Sonic Releases BD PowerStation, Blu-ray Disc Production Suite for Videographers

Sonic Solutions announced it has released the Sonic BD PowerStation, a Blu-ray Disc (BD) production suite for professional videographers that's built on Sonic's Hollywood-standard CineVision HD video encoding and Scenarist authoring products, which are used to create DVD and BD titles.

Configured and priced to meet the needs of professional videographers, independent film and corporate video producers, Sonic said its BD PowerStation includes a special version of CineVision featuring multi-codec and segment controls, as well as DVDit! Pro HD for authoring BD and DVD titles and Scenarist QC Studio, a specialized BD emulation system that provides a detailed title proofing step during the authoring process.

"Sonic's BD PowerStation is the perfect combination of technology, product and price positioning that independent producers and small production houses have been waiting for to start offering BD production services. Until now, producing replication-ready BD masters has been financially out-of-reach of most businesses," said Gary Bettan, VP of Business Development at Broadfield Distributing a distributor of desktop production solutions.

The Sonic BD PowerStation leverages the same exclusive video encoding and title multiplexing engines used in Sonic's products for facilities, which are responsible for the vast majority of commercially released BD titles. Capabilities include: support for MPEG-2 HD, VC-1 encoding with segment re-encoding that provides significant video encoding image quality controls; simple-to-learn and use authoring application that offers HD motion menus and interactive navigation programming without the need to understand the BD specification; and detailed title proofing based on Sonic's BD and DVD navigation engine that is used by CE vendors for set-top and in-car playback devices.

Sonic said it will be demonstrating the Sonic BD PowerStation at the IBC convention, September 11-15 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Sonic BD PowerStation is available now from Sonic's professional products reseller network and appointed distributors.

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