Billie Holiday died in 1959 at the age of 44. To commemorate her 90th birthday, a new multimedia collection called “The Ultimate Collection: Billie Holiday” takes fans on a richly detailed tour of her life, world and music.

“Whether you are new to Billie Holiday’s music or a serious jazz/blues enthusiast, this set will become an important part of your music library,” predicts Yan Shvalb, who served as project director, designer and author of the DVD. “It spans her entire life and has material — especially on the DVD — that’s not available anywhere else.”

The collection includes two CDs containing 42 of Holiday’s greatest songs plus the DVD. The latter is loaded with audio, film and TV performances — including three that haven’t been seen since they first aired in 1956 on the “Stars of Jazz” show — with the likes of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and the All-Star Jam Band. It also includes a multi-layered timeline with hundreds of images and interactive features; interviews with friends and colleagues including John Hammond, Roy Eldridge and Tiny Grimes; a 1956 talk with then “Night Beat” reporter Mike Wallace; and a complete discography.

“With this project, I was one person working on one machine, and I had all the assets at my disposal, so I could move ahead on many elements at once, in any order. That’s a huge advance.”

A Big Mess

As polished as the finished set is with its handsome sleeved box, stylish photos and biographical essay, the DVD-in-progress was a mess when Multiprises, its producer, first dropped it on Yan Shvalb’s desk.

“They brought me this semi-complete project to finish,” relates Shvalb, “but it wasn’t authored properly, and there were menus and titles and songs that needed to be added, removed and changed in various ways.” Worse, continues Shvalb, “all the creative assets were already compressed, so they couldn’t be repaired. I had to completely start over.”

He took on the challenge, re-authoring the DVD from the ground up in DVD Studio Pro. He’s proud of his many contributions: “I developed new ideas and ways to present the content, designed all the menus and opening animations, did all the scans and images and created new assets to enhance the look and feel of the piece.”

Working Non-Linearly

The result is a detailed compilation that invites Holiday fans to an intimate acquaintance with her life and work. To make the DVD, Shvalb combined material from dozens of sources. “It was a big project with thousands of elements,” he says.

Throughout the three-month project, DVD Studio Pro proved an able ally, helping Shvalb accomplish solo what normally would have required a team of specialists.

What’s more, he was able to work “in a completely non-linear fashion,” Shvalb says. “I was doing all these different steps in the process — editing, designing menus, authoring, creating builds — and I was able to begin authoring before I even finished the content. That’s not the way it usually works.”

DVD Studio Pro allowed him to bypass the typical process of waiting for finished assets, capturing them, then authoring them in a specific order. “This project kept evolving, so I couldn’t really work like that,” he explains. “And with DVD Studio Pro I didn’t have to. For instance, I was able to keep adding images to the timeline and the slideshow, as needed to fit the music. I was re-editing the intros on the fly and cutting new audio and video into the title even after I authored the DVD. I moved chapter points around, re-coded it, and it all lined up perfectly.”

Self-Reliance

That flexibility, in fact, made working solo an asset. Normally, “you have to rely on other people to provide their elements or make changes, and you’re waiting for them to do their part,” he notes. “With this project, I was one person working on one machine, and I had all the assets at my disposal, so I could move ahead on many elements at once, in any order. That’s a huge advance.”

Shvalb credits DVD Studio Pro for empowering him to work in his own style. With the abstraction layer, he says, “you just point it where you want to go and it goes there, so you can create repeating elements really quickly and easily without having to go down into the DVD spec or to create all these intricate dummy program chains. And you don’t have to perform the low-level commands — like jumping from a menu to a track — that other programs require.”

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