MARIN COUNTY, California (November 04, 2015) – Scenarist, LLC, the developer of Hollywood-standard professional Blu-ray Disc authoring systems based in Marin County, California announced today that the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has certified Scenarist UHD as having met or exceeded all its requirements to be approved for producing titles in the new Ultra HD Blu-ray format. Now authoring facilities who wish to offer authoring services for the new format can do so with the control, confidence and compliance that has been the Scenarist-brand hallmark since the system was introduced in 1995.

“To help ensure a successful Ultra HD Blu-ray launch it is vital to have proven authoring systems that enable Hollywood studios to produce titles with the ultimate in quality and compatibility. Scenarist has achieved the Blu-ray Disc Association’s testing requirements and is production ready for Ultra HD Blu-ray,” said John Town, Chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association Commercialization Task Force. “In addition, Scenarist is helping to inform authoring facilities about Ultra HD Blu-ray through a series of technology seminars on the format.”

The certification is the result of months of effort by Scenarist support and engineering teams working closely with the BDA and the Scenarist UHDG global focus group to develop Scenarist UHD and verify the system’s output as compatible with Ultra HD Players anticipated to ship in the first quarter of 2016 and beyond.

The Ultra HD Blu-ray specification includes 3840×2160 video resolution with advanced HDR 10-bit color and High Frame Rate (HFR) video up to 60 frames per second. With 400 nit average and 700-1000 nit peaks, the image brilliance and color depth potential is a dramatic quality increase over standard 100 nit peak televisions in homes today and offers content creators a vastly larger available color pallet with which to create new and exciting visual experiences.

“Scenarist is celebrating over 20 years of providing authoring technology, products and support to the professional authoring community worldwide and we are delighted to be leading the Ultra HD Blu-ray format evolution with Scenarist UHD,” said Rolf Hartley, managing partner at Scenarist, LLC. “We are very grateful to the Blu-ray Disc association for providing their certification of Scenarist UHD and validating the efforts of our support and engineering teams as well as our UHDG members who have worked closely with us to achieve this goal.”

Scenarist has began delivering early development phase authoring tools to members of its UHDG focus group in March of 2015. UHDG authoring facility members have been actively developing titles in support of the Ultra HD Blu-ray launch expected in early 2016. At IBC in Amsterdam in September 2015, Scenarist announced a complete workgroup solution available for Ultra HD Blu-ray including Scenarist UHD bundled with the ATEME TITAN HDR encoding system.