Home video is currently such a crucial part of a feature film’s revenue stream that distributors have to ensure the best-quality DVD formatting. In the case of Mambo Italiano, the most successful English-Canadian film at the domestic box office since Porky’s, distrib Equinoxe Films entrusted this task to the Montreal facility of post giant Technicolor

First it was a question of assembling the content. When director Emile Gaudreault was shooting the comedy hit Mambo Italiano for producer Cinemaginaire and Equinoxe, ‘We asked the studio to make sure that they kept all the extra footage for the DVD’s special features,’ recalls Marc Beausejour, Equinoxe’s director of home video for Canada. Mambo, starring Luke Kirby, Ginette Reno, Paul Sorvino and Mary Walsh, tells the story of a young man who comes out of the closet in a traditional Italian immigrant family.

From this extra footage, Equinoxe compiled 30 minutes of bloopers as well as added and deleted scenes. It then took all this material to full-service post giant Technicolor.

‘We told them what we wanted to see on the DVD, and they came up with a couple of entry menus and links,’ Beausejour says. ‘They then handled the rest of the process for us.’

To ensure the highest picture standards, Equinoxe specified variable-bit-rate encoding. This meant frames featuring a lot of visual detail and/or motion were allocated more bits of data storage than static talking-head frames. A fixed data rate, on the other hand, could have resulted in obvious video errors during scenes with more action.

‘Using variable-bit-rate encoding, Technicolor was able to adjust the film-to-video transfer to provide the best resolution and color,’ Beausejour explains. ‘We ended up with a very high-quality DVD as a result.’

With viewers today increasingly preferring letterbox transfers, Equinoxe maintained Mambo’s wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio for the majority of its copies. At the same time, it did not want to alienate those viewers who haven’t yet come around to letterbox. ‘Subsequently, we did make a full-screen DVD and a full-screen VHS version, but the wide-screen DVD is our flagship product,’ Beausejour says.

Equinoxe says that the formatting process for Mambo went smoothly, and the resultant DVD and VHS copies have generated significant sales – about $3.5 million, as compared to the $5.3 million the film took at the domestic box office.

-www.equinoxefilms.com

-www.technicolor.com