before there were forums like this. It was all on a mailing list. I was active there answering questions like this as I felt that was the least I could do because I learned so much from other people's responses on the same mailing list.
So, having said that, what is it you'd like to know? My problem is that things that seem obvious to me gets skipped in my explanation of things, and the things I sometimes find myself talking about is nothing what someone else actually cares about. So turn this into an AMA, and we'll probably go farther faster
1. What platform did you do the development itself on, when you worked on these DVD things?
2. Did you use any proprietary software to do it? And any open source?
3. What year did you start doing these DVD things? And what year did you end?
4. How did you get into it?
5. Did you need any specialised hardware?
6. Did you work for a company directly as an employee? Or hired as contractor? What kind of company or companies did you work for? I.e. were they movie studios, or film distributors, or DVD tech companies such as whichever divisions of Sony used to make DVD players?
Wow, those are questions that make you seem very interested, which makes me want to answer.
1) The company I started working for already had the software that was the de facto industry standard for DVD authoring, Scenarist. When I started, the software was running on Windows NT. It wasn't until a bit later before I learned that it was the first version to run on Windows. It was dog slow. Things improved dramatically with the release of Windows 2000. Apparently, the previous version was being run on some form of *nix, and required a lot of text file manipulation. It wasn't until I got much more advanced before I went back to manipulating the text file versions as well myself. But for day-to-day stuff, the UI was what I used.
2) I used lots of stuff that was ancillary, but nothing proprietary or open source other than awk/sed/grep and shell scripts written using those on the aforementioned text files.
3) I started programming DVDs in 1999, and continued working shiny round discs until 2006. By the time I left, the company had garnered a few awards, had grown to 10 full time employees with multiple DVD authors, and an award winning graphics team, and was quite an interesting place. Haven't found a company since that compares.
4) I got into it by luck really. I was working in the editing department of a film post production facility. I was the youngest person there that was too eager to do things that nobody else wanted to do. That meant most of that "computer shit". This was the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 1" tape machines, reel-to-reel Nagra tape decks, and all of the other analog/digital cassette tape decks were within arms reach in the machine room that was my workspace. Clients eventually started wanting these new fangled Video-CDs which required computers (gasp!). So I started capturing MPEG-1 videos. There was another small company that specialized in interactive CDs using the old Macromedia Director software that we would contract jobs out to. This company eventually moved into a small bit of workspace within our company's space as co-op agreement. We'd get discounts on their services as well as advertise being able to do those services to our existing client base, and they would get use of our video equipment which expanded their input capabilities. I then became the liaison between the two companies. When my time at the post house came to an end, this company contacted me a week later asking me to have lunch. I started working with them a week later.
5) specialized hardware is a tricky question. To the industry, most of the hardware was typical, to someone unfamiliar, it's all very specialized. By that, I mean that the SD master tape format was Digibeta and was not uncommon to have multiple racks with multiple decks in each rack. Each digitbeta recorder original MSRP was close to $80k. When HD equipment came out, the HD-SR was the top machine, and it was $120-150k. We'd receive SR tapes and take a downconvert out of it for DVD use. So, that kind of stuff probably sounds specialized, but was typical (for well funded outfits). This is why the co-op agreement for this company was such a good deal for this smaller company. After the video equipment, there were full length PCI cards for encoding to MPEG2. Software encoding was years away still, and playback from tape to an expansion card was the way it was done. Just like with software encoding, there were "quick" one pass encoding, and then there was the slower 2-pass encoding. Both passes were done with real time playback from a master format tape machine. This made things very expensive as you were paying for the deck by the hour. Once the first DVD recorder came out at $15k, it could only record 3.5GB. Oh, Scenarist went for about $20k at the time as well. For motion graphics for menus, we were using some version of a Targa card to capture uncompressed 10bit data (ugh, the files were so large for the time). There were other pieces of equipment that were again normal for a post facility, but kind of specialized other wise. There were boxes from Teranex and (I'm blanking on the name of the other boxes) that did things like standards conversion from NTSC<=>PAL, noise reduction, etc. The toughest part was to take film original content with a 3:2 pull down pattern into it and feed it as a 24 (23.976) frame rate to the encoder for a progressive encode. This got much easier when software encoding came about and we could process data that way. This became very viable for us when Apple released the first Mac Pro Intels. We used Final Cut Studio to capture the footage, and would then reboot into Windows to use the MPEG-2 encoding software. We tried using Adobe Premiere to capture while in Windows, but their software refused to capture multichannel audio sources as discrete audio tracks. It would only create multichannel interleaved sources. It also had some other pain points for us like only capturing as AVI (shudder). I wrote a ranting review of the decision process of switching to Final Cut on the DVD mailing list that got a lot of attention. Including a rep from Adobe that contacted me through the HR department to get permission to chat to me (which was interesting of being a "correct" political move to be made). After going complaint by complaint through the rant, the rep said, you have some good points. "Would you consider switching back to Premier if these issues were resolved". They were ultimately resolved by Apple folding that space with the release of Final Cut X.
