Avatar: BD-Live Explained

Over the weekend, Avatar fans were treated to a preview of some exclusive never-before-seen footage at the MCM Expo including bonus features, clips and deleted scenes taken from the Extended Collector’s Edition Blu-ray. We thought it might be a good idea to have a look at Blu-rays in general and see how far the format has come in the past couple of years and where its likely to be in the next few!

Blu-ray is becoming more and popular, it’s official. 2011 will see a sharp rise in how many of us own a player. It is estimated that around 5 million households in Europe currently own one; this figure is provided by Parks Associates, a market research firm for digital technologies, and they expect it to rise to approximately 66 million by 2014. That’s the equivalent of every household in the UK!

Its name, Blu-ray, comes from the violet laser which is used to read the disc as opposed to the 650-nanometer red laser used for DVD’s. A Blu-ray disc can hold 25GB on a single layer and 50GB on dual layers, allowing for 6 times more storage that its predecessor, the DVD, which holds only 4.7GB. This allows for much more content to be packed onto it and for movie fans this is great! For the Avatar release, one disc alone will feature 3 versions of the movie; the Original Theatrical Version, the Special Edition Re-Release, the Collector’s Extended Cut and there’s still room for more than 15 minutes of additional footage and exclusive alternate opening.

But what about picture quality? Picture quality is what attracts most people to Blu-ray and there is a significant change when you switch from DVD. High definition images are sharper, details are clearer, colours are more vivid and the overall experience of watching something on Blu-ray is much more enjoyable as a result. The pixel resolution for Avatar is 1920×1080, meaning that’s as high as it gets. At the moment, this is the standard pixel resolution for High Definition video.

The second disc will feature an additional 45 minutes of new never-before-seen deleted scenes together with an in-depth feature length documentary with James Cameron, Jon Landau and cast and crew, but disc 3 will contain BD-Live material. What’s BD-Live? When your Blu-ray player is connected to the internet you will be able to access and download more features than are on the disc for your movie. These could include ringtones, wallpapers, games as well as trailers, clips, up-to-date interviews and much more. The options will appear on your main menu and all together make the ongoing Avatar experience something to keep coming back to Pandora for!

So, have you been one of the 5 million joining the Blu-ray revolution or will you be one of the 66 million expected to join over the next few years?