Panasonic to author Hollywood Blu-ray discs

Panasonic, the consumer brand of Matsushita Electric, has announced that it will commence Blu-ray disc authoring services for movie studios in California on 1 July.

Blu-ray discs, like conventional DVDs, need to have content authored as a step toward physical replication as an entertainment title. Panasonic will be doing this with Blu-ray disc read-only media, or BD-ROM as it is known.

As Panasonic and other electronics manufacturers plan to introduce Blu-ray disc players this year, Blu-ray movie titles from the major movie studios are expected to become increasingly available for consumers.

Panasonic has been authoring DVDs in the US since 1996. New equipment installed for the Blu-ray process includes a specially developed MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) encoder and a Blu-ray Java authoring system.

The combination of the encoder and authoring system enables Blu-ray title creators to reproduce near-original, high-quality video with an easy-to-use graphical user interface based on Java.

The Panasonic MPEG-4 AVC encoder, capable of more than twice the compression of conventional MPEG-2 encoding, maintains the highest resolution 1080p image quality of the source.

The result is a stunning picture which Hollywood studio experts have reckoned comparable to the original.