UK-based company Bollywood Entertainment Limited is setting up operations in India, with a platform for the sale of a wide range of Blu-ray discs from Indian home entertainment companies. The company is also associating with one of Indian cinema's oldest post production houses, Prasad Cine Labs, to promote Blu-ray in India.
Bollywood Entertainment will promote online sales of BDs in India through its e-commerce website
Bollywood Blu-ray.
Bollywood Entertainment company head Prem Jolly said, "We have had successful meetings with biggies in India like BIG Home Entertainment and Yash Raj Films and are entering into a tie-up with them for their Blu-ray sales through our website. We have also had meetings with Prasad Cine Labs and were mighty impressed with their set-up. They have brought in all the latest equipment and have already proved their mettle with the Blu-ray of Rajinikanth starrer Sivaji. This Tamil blockbuster's disc is now considered a benchmark in high quality Indian Blu-rays."
Jolly further adds, "We have tied up with five major replication houses of the world including Sony [DADC] and Technicolor. On a consulting basis, we are also providing technical know-how to Indian authoring houses and home entertainment companies."
Regarding the viability of higher-priced Blu-ray in India, Jolly said, "the Blu-ray disc buyer is more quality conscious than price conscious, so I see no reason why he would think twice before buying one if he is getting the best in the world available at his doorstep," Jolly concludes.
With regard to the alliance with Prasad Cine Labs, Jolly states: “we visited Prasad Cine Labs and were extremely impressed with their state-of-the-art technology being used for film processing as well as authoring. Prasad Labs has been into films since the last fifty years. Their clients include all the Bollywood A-listers right from Yash Raj Films to UTV to Shah Rukh Khan's production house Red Chillies Entertainment. Their biggest labs are at Chennai and Mumbai while Kochi and Hyderabad house some of their other labs and Delhi has a sales office. Their main jobs are negative processing, printing and visual effects. Their visual effects department has successfully worked on films like 'Krrish' and '1920'. Their DI department, where the colour correction of the entire film takes place for achieving desired results, has got two scanners – Spirit and Oxberry where the negatives are loaded, the images are captured and finally transferred into the hard disk.”
“We saw their grading department where every reel is scrutinized along with the director of photography. The necessary last-minute changes are then made and the final print is confirmed. The final print is then brought to the Arri department where the final product is brought back to negatives. The entire procedure takes nothing less than 25 days and the prints are made within 8 hours. About 50 prints of each film are made in Prasad Labs in Mumbai and 70 in Chennai”, Jolly continues.
Jolly is confident that together, Bollywood Entertainment and Prasad Cine Labs can bring about a complete change in how Indians watch movies at home.