When most people hear Salzburg, they think Mozart. But there’s more than just stunning alpine views and classical music to this city of 150,000 people. Away from the tourist bustle, on the city’s outskirts, Sony DADC operates Europe’s largest Blu-ray production facility. Televisions.com paid them a visit.

Europe’s biggest Blu-ray factory lies just outside of Salzburg.

When we first visited the factory in Anif, near Salzburg, in late 2006, Sony DADC’s European headquarters had completed just ten Blu-ray productions and could make about 2.5m Blu-ray discs a month. Since then, a lot has changed. The monthly output, for example, has increased significantly: In October 2009, more than 23m discs left the factory (10 million films and 13 million PS3 games) over the course of a single month. From its Salzburg base and sister factories — in the neighbouring town of Thalgau and the English town of Southwater — Sony DADC Europe produces 3.3m Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs a day.

The dress code in the factory is strict: overall, headgear, and special shoes.

We had a peek at the other changes to the factory when we visited in November 2009. Sony even allowed us to visit the clean room, which requires all visitors to wear special clothing (pictured above). Here, 40 largely automated Blu-ray replication machines run simultaneously. The construction of these systems and how they work is no longer secret, as Sony DADC has been cooperating with companies such as Oerlikon and Singulus, which manufacture the replication machines, since early 2007. The aim is to accelerate Blu-ray’s establishment on the market by sharing production know-how.

Visual quality testing: A member of the Sony team carefully inspects one of the discs.

The Complete Package

These replication lines don’t only produce discs for Sony — in fact, two thirds of the company’s turnover comes from external customers. The package that Sony offers its customers is attractive, encompassing all production stages from authoring and digital-rights management to mastering, packaging, and distribution. According to staff at the Salzburg facility, the lower ratio of saleable discs to rejects in 2006 reflected the state of Blu-ray development; now, the 80-percent yield meets that of DVD production. To avoid letting the remaining 20 percent of the discs reach consumers, automatic quality control takes place in the replication machines, using optical measurement systems.

Optical checking: A measurement system automatically inspects the finished Blu-ray discs.

According to Sony, this increase in efficiency hasn’t come at the environment’s expense: Since the year 2000, the company has reduced its CO2 emissions per disc by 94 percent. It also claims to have improved its recycling processes to minimise the factory’s consumption of water and solvents.

The effort required in delivering raw data for Blu-ray productions has also dropped. In 2006, this largely involved sending the video to Sony on HDCAM-SR tapes. Now, the facility receives the data via secure high-speed data connections such as WAM or Aspera. Once the transfer is complete, the data appears in the factory’s server library, which has a capacity of two petabytes, or two billion megabytes. The Blu-ray database occupies just 32 terabytes (32 million megabytes) of this.

3D? No Problem

The factory in Anif is already equipped for the forthcoming arrival of 3D technology. Despite changes in the encoding workflow, nothing about the physical production of the discs will change, explains Stefan Perlot, director of mastering at Sony DADS. We’ll hear more details about mastering and new BD-Live developments in the interview below.

The high-precision rotation coating process uses infrared radiation.

But even at Sony DADC, some of the work isn’t automated. We saw some staff, for example, packing discs into boxes manually for special-edition Blu-rays and DVDs, since there are no special packing devices for the complex designs of box sets.

The Sony DADC team talks to Televisions.com

Jürgen Grünberger, manager of software development, and Stefan Perlot, director of mastering.

In Salzburg, we had the chance to speak to Sony DADC’s Jürgen Grünberger and Stefan Perlot.

Which software does Sony DADC use in the authoring process?
Grünberger: We use Blu-print, which is made by Sony Creative Software. For BD-Live features, we use a Java framework that we developed with several of Sony’s global divisions.

Why did Sony choose not to include an online research feature in its BD-Live feature movieIQ?
Grünberger: movieIQ was conceived as a so-called “in-movie” feature. It offers the user the option to find the information they’re looking for quickly, so that they can then get on with watching the film. But our clients believe that users prefer to do research and to input large amounts of text on conventional, purpose-built devices such as laptops or iPhones.

What new BD-Live developments can we expect in the future?
Grünberger: Thanks to BD-Live, the possibilities for e-commerce on Blu-ray discs are almost unlimited. movieIQ will soon play an essential role in this for our clients, as will community features, iPhone applications, and trivia games.

How long does it take to manufacture a Blu-ray (producing the master, replication, packing, and shipment) once the authoring is complete?
Perlot: The first step towards producing a finished Blu-ray video disc is to add encryption using the required AACS copy protection. Then we burn the master and produce test discs, whose quality we examine thoroughly. We only begin replicating the discs when our strict quality criteria have been met. If you include printing and packing, we need about 10 to 15 working days for the whole process, depending on the size of the order and how urgent it is. Very urgent orders can be delivered in less than a week.

How far has research into four-layer Blu-rays come?
Perlot: The Blu-ray specifications allow for up to eight data layers, each carrying 25 gigabytes, but complete physical and logical specifications only exist for one- and two-layer versions. The current maximum of 50 gigabytes — six times the capacity of a DVD — gives our clients plenty of room to deliver attractive content to consumers. We’re not aware of any concrete market demand for larger capacities.

What developments can we expect in optical “Near Field” storage technologies?
Perlot: Near Field recording and playback allow us to store more data on discs — up to 100 gigabytes per layer, with several layers on each disc. The data’s nanostructure is similar to that of Blu-ray discs but significantly smaller and more closely packed. Our research laboratories carried out the first technical feasibility studies in 2007. Whether — and when — this technology becomes commercially applicable is impossible to predict.

The market share of single-layer discs has increased recently. What do you attribute this to?
Perlot: We’re pleased to say that many independent studios released their films on Blu-ray in 2009, often initially in small quantities. Single-layer discs with a 25-gigabyte capacity are cheaper to manufacture than the 50-gigabyte versions — and this difference introduces significant savings in small production runs, from the authoring right through to the packaged disc.