What could Blu-ray features do for Disney films

[2099net]

How many Blu-ray features are actually innovative? How many are just evolutionary? How many are revolutionary? How could some of these features aid our viewing and understanding of Disney movies?

While its true that most of what Blu-ray offers today is simply evolutionary, boundaries are being pushed more and more - especially as BDJava tools are created and enhanced.

Picture-in-Picture may not, on the face of it appear to be revolutionary - after all many DVDs have included PiP via various means - including Disney's own Animated Classic Bambi. However, PiP on Blu-ray is revolutionary for a number of reasons:

The Picture-in-Picture stream is totally independent of the main movie stream. This allows volume settings to mixed and adjusted, the size and position to change and also saves on bandwidth/disc space over totally re-encoding a second version of the film including the PiP track.

I think its fair to say up to now, Blu-ray has only scratched the surface of PiP content. The majority of what we're offered is somewhat bland and linear - the worst examples being "visual commentaries" which simply put the face(s) of the commentator(s) on screen throughout the movie's runtime. Hardly a major selling point. Even with normal PiP pop-ups, most of the time you question if it would be better as a full-screen mini-documentary.

But my enthusiasm for PiP increased dramatically when I played my French Silent Hill Blu-ray. For the first time, this does something new with the format. The movie has two PiP streams (Behind the Scenes which is intermittent and a version of the movie without effects which is constant). At any time you can switch the PiP track to be displayed full screen. Not that impressive for the Behind the Scenes content, but much more worthwhile for the non-effects movie. True, when full-screen the PiP track is still only SD but think what this could mean for Disney films.

Beauty and the Beast could have the WiP version encoded as a PiP track running constantly in the lower corner of the screen. However, at any time the user could switch this too full screen - or indeed view the entire WiP print full screen from the start. Viewers could compare each version however they wanted, whenever they wanted.

The same is true for graphical overlays. Existing DVDs have used these to some extent in the past (remember Anchor Bay's Army of Darkness with the storyboards encoded in the subtitles?) While DVD is limited to low resolution and 3 colours (4 actually, but the fourth is transparent) Blu-ray can display normal bitmaps of thousands of colours.

Early Disney Blu-rays used graphic overlays on their CineExplore tracks - such as Cars. Unlike the current profile 1.1 CineExplore tracks, these didn't feature any video clips, just static images (bitmaps) appearing, disappearing and moving across the screen.

But Blu-ray should be able to do better. Blu-ray can shrink the movie image when displaying graphics (Disney Blu-rays do this for the menu screen). Imagine being able to shrink the movie at the press of a button, and the remainder of the screen be filled with thumbnail images of all the concept art related to that particular scene in the film. Click on a thumbnail and you could see if expand to fill most of the empty screen while still watching the movie. Again it would allow the user to make real-time comparisons on demand.

[Margos]

The idea for PiP in BatB is a really good one! They really should do that, what are the odds that they will? I probably won't be getting the Blu-ray anyway, but it would still be nice to know that they're doing interesting things like that....

[ajmrowland]

Just so long as the WIP is HD when you fullscreen it.

And I like pip tracks, because they'll generally tackle what's not anywhere else on the disc, such as the animation tests in UP's track.

[2099net]

Just so long as the WIP is HD when you fullscreen it.

And I like pip tracks, because they'll generally tackle what's not anywhere else on the disc, such as the animation tests in UP's track.

I believe the spec for Blu-ray allows for 2 HD streams, so I suppose it could be HD, the two examples I know of (French Silent Hill BD and the Freedom Animes on HD DVD [review) are SD. But of course, HD DVD didn't have the bandwidth for 2 HD streams, and Silent Hill has 2 PiP streams - 3 HD streams on BD is probably pushing it.

I'm ambivilent towards PiP, because most PiP is done badly. But when its done well or with a purpose it works very well.