By Andrew Shapiro
DVD, CD-Rom, Audio CD, even web-based delivery; we’ve never had so many options to deliver high quality audio – visual information to our clients and consumers. It can sometimes be a bewildering process to choose between formats. In other cases people begin the conceptualization of a project only to realize, halfway through, that the medium they had in mind does not compliment the requirements of the project at hand. Let’s take a cursory look the strengths and weaknesses of a few common formats and, hopefully, make that choice a little easier and a little earlier for the next project.
As we discussed last week, DVD skyrocketed to popularity in the late 90s and the entire time since, businesses and creative concerns have been clamoring to get their content and their promotional material onto the disc. Most people think DVD stands for “Digital Video Disc,” but at its inception it was designated, “Digital Versatile Disc.” The DVD Forum, which sets the standards and for this format, promised that the faster read speeds, increased storage capacity and flexible-authoring standards would allow the disc to serve as a wide-ranging platform for audio, video and interactive content. It certainly has. DVDs quickly became the choice to distribute not just feature length video, but high volume digital content such as encyclopedias, video game entertainment and high fidelity surround sound audio content.
In many ways, DVDs can be thought of as a larger faster storage media than CD-ROM with all of the capabilities of that medium and the capacity for high-quality full motion video. In order to fully assess its capabilities, however, we should separate the notion of DVD-ROM as a storage medium, and DVD-Video as a playable format.
DVD-Video discs have a specific format and compression for both video and audio. In addition, despite their impressive interactive and random access capabilities every piece of content on a DVD-Video disc is ultimately either video or audio. Clever authoring engineers can arrange this content in such a way as to give the “illusion” of deeper interactivity, but in the end, the programming and structure of a DVD-Video disc is much simpler and less flexible than a custom program developed for CD-ROM. One excellent example is a small quiz game. You may have seen a game like this on a Disney DVD, and many of our clients like to have knowledge checks or quizzes for their training and informational content at the end of their programs. As I stated before, each piece of content on a DVD is an audio or video asset. So even something as simple as keeping score on a 3 question game means 4 different pieces of video or animation have to be created for each possible score outcome, 0-3. That’s a linear increase in complexity, and one that DVD can handle as evidenced by such DVD based board games as Scene It! Entertainment trivia games.
What games Scene It! Don’t do for you is keep track of which questions were right and which were wrong. Now we have a 8 possible combinations of right and wrong answers, plus the original four videos for total score.* Remember this is only keeping track of the answers being right or wrong, a binary state, let’s not even think of what would happen if we had to show the incorrect answer the player chose, followed by the correct answer. This massive increase in complexity makes DVD less suitable for many kinds of interactivity where score-keeping or status tracking is required.
This is where a simple data storage platform comes in. CD-ROM and DVD-ROM allow us to choose a development platform that is best suited to the requirements of a project. Designers and developers can choose from Java, Flash, HTML and ActionScript authoring environments among others. Such programs can offer enhanced interactivity, status tracking, score keeping and more. Even better, they can then use database applications to upload the information they gather such as demographic data or training performance scores to a central database the content owner can use to further tailor the product or user experience. Dense storage mediums can also provide multiple format content such as image files, PDF documents, video and audio in their native formats without additional compression.
Certain trade-offs must be considered. While disc based interactive content has a huge amount of flexibility, it brings up compatibility issues. Executable content requires a computer. It also has to be concerned with the particular platform it can be run on. Mac and Windows hybrids can be made, however that increases development time and cost. Autorun programs can no longer be guaranteed on a modern OS, and even the highest budget title runs into compatibility issues the developers cannot have foreseen because each hardware configuration may differ. As a result, the control over the user experiences tends to diminish with increased content flexibility.
These problems bring us full circle to talk about the advantages of DVD-video. DVD-Video is unconcerned with the Windows / Mac divide. As long as the user’s system has a DVD drive and the software required to play DVDs, they will operate identically on a range of systems. DVDs also have the advantage of playing in both computers and set-top players making usage more convenient and less equipment specific. Finally, the DVD-Video standard promises high quality audio and video delivered on any system robust enough to play back a DVD.
In the end, the decision must be made based on the nature of the content. Content that is strongly biased to audio and video thrives on DVD without the potential pitfalls of compatibility problems and user error or level of technological savvy. CD and DVD-ROM offer customized, flexible delivery options and a two-way path of communication between the user and the content producer. iDEA Media is pleased to offer replication and production assistance to meet both needs so we can help your project deliver the best experience to the widest possible audience.
