Scenarist User Showcase - Companies doing great Blu-ray Disc authoring work

Blu-ray Disc Authoring Market Leader

Scenarist BD leads the market in Blu-ray Disc titles produced for retail. More and more companies are switching to Scenarist BD from less capable solutions.

Hear from some of the country’s top authoring houses below on why Scenarist is their only choice!

Reasons to upgrade to Scenarist BD and Scenarist UHD

Full BD and UHD spec authoring with no hand-coding ever
The fastest MUX engine available
Save hundreds of hours per project with true partial muxing
Scenarist Designer, the industry standard menu design tool
Unified workflow between Scenarist BD and Scenarist UHD

Media OCD, Glendale CA

Media OCD made the switch to Scenarist BD from DoStudio Indie and EX in 2017. They haven’t regretted it for a moment, as Justin Sevakis explains.

We work with a lot of anime, and anime has very demanding needs for subtitles. Sometimes more than one subtitle appears on screen at once — something DoStudio never was able to handle without causing annoying blinking. Once we changed to Scenarist’s subtitle workflow, we were able to have concurrent subtitles on screen with no issues.

Scenarist has none of DoStudio’s compatibility issues, and offers detailed control over disc layout and layer breaks. We’ve actually gone back and re-authored some problematic discs in Scenarist and were able to completely eliminate show-stopping playback issues without re-encoding or changing the disc programming.

But the best feature has to be Scenarist’s ability to do partial muxes. No more having to wait for the entire disc to build when you’re debugging menus! If you only need to test a small coding tweak, the disc rebuilds in seconds instead of the hour that it took DoStudio. This has saved us WEEKS of unnecessary build time. This is the biggest reason to upgrade, hands down.

Media OCD Loves Scenarist BD.

For software as complex and specific as Blu-ray authoring, Scenarist BD is rock-solid. We’ve experienced no random freeze-ups, no unexpected quits, and no weird incidents where our project got corrupted…and we’ve built some incredibly complicated discs! It’s easily the most stable of the apps we use everyday. Even better, reliable undo, copy/paste, and drag-and-drop within the app has made what used to be insanely tedious tasks a breeze.

Media OCD has experienced greater control of menus graphics using the Scenarist Designer tool.

One of the biggest headaches for us has always been updating menus mid-way through the authoring process. Whether you’re adding buttons or pages, deleting elements, or just touching up an existing graphic, re-importing the design from Photoshop was always a nightmare. Not with Scenarist. Almost every time, every element just pops right back into place, without anything having to be fixed or corrected. This was never the case with DoStudio, so transitioning to Scenarist has saved us untold hours of tweaking and correcting updated menus.

Access to the expanded Scenarist Designer format has allowed us to integrate cool features such as multi-state buttons (very helpful for audio and subtitle menus) and animations that were difficult or impossible to do with DoStudio EX’s bundled IG Editor software. And better yet, we have yet to create a menu that caused Scenarist Designer to produce out-of-spec BD graphics layers — something that happened all too often with IG Editor.

–Justin Sevakis, CEO Media OCD

Fidelity In Motion, New York, NY

David MacKenzie, CEO of Fidelity In Motion addresses their change to being a Scenarist authoring only shop.

In the past, we used several authoring tools, including DVD Studio Pro, DVDAfterEdit, DoStudio, and of course, Scenarist, to author to BD and DVD. As we grew, efficiency and rapid turnaround became more and more critical, so we became a 100% Scenarist facility for authoring to optical disc formats. Support for the latest operating systems and format revisions were also factors – it sure doesn’t hurt that Scenarist UHD lets us author to UHD Blu-ray using the same familiar interface and reliability we’ve been using for years with regular BD.

Fidelity In Motion produces both Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray for Hollywood Studios. HDMV coding is especially important; Scenarist’s NAVI Command editor alleviates issues they had with other tools.

We love the repeatability, simplicity, and reliability of Blu-ray’s HDMV mode. Combined with the Designer Photoshop plugin and Scenarist’s proven compatibility, it lets us quickly author discs that operate consistently across all players, with access to the player’s Resume capability as standard. With Scenarist and HDMV authoring, control over the entire disc flow and menu functionality is contained within one application, rather than being split across differing user interfaces with different command syntaxes.

Scenarist BD’s partial-mux feature saves hours of production time, as David explains.

Scenarist BD’s “Partial mux” feature also saves us hours of time. A simple menu change takes less than a minute to build and test, rather than 25-30 minutes to rebuild the entire project. We also hooked the powerful “Post-mux scripting” feature up to a simple Windows batch script, which automatically syncs only the changed files in a project to our QC staff. Scenarist BD’s support for templates is another workflow enhancement that lets us build titles faster, and frees up time for us to guarantee the first-rate image and sound quality that our clients and consumers love about Blu-ray.

–David MacKenzie, CEO Fidelity In Motion

Duplitech, Torrance, CA

Duplitech is making the switch to Scenarist BD from DoStudio and found an increase in their full authoring workflow.

By transitioning from DoStudio to Scenarist, we were able to significantly improve our turnaround on client-requested changes. Scenarist’s partial-mux capability eliminates the need to create an entirely new build for each version of a title. Scenarist provides us the tools to better integrate external JARs to create very custom complicated discs with a high level of interactivity.

If you are currently authoring HDMV titles using DoStudio EX, the transition to Scenarist will seem familiar. The Navi commands are identical to the IG Editor with additional tools for accelerating the validation of your programing and updates of menu assets.

Steve Johnson discusses how some advanced features of Scenarist BD have improved his titles capabilities.

Seamless playlists are near impossible in DoStudio; by using Scenarist we have options to use either seamless playlist and/or multi-angle tracks to create localized versions of a film.

We are currently using Scenarist BD to manage a project with well over 1,000 separate assets. Scenarist’s asset management tools allow us to keep the project well organized. Managing this number of separate assets within
DoStudio would have been extremely difficult.

–Steve Johnson, COO Duplitech

Using a different authoring application but want to upgrade to Scenarist? We offer competitive upgrade and cross grade pricing for all our applications.

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