Authoring house ScreamDVD, New York, has opened under the aegis of president Mark Ashkinos. The new venture provides encoding, graphics and replication services.
Ashkinos is a former VP of Morty’s Digitorial (now Slingshot), a New York editing facility he founded with his father. Ashkinos has become a fervent convert to DVD. A compressed video that uses the MPEG 2 format, a DVD-18 can store up to eight hours of information and is much prized for its archival capabilities due to its small sized disc. However, DVD has started to be used for other purposes. DDB Chicago announced it would convert from the fl" tape to DVD for internal use (SHOOT 11/5/99, p. 1) and DVD’s random access capabilities, allowing viewers to instantly retrieve what they’re looking for instead of scanning a reel, adds to the technology’s appeal for viewers
"If the transfer is good enough, you’ve got an original master, and you go with the highest compression a DVD can take, you can air the DVD," Ashkinos contended. "The great thing is it’s sort of like the Web—you have menus and you can go from one to the next. And it works the same exact way, except there’s no delay, because it’s all on your computer or a set top box. Access is instantaneous as long as it’s authored that way," he continued. Authoring includes encoding, the creation of the MPEG files, creating the menus, buttons and the navigation of those buttons.
Like any enthusiast, the devotee predicts its imminent omnipresence throughout the industry: "Everybody’s going to have it; all the post houses, all the big agencies," Ashkinos claimed. "I don’t see it as a long transition; maybe a year, max. A fl inch deck now is $7,000, while the DVD player is $300 or less, so there’s really no reason. There are just so many advantages. I think for an investment of $100,000, they [advertising companies] will be DVD ready." He added, "The only resistance I’ve seen is to the prices [for authoring]. But prices are coming down now that there’s more competition. Up until a few months ago, there were only three guys in New York that made DVDs. And now I think that number has doubled. So the prices are coming down, and everybody benefits from that." Ashkinos also predicts they’ll be a DVD recorder within a year or two, as soon as manufacturers resolve compatibility problems.
According to Ashkinos, DVD is an emerging field whose professionals will be specialists, much like editors or graphic designers. "It’s very complicated to do all the encoding, authoring, menu structure, bit rate, and navigation; it’s very computer oriented. That’s where I come in," Ashkinos explained. "I’m going to be able to do all the menu structure and all the navigation, and make it look like a feature film on a DVD."
ScreamDVD’s staff currently consists of Ashkinos and the freelancers he hires for projects with multiple menus. He rents office space from Slingshot, though the two companies are not affiliated and Ashkinos expects to move into bigger premises within the next few months. "I’ve got one system and some big plans," he laughed. "I use the Sonic Solutions Creator, one of the few Mac-based systems. It’s great in the ad industry because everybody is Mac-based. The image quality is incredible, and that’s more important than anything else."
He is working on several projects, including a director’s and an editor’s reel. A reel can take some time, Ashkinos explained: "If it was simple menus, it would take just a day or two." The cost is anywhere from $4000 and up, depending on the complexity of the graphic menus as well as how much footage is being authored. "For a one-minute spot," he said, "I could use 8 megabits a second [megabit rates vary with the amount of motion in the video, and usually hover around 8 megabits per second], and knock it out in a couple of hours and be done. But it’s never that simple."
For reps, the advantages are long-term: "Instead of sending out five or six fl"s for each of these people, they send out one DVD and you can see everything on it. And they [clients] can click to anything they want, clicking on a button and going right to the spot," related Ashkinos.
ScreamDVD offers DVD-Videos and DVD-ROM, a hybrid that can access ROM computer files while maintaining video quality on either a computer or a set-top player.
