The Energon Pub

Michael Bay, the director of the 2007 Transformers movie, has left a message on his board, letting fans know that he has not lost his hope to one day release the Transformers movie on the High Definition format of Blu-Ray. The following has been taken directly from his post.

"Well another studio down. Maybe I was right? Blu ray is just better. HD will die a slow death. It's what I predicted a year ago. Now with Warner's down for the count with Blu Ray. That makes it easier for Wal-Mart to push Blu Ray. And whatever Wal-Mart pushes - wins. Hd better start giving out those $120 million dollars checks to stay alive. Maybe they can give me some so I can give it to my Make-A-Wish charity, just to shut me up. Have faith people Transformers will come out in Blu-ray one day!

Bay".

Blu-Ray FTW!

Bay does have a point, though. HD-DVD, thus far, isn't quite as popular as the BD format.

I happy *hugs my PS3*

Pity Blu-Ray is winning the HD race.

HD-DVD is by far the more consumer friendly product(i.e less studio friendly). The main problem the studios have with HD-DVD is that they can't region protect their content so that Europeans don't have to pay ridiculous mark ups(e.g Heroes S1 U.S HD-DVD $100/EUR68 retail, E.U retail EUR100/$150 for the exact same discs) or wait for ages to get a copy. Although it is odd having Japan in the same blu-ray region as the US as their mark ups are even worse, $80-$100 for a blu-ray film .

EDIT: For some reason the forum has stopped recognising the Euro symbol.

sniper_samurai wrote:EDIT: For some reason the forum has stopped recognising the Euro symbol.

€

Still seems to work for me!

This is a bit of a no brainer. Exclusive rights only last 18 months and Blu-Ray is a superior product and in the UK and Europe took about 75% of the HD takes this year. That ain't likely to change.

What does it matter if blu-ray is better or not? By the time it either one wins out, everybody will be making players that play both.

I guess it only matters to Movie-Philes like my who prefer the best quility transfer of picture and sound. But I'm a movie freak so I may be in the minority.

What a hack.... he "predicted" if only everyone listened to Michael Bay...

Bay is like Hasbro's repaints on this one...

The more versions that can be created of the same dam thing equil more royalty profits so that is good(for them0

I recall after the initial DVD was released he said over all the packages could have been better.

So here's your chance to put your money where your integrity is....

WOW us with special features, make us want to go get it again, and OK I'll respect this effort.

However if it's just more of the same ol' on a different platform, I'll see you as nothing more than a movie milking prick the same way I see Hasbro at this point.

I guess Bay really wants his movie to be in every format so everyone can have it. But c'mon.. Blu-Ray? What, does every1onenow have a PS3? Don't get me wrong here, Blu-Ray is better than HD, but whats the bloody point?

I can't wait till HD and Blu-Ray start making DVDs for every movie so that everyone starts getting a Blu-Ray/HD DVD player, but until that time, this whole HD vs. Blu-Ray crap is senseless to me.

Why is it that everything that tends to come out of his mouth is so arrogant? It just gets annoying to listen to him even when he wants to make a purposeful point.

Nemesis Cyberplex wrote:What does it matter if blu-ray is better or not? By the time it either one wins out, everybody will be making players that play both.

That is the whole point of his comments -- with Warner's announcement to support Blu-Ray exclusively, HD-DVD has little to no chance of surviving now. Equipment manufacturers will no longer support the dying HD-DVD format (it's not like they really are right now, except for Toshiba...), and thus won't HAVE to make players that play both formats, because in the very near future, only one format will exist -- the better of the two formats -- Blu-Ray. And once there is only one format, ALL studios will be releasing their movies on Blu-Ray, and thus, the inevitable conclusion that Transformers will eventually come out on Blu-Ray.

sounds good to me, I can't wait till it comes out in blu-ray. My blu-ray player upscaled the regular Transformers dvd to look amazing. I could even see Prime and IronHides teeth spinning in their mouths. So if my player can make the regular dvd look that good I can't wait to see it on blu-ray.

stocky wrote:That is the whole point of his comments -- with Warner's announcement to support Blu-Ray exclusively, HD-DVD has little to no chance of surviving now. Equipment manufacturers will no longer support the dying HD-DVD format (it's not like they really are right now, except for Toshiba...), and thus won't HAVE to make players that play both formats, because in the very near future, only one format will exist -- the better of the two formats -- Blu-Ray. And once there is only one format, ALL studios will be releasing their movies on Blu-Ray, and thus, the inevitable conclusion that Transformers will eventually come out on Blu-Ray.

Couldnt have said it better myself, Warner going blu is the nail in the coffin for HDdud. Good riddance to an underpowered, underwhelming format.

the pros and cons of one over the other for the end user are minimal

prices are dictated by several factors and in europe many things are more exp than the use - from cars to consumer electronics and media. region locking has little to do with pricing as the idea was mainly to protect the local box office as movies usually have a staggered international release. For example, transformers was released in the uk long after the us in the cinemas and thus the US dvd release was available earlier.

also, region locking won't last long as even now there are some companies trying to crack the current bluray region locking (and will be selling unlocked players at a premium)

i'm glad one more studio has aligned itself as the longer the battle is drawn out the longer people remain on the fence. at this point they might as well release hddvd players in paramount livery.

With DVD one could apply a modification to their DVD player to play content from other regions. It wasn't a great solution to to the region problem, but it worked.

Blu-Ray is different. If you modify your player to play "out of region" content, your player will be bricked - just like a modified iPhone, the next time your player gets updated.

