Seamless branching is a space-saving mechanism used on

Blu-ray Disc Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of ...

s and, rarely, DVDs, to allow multiple versions of a film to be stored on a disc without storing redundant scenes several times. One example is the Signature Edition DVD of ''

The Iron Giant ''The Iron Giant'' is a 1999 American animated science fiction film directed by Brad Bird and produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation. It is loosely based on the 1968 novel '' The Iron Man'' by Ted Hughes (which was published in the United ...

'', where the user can select between the original theatrical version and an extended version. The two versions differ only in a few scenes. The DVD player is instructed to play the film normally except for these scenes, then jump to the appropriate scene as selected by the user before the commencement of the film, and then jump back to play the rest of the film. The disc is authored in a way which allows the joins to be invisible, hence the term ''seamless''. (An example of a non-seamless branched title is the DVD version of ''

The Lion King ''The Lion King'' is a 1994 American animated musical coming-of-age drama film directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, produced by Don Hahn, and written by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton. Produced by Walt Disney ...

''). Larger scale examples of the same technique are seen in the 2000 Ultimate Edition DVD of '' Terminator 2: Judgment Day'', the 2007 DVD rerelease of ''

Blade Runner ''Blade Runner'' is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Di ...

'', the Platinum and Diamond Edition DVDs of ''

Beauty and the Beast "Beauty and the Beast" is a fairy tale written by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in (''The Young American and Marine Tales''). Villeneuve's lengthy version was abridged, rewritten, and publish ...

'', and the 4K Ultra HD version of ''

Conan the Barbarian Conan the Barbarian (also known as Conan the Cimmerian) is a fictional sword and sorcery hero created by American author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) and who debuted in 1932 and went on to appear in a series of fantasy stories published in ''We ...

'', in which three different cuts of the films are playable from the same discs. Another possible use of seamless branching is for the localisation (translation) of on-screen visible text. The ''

Star Wars ''Star Wars'' is an American epic film, epic space opera media franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the Star Wars (film), eponymous 1977 film and Cultural impact of Star Wars, quickly became a worldwide popular culture, pop cu ...

'' DVDs with their opening crawl are a prime example. Normally, only the audio track of films is translated into other languages, but when text central to the plot is visible on-screen, the scene may be created once for every language, and the DVD player can be instructed to select the appropriate version of the scene depending on the user's language preference. However, for this purpose a technique called multi-angle is used more often.

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See also