6) I was hired as employee #3 in a full time position. The owner was from England, and ran it in a very English manner. Fridays, we would all go out to lunch together, and was only expected to be in the office long enough to sober up before heading home. We did all sorts of work, but never for feature content from studios directly. We weren't on their radar since we were not located in the "cool" part of the country. We did a lot of corporate work. We did land a couple of film distributors to get back catalog feature titles or imported titles. We did a lot of DVD games. One of these was a massive 18 month long project. We knew from the beginning that the project ultimately wanted to be released as NTSC and PAL, so we designed all of the graphics in HD. Early on, the decision to solely focus on the NTSC release was made. This was a complex disc with animated graphics and a list of 300 questions that were meant to not repeat unless the disc was restarted. The programming was quite a challenge, and there were no graphics ready to be used in testing. So a series of place holders were created with the code for each question as big block white text in Impact font on black background. Then the reveal, then the answer all in similar style. Once the programming was completed like this, the disc was sent out to a 3rd party testing facility that had every single DVD player that was available to the public. Not every DVD player was the same and had different features/capabilities. The cheap Apex players didn't actually have a random number generator. It had a randomized list that would give a random appearance, but the random was the same each time. This made for poor game experience as you'd just remember the patterns. Once the programming was approved by 3rd party, the disc was ready for graphics. The UI for the system had a way to point assets to a new folder, but it was very very very very slow. Instead, we exported the programming to a text file, created a shell script using awk/sed/grep and processed the very large text file in <15 seconds. That new file was re-imported back into the system in less time than the UI would even be a fraction of the way of updating to the new asset location. The final week before the project was due to be delivered, the call came in asking if we could go ahead and deliver the PAL version (who didn't see that coming?). Graphics team already had been prepped for this. These guys (it was one guy and one gal) that had programmed the crap out of Adobe After Effects with the javascripting built in. They fired off one script, and it queued up renders of the HD->PAL exports. When those were done, we reran the awk/sed/grep script tweaked for the NTSC->PAL conversion and in <30s (it took longer as there were many more things to change), we had the PAL version of the programming. We delivered 2 days after the ask which was 2 days before deadline.
7) Now, I specialize in prepping old content that's "in the can" which is basically back catalog content that people are trying to monetize on the various streaming platforms. What I'm doing is way more in depth than that, and actually pretty cool stuff (if your a video engineering nerd). Otherwise, I'm just helping make the infinite scroll of content on your streaming platform of choice get that much longer.
It's great to have this kind of personal history written down, otherwise some of this stuff just gets lost forever.
Our first DVD player came with a copy of the first Harry Potter film on DVD, and it's still by far the fanciest DVD menu I've ever seen, with all sorts of features and hidden extras. It's clear that some serious effort went into showing off the new medium in those early days.
You should find a copy of Contact for how important they thought extras on a DVD release were going to be. Menu designs were still quite simple, but the production of making of content was longer than the feature.
That trend definitely lessened, but yes, the graphics design for menus went through the roof. There's also a few things a lot of people don't realize, but parents with small kids probably do. For certain DVDs, the looping menus have a bit of extra programming where after looping for so many times, it will switch to a menu without audio. The menus with animated transitions from one screen to the next became popular too. I'm not familiar with the specific disc of Harry Potter, but I'd be amazed if it didn't have transitions
Yeah it did. One really impressive part of it that I recall was a tour of the set that was implemented like you were playing Myst, where you could go forward, left, or right from your current position. It would play a short POV video taken by someone walking around with a camera depending on which button you pressed, as if you were freely exploring.
we did something similar for a project and absolutely, Inspired By Myst, would have been a worthy badge for the box. it is funny how the limitations within the DVD spec meant for some creative thinking to get unique results, yet there being only so much that could be done meant a lot of similar ideas. at that point, the execution is what separates.
The Matrix' Follow The White Rabbit was a good example. The MSTK discs pushed the ideas of a subtitle track to animate the silhouettes of the characters over clean video. There were lots of clever things that when seen for the first time, you nod at the effectiveness, then you think about what was done, and you nod again at the cleverness.
It made me smile a little realizing I'm now the old guy with stories. You should definitely follow up with more old greybeards (beard not required) to find out their stories. Shortly after leaving that DVD shop, I wound up moving to LA for another post house. My engineering team worked in a cubicle farm, but there was this one senior engineer that had his own office with a door! Who was this guy? He only worked on "special projects". One day, we had an offsite meeting with the full engineering team. I got the chance to chat to this mysterious engineer, and whoa did he have some stories. This guy was LEGEND! The conversation started with our common experience with film telecines (the equipment used to transfer film to video). He was surprised that I knew what a flying spot scanner[0] was, and proceeded to tell me his story that showed me how LEGEND he was. He and his brother had received a Rank telecine and over the course of a summer, converted it to a method of continuous scanning of the film by storing frames into a custom made memory bank to allow for the creation of the 2:3 telecine cadence. Because they had this bit of memory buffer, they also introduced a bit of noise reduction. Apparently, this was one of the first live capable noise reductions. So much so, that in July 1969, a certain image of a certain person taking his first steps found its way through his equipment for a little bit of clean up before hitting the air waves. After picking my jaw up from the floor, I proceed to buy this man another round from the open bar, but still. I now always try to get the senior coworkers talking.
this is exactly how it worked. a bunch of buttons stacked on top of each other so that if you didn't get the sequence correct, the enter button would do the default (for each of the buttons in the sequence).