Perry Paolantonio established 'No Frills DVD' in a loft apartment in South Boston, Massachusetts with the idea that DVD didn't have to be expensive to be high quality. It was built on his years of work in the film, video and software user interface design world.
While Hollywood was producing buggy and complex DVDs back then, the independent filmmaker and small distribution company was really more interested in simply getting work shown in the best possible light, as fast as possible. Few authoring houses were willing to take on smaller projects, and that's where we came in. We began offering DVD Authoring services at reasonable rates, at a time when everyone else was still charging thousands of dollars for the simplest of discs.Of course, times change. With the advent of Apple's DVD Studio Pro and similar inexpensive authoring software, the market shifted radically. Suddenly the power to offer DVDs with interactivity on par with Hollywood was in the hands of the small production company and, eventually, the individual filmmaker. In reality, however, things are never that simple. We found that a large component of our new work involved fixing up broken DVDs made by folks who were in a little over their heads. As a result, our business continued to grow as larger authoring houses closed up around us.
While we continued to author feature film DVDs for independent production and distribution companies, we also began doing much more work with museum exhibit designers. We have encoded and authored many multi-screen, simultaneous playback exhibits for a variety of live performances and museum exhibits, rapidly becoming experts in the field.
In 2004, we obtained an MTI CORRECT digital film restoration system to clean up the animated feature film Rock & Rule, and have restored several feature length films since, along with countless smaller projects. It was at this time that the company name was changed to Gamma Ray Digital, to better reflect our shift away from a DVD-Centric business, and our new focus on Digital Film Finishing services - color correction, restoration, final encoding for presentation, authoring and professional quality replication and duplication.
We still work mostly with individual producers and smaller companies, and that's how we like it. Our clients know they can call or email us and get straight, honest answers, even if it means we end up sending them somewhere else.