Sonic Solutions today released the Sonic BD PowerStation, a new Blu-ray Disc (BD) production suite for professional videographers that's built on Sonic's CineVision HD video encoding and Scenarist authoring products. Configured and priced to meet the needs of professional videographers, independent film and corporate video producers, Sonic BD PowerStation includes a special version of CineVision featuring multi-codec and segment controls, as well as DVDit! Pro HD for authoring BD and DVD titles and Scenarist QC Studio, a specialized BD emulation system that provides a detailed title proofing step during the authoring process.

Priced at $2,499.00, the Sonic BD PowerStation breaks the financial barrier-to-entry and immediately expands the availability of high-quality HD title creation solutions to a broader range of post-production facilities and specialized content owners looking to enter the Blu-ray Disc market. In concert with the recent reduction in AACS-LA licensing costs, Sonic's introduction of the BD PowerStation could be perfectly timed to energize the high-definition content creation industry.

The Sonic BD PowerStation leverages the same exclusive video encoding and title multiplexing engines used in Sonic's products for high-end facilities, which are responsible for the vast majority of commercially released BD titles. Capabilities include: support for MPEG-2 HD, VC-1 encoding with segment re-encoding that provides significant video encoding image quality controls; simple-to-learn and use authoring application that offers HD motion menus and interactive navigation programming without the need to understand the BD specification; and detailed title proofing based on Sonic's BD and DVD navigation engine that is used by leading CE vendors worldwide for set-top and in-car playback devices.

Sonic will be demonstrating the Sonic BD PowerStation at the IBC convention, Hall 7, Stand 7.J38, September 11 to 15, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.