SONY EARNS ITS STRIPES BY TAKING "TIGERS --TRACKING A LEGEND" FROM ACQUISITION TO DVD DISTRIBUTION

PARK RIDGE, N.J., Sept. 22, 2003 - Documenting the lives of the majestic wild tigers of India takes years of training, along with plenty of nerve, skill and daring. But for Carol Amore, an award-winning wildlife cinematographer, photographer and author, exploiting Sony production technology for her latest documentary, "Tigers--Tracking a Legend" enabled her to bring a new degree of realism to her audience.

Shot at India's Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, the documentary chronicles the powerful tigers of India in digital high definition video using a variety of Sony HDCAM ™ equipment. It was encoded with Sony's powerful Vizaro ™ DVD encoding system to create the recently released DVD.

Focusing on the lives of a young tigress and her two five-month cubs, the disc has already been recognized by earning the DVD Association's 2003 Excellence Award for Video Quality and Video Presentation. The production also recently won the Wings Trust 2003 Special Award for Groundbreaking Film and Exploration, the prestigious Cinematography and Young People's 2002 award at the International Wildlife Film Festival and the Cine Golden Eagle 2002 award for film excellence.

"Going straight from the HDCAM footage to the DVD helped preserve the high-quality images we captured in India," Amore said. "After all of the hard work it took to get the HD footage, I was impressed with the way that the Vizaro system allowed us to bring awesome wild tigers and the rich Indian wilderness with magnificent clarity into peoples' homes."

Wayne Mooney, principal at Moon Eclips, a DVD authoring and training company in Long Beach, Calif., worked for six weeks to assemble the multifaceted, interactive title. Using a Sony HDW-500 HDCAM VTR, Mooney said he ran the down-converted high definition signal via SDI directly into the Vizaro DVA-V700 DVD encoding system. He then encoded the footage at approximately 6.5 mbps to maintain the high quality that the HDCAM format provides.

Many DVD transfers dub HD footage to Digital Betacam before encoding, but on the "Tigers" project, Mooney said he wanted to preserve as much of the original high-definition quality as possible by bringing the super-sampled ITU-601 signal directly from the HDW-500's downconverter into the Vizaro MPEG-2 encoder.

"We've tried other DVD encoding systems, but the Sony Vizaro unit is the best of the breed," said Mooney, who also developed many of the DVD's unique features, such as high-quality stills with associated wildlife animal audio clips and a "Tiger Quiz-Earn Your Stripes" section that helps consumers learn more about tigers.

"It is so much easier to encode footage and correct for unwanted artifacts," Mooney said. "Even though most encoding systems are `real time', I can get the job done in a third of the time with the Vizaro unit because I have to massage the software and adjust the bit rate a lot more with other competing systems."

The intuitive graphical user interface is also a welcome tool at Moon Eclips, said Mooney.

"With the Vizaro system, I simply click on certain attributes of the software and things happen immediately," he said. "The system is so intuitive; it gives you error warnings when it does not think the images look good enough. That's pretty impressive."

The exclusive Sony authorized dealer for the Vizaro system is Marshall Graphics Systems of Nashville, Tenn.

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