Type
Blu-ray Bit Budget
Platform
Spreadsheet
Client
Abbey Road
Date
2008
My role
In 2008, I was asked to create a new version of my DVD bitbudget for Blu-ray. A bit budget is used to work out at what rate to encode video and audio to achieve the maximum quality without overfilling the disc.
Previous bitbudget software we had used was incredibly complex focusing on the math calculations required which was rather intimidating to non-technical people.
My bitbudget allowed a user (even if they didn’t understand the math) to simply add pieces of content and their lengths and the preferred audio streams. The user could then modify the encoding rates for each piece individually with the spreadsheet performing all the calculations ‘behind-the-scene’ until they achieved a ‘full disc’ (The Blu-ray bitbudget also had to content with Blu-ray ‘lossless’ audio codecs (whose file sizes cannot be easily estimated)).
The bitbudget was successfully adopted by the company allowing producers as well as video-encoders to draw up a bit budget for a project. It has also, allegedly, made its way to various other DVD companies after the closure of Abbey Road Interactive.
