Gütersloh: the headquarters of Arvato Digital Services.

In mid August 2008, the Prague team completed the authoring and quality-control process. Subsequently, they sent an ‘image’ of the completed Blu-ray disc via a secure internet connection to the Germany company ADIS. Our mini-tour of Europe therefore embarks on a new leg. Destination: Gütersloh.

Gütersloh: Replication and more
So, here we are: In Gütersloh, we’re visiting the company Arvato Digital Services (or ADIS for short). On first impressions, the firm’s white, box-shaped building looks extremely sterile, but there’s plenty of life on the inside. After all, ADIS doesn’t just join in once the Blu-ray image arrives from Prague; the company is involved from a much earlier stage in the process: Andreas Bittel (Senior DVD Producer) and his team have been working closely with Concorde and DMP since the beginning of the project.

This three-location line-up — Munich (Concorde), Prague (DMP), Gütersloh (ADIS) — has proven effective since 2007, when Concorde released its first Blu-rays. ADIS serves as a sort of interface between the distributor (Concorde) and the authoring studio in Prague. As well as project management, Gütersloh is responsible for extensive screening measures and specification inspections that cannot be carried out in Prague.

Andreas Bittel is Senior DVD Producer at Arvato Digital Services.

According to Bittel, a total of six ADIS employees worked for almost five months on the “Iron Man” Blu-ray. “Of those, approximately two months formed the so-called hot phase, during which they worked on ‘Iron Man’ all day, every day”.

Specification inspection:

Jürgen Böckmann (left) explains how the BD verifier works.

The marathon process of specification inspection kicks off with testing the Blu-ray using the “BD-ROM Verifier” software. Only companies that are licensed by the Blu-ray Disc Association receive this software, which checks whether the image corresponds to the specifications in the so-called Blu-ray Book. The VC1 codec, for example, must work in accordance to the specifications. Minimal deviations occur frequently, says Jürgen Böckmann, Head of Compression and Authoring at ADIS. According to Böckmann, these are caused by the authoring software or by bad programming. Sometimes, however, the deviations are so slight that they don’t require correction.

On the other hand, Blu-ray projects have to be stopped if the problems are too serious to be allowed into series production. With “Iron Man”, they assure us, everything went smoothly. ADIS even verifies BD-Live content, to ensure than the application on the server will collaborate correctly with the “Iron Man” disc.

Final check:
Before mastering can commence, a final stage of checking takes place. Here, experienced test viewers and listeners once again examine the material closely, by burning the movie onto recordable Blu-ray discs. Using flowcharts that precisely list the links between the individual menu elements, they check if navigation is perfect and whether all of the links lead to the intended menu entries. Any errors are meticulously entered into a “bug report”. Any nasty errors that can be traced back to the video or audio encoding are immediately reported back to DMP in Prague. Once all of the problems have been fixed, mastering can finally begin.

Mastering:

On the micrometer scale: The pits on a Blu-ray are less than half the size of those on a DVD.

Mastering is the process of preparing a matrix for duplication. A laser-beam recorder retrieves the data in the Blu-ray image from a high-speed network, in the so-called Phase Transition Mastering process. Unlike DVD masters, which were made of an organic material on a disk of glass, Blu-ray masters consist of an inorganic coating on a silicon wafer. A copy of the master is then used for production. For double-layer Blu-ray discs, such as “Iron Man”, the process requires two matrices — one for each layer.

Let the duplication begin!

We’ve seen cosier-looking places: This is the interior of the Bluline II.

In order for duplication to begin, the master is taken to the pressing facility. In Gütersloh, ADIS manufactures its 50-gigabyte discs on a Bluline II production system (see box below) from German company Singulus. The system can produce both single-layer, 25-gigabyte discs and double-layer, 50-gigabyte discs, and is even used by large American manufacturers. The Bluline II is also insanely fast, requiring just six seconds to produce each Blu-ray!

The company’s in-house printing facility then applies the discs’ labels using offset printing. Packaging of the discs is automatic: At high speed, the discs travel along conveyor belts to the packing machines, which mount them in their blue cases. By this point, the corresponding covers have already been slotted into the case’s plastic sleeve.

Done: The new “Iron Man” disc is ready for sale.

Once the disc is in its case, the whole thing is wrapped in the obligatory cellophane, before robotic arms place the finished products into boxes. These are then stored until they go on sale.

Now that’s what we call expensive: The Bluline II costs a massive 1.8 million Euros (1.6 million GBP).