With Dune being the first entirely Aussie built DVD with a DTS track (Universal's Gladiator DVD is the first official DTS encoded DVD to be released here, but not authored here) I spoke to Infogrames' PR Manager, Rebecca Simpson, who is incredibly enthusiastic about DVD as is her Boss Jamie Broderick (I met both of them the other week while in Sydney and we had a good 'ol chat about their plans for DVD [I can't believe I wasn't told about the DTS track for Dune though.... that wasn't very nice Rebecca <grin>  ]  (Ed. Though a newcomer to the Aussie DVD market I anticipate that Infogrames will do some good things for region 4 DVD in the future). 
Anyhoo, Rebecca suggested that I get in contact with Stream AV's Director, Paul Rodgers to get all the dirt on this DTS encoded DVD.  So I did. 

Though DVD has been commercially available in Australia for over 3 years now, DVDs with DTS audio tracks are few and far between.  While the USA has released several thousand DVDs to their marketplace, the ratio of NTSC DTS encoded DVDs to NTSC Dolby Digital Encoded DVDs is pretty small (this ratio is improving in DTS' favour on a Daily basis...go little DTS go!!).  For Australia the ratio is about 4 to 1000 (with Gladiator being the only Movie on a PAL DTS DVD on our shores at the moment, with the other PAL DTS DVDs being Music Videos and the like..but I'd say there's plenty more to come (let's hope Roadshow's re-issue of Se7en gets the DTS treatment it deserves..hint hint). 

As I was saying with DTS being so new to Australia my First question to Mr Rodgers was, "How is it that Stream AV are first to be authoring PAL DTS DVDs in Australia?)  The reason....Stream AV do Beta Testing for companies overseas using Digi-Design Professional Tools with all sorts of Plugins and one of the latest add-ons to this gear was DTS encoding capabilities. 
It turns out that Stream AV have been tinkering with the DTS side of this package for a while now and only recently have been happy with the quality (ie lack of software bugs) of the most recent version of this add-on software. 

Wanting to tackle DTS on a Feature film DVD, Stream AV told Infogrames of their win and Infogrames Jumped at the chance to get a DTS track on their DUNE DVD. 

Initially, The remaster of DUNE to DVD was coming to us with a 4x3 letterboxed picture (there are absolutely no Anamorphic Widescreen transfers in existence....at the moment at least, and the cost to transfer a film to tape is in the 10's of thousands of dollars)and on the audio side of things, a Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 encoded audio tracks.
This DVD is now featuring all of the above with a theatrical trailer, Production Notes and Cast/Crew Bios totally around 100 pages, but also gets a 1509kbps [KiloBits Per Second] encoded DTS track.   The Dolby 5.1 track is encoded at the higher 448kbps and Dolby 2.0 track is encoded at a slightly lower 192kbps (224kbps seems to be the standard for 2 channel soundtracks ). 
With this additional info, the DVD is also being spread over two layers of an RSDL DVD.   (considering the audio component alone is taking up over 2megabits per second this is a good idea :)

As for the source for this DTS track, it was taken from a DA88 tape (which is just like an 8mm video camera tape).
On this tape you can fit 8 audio tracks of PCM quality digital audio.
In the Case of the Dune Audio, the encoding rate for each of these PCM tracks was 16bit 48Khz (again this was all which was available for DUNE). (sample rates can be source from DA88 at an even higher quality of 24bit 96Khz)
Quite often with there being 8 audio tracks available on a DA88 tape you get both the 5.1 mix (Left, Right, Centre, Left Surround, Right Surround and LFE track) and 2.0 mix (Left and Right) for the one movie on the one tape.

At the moment Infogrames/Stream AV have made a DLT of DUNE and are now just awaiting for the Glass Master to be made (Glass Masters are sourced from DLT's, Digital Linear Tapes (think something bigger than an 8 track, and a DVD is then made from this Glass Master)  (for an indepth article on DVD making, check out the DVDBits article on their Visit to the PM Plant )

Due for release in only a few weeks, it'll be interesting to see how well this film does on DVD, not just because of the lacklustre treatment it received a few years back (earning itself the "coaster" award in the Region 4 DiVAs Debut...hmmm that's due again pretty soon isn't it), but also because of it being one of now 2 DVDs to be released in Australia carrying a DTS audio track.  One can only hope that with the inclusion of a DTS track we'll see more DTS encoded DVDs coming from Infogrames, but also from the other Aussie DVD Distributors. (having a quick look at DTS Receivers today, I was hard pressed to even find an AV receiver WITHOUT DTS.  DO they even make them without DTS anymore?  :)

If you've ever wondered how much it costs to author a film for DVD, check out  Stream AV's web site as they list their charges.....ouch! Damn this DVD'ing is majorly expensive (I am told that as the technology grows the authoring costs are coming down, but it certainly explains why there are still so many DVDs out there to be put onto a shiny digital disc...so yes
Jamesy I'm sure "someone" will release Razorback on DVD for you :)

A big thanks to Paul Rodgers of Stream AV for taking time out of his busy schedule to have a chat with me.  Much appreciated

Matt.G
DVDown Under..