FS Film releases first Finnish Blu-ray movie

FS Film Oy, one of Finland's leading film and video distributors, is to release next month its first Blu-ray Disc, with BonusView features. Ganes, directed by JP Siili and produced by Helsinki-Filmi Oy, is based on the life of Remu Aaltonen, legendary drummer, singer and songwriter of the infamous Finnish rock band Hurriganes.

The title was authored by Craft Finland Oy, a Finnish authoring house with a proven track record spanning thousands of DVD projects. “From the very start, our aim was to take advantage of Blu-ray's various abilities,
including pop-up menus, a BonusView-specific picture-in-picture video commentary and playback of lossless compressed audio,” said Markus Castrén, CTO of Craft Finland.

“The biggest challenge turned out to be subtitling. We are, to my knowledge, the first authoring house to use player-generated subtitles, allowing the viewer to select from six different styles of subtitles that vary in size and screen positioning. This approach made it necessary to reverse-engineer Bluray's TextST specification. We've also created a special application for converting subtitles from various DVD formats to the subtitle format on Blu-ray.” The disc includes English subtitles.

“FS Film has certainly pulled out all the stops for this release,” enthused Petri Teittinen, an independent quality control consultant and a technology journalist with more than 20 years of experience. “The original 5.1 channel soundtrack has been expanded to 7.1 channels and remixed for home theater sound systems. The movie has a gritty and grainy 16mm look which is a massive challenge for video compression, but Blu-ray manages to reproduce the look faithfully.”

Story filed 21 June 2008

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