You can argue that just because the standard includes region encoding doesn't mean that region encoding will be used, but up until this point the competitor to Blu-Ray has been region free. HD-DVD's death will be the death of region free Blu-Ray and you'll have to chose between never being able to watch "out of zone" content or modifying your player (most likely a PS3) and never updating it, knowing that if Sony detects your update, they will "brick" your expensive console.

Orin_Thomas wrote:With DVD one could apply a modification to their DVD player to play content from other regions. It wasn't a great solution to to the region problem, but it worked.

Blu-Ray is different. If you modify your player to play "out of region" content, your player will be bricked - just like a modified iPhone, the next time your player gets updated.

You can argue that just because the standard includes region encoding doesn't mean that region encoding will be used, but up until this point the competitor to Blu-Ray has been region free. HD-DVD's death will be the death of region free Blu-Ray and you'll have to chose between never being able to watch "out of zone" content or modifying your player (most likely a PS3) and never updating it, knowing that if Sony detects your update, they will "brick" your expensive console.

Maybe I am in the minority when it comes to this, but I have little to no interest in playing "out of zone" content. Sure, that could eventually change, but for now, there is nothing I am dying to have on Blu-Ray that I feel the need to order it from a different region. The whole idea behind the different regions is (or at least was) due to the different distribution/release dates of titles in the US versus those same titles overseas. Since most countries outside the US would get their new releases weeks or months after a title had been released in the US, the region-coding was designed to prevent those countries from being able to purchase copies from the US far in advance of that countries release date, and have them be able to play on that particular country's hardware, since those titles were sold or distributed illegally. It seems to me the simpler solution would be to have a single, world-wide release date of a title, rather than worrying about having all these different regions around the world, but I guess sometimes some countries don't even get to show a movie in theaters until after it has already been released in the US on DVD. I guess often times the only solution to fixing a problem is to create a different problem altogether. Ah, the beauty of the corporate world...

You are probably not in a minority - region locks have probably caused less problems to Americans than everyone else in the world. In my own case my wife teaches languages and uses DVDs of foreign TV shows and movies that would never see release in English speaking markets as teaching aids. We taught our son Russian partly through allowing him to watch DVDs of Russian kids shows and cartoons. Stuff that will never be released outside Russia because there just isn't a market for it.

The region locking technology of Blu-Ray is lightyears ahead of that of DVD. It isn't going to be easy to get around this time because the devices software is more complex and is designed to shut down the unit when that sort of tampering is detected.

And believe it or not, one day there will be a film that you want to watch that isn't available in your region. The best films in the world aren't always going to come out of Hollywood. Someone, somewhere will come up with something spectacular And the reason we won't be able to watch it on our own TVs after buying it off a legitimate Internet site is because the format that won the hi-def war has region encoding.

NOT Likely to be anytime soon, guys.

Paramount still has a contract with HDDVD for another year before they can go BluRay.

Despite all the Warner Bros. news going blu thx to Sony paying them off things are looking ugly, but not over for HDDVD. We'll see what happens, but if TF gets on Bluray it's not gonna be for a long time.

And might I say being able to enjoy it now on HDDVD since late October has been nothing short of BEAUTIFUL.

Versa wrote:NOT Likely to be anytime soon, guys.

Paramount still has a contract with HDDVD for another year before they can go BluRay.

Despite all the Warner Bros. news going blu thx to Sony paying them off things are looking ugly, but not over for HDDVD. We'll see what happens, but if TF gets on Bluray it's not gonna be for a long time.

And might I say being able to enjoy it now on HDDVD since late October has been nothing short of BEAUTIFUL.

Honestly, I don't think seeing the movie would look better in a higher definition than what HD-DVD could produce anyway. I've already noticed that in that version you can see a lot of a low-light fuzzy picture problem throughout a lot of the nighttime scenes, which make up a good chunk of the movie. I would think a higher resolution would only make that more noticable.

stocky wrote:Maybe I am in the minority when it comes to this, but I have little to no interest in playing "out of zone" content..

Do you drive 55 in the right lane too? Never let the tank go under half full?

The point is that Phony wants to control everything you do with their media, from the content all the way down to the player, which is YOUR personal private property. Once you purchase the hardware, you should be able to alter it in any way you wish to suit your liking and desired performance. They gray zone is when you crack copyrights, which is of course illegal, and I am not advocating it here.

But, for example, I just purchased "My Boy Jack" from the UK, a PAL DVD that is unavailable in America. I want to play it, but my player is not region free, it is NTSC US/Canada zoned. Owning the system, I choose to modify it, no harm done, no laws actually broken.

If it were a blu-ray version of My Boy Jack, though, what others here on the board are saying is that if Sony detects you using YOUR property in a certain way, they will make it unable to be used. That's CRAP! Sony's DRM practices are formidable and ultimately hostile to their user base.

Cheering for blu-ray is like rooting for the Death Star.

Pardon our dust...

Well, warner's sister company new line has followed suit, come may of this year, all releases for warner and newline will be blu.

Rumours that paramount has a "get out of jail free" cluase in their exclusivity contract with HDdud are also surfacing. Might see a proper transfer of TF sooner than we thought.

This format war is all but over, all HDdvd has now is paramount and that is only due to a shady pay off.

It was great to read the quotes from the HDdud camp after the warner decision, they really had no idea what to say.

Maybe next time put out a quality product.
2008 is looking blu, as I expected.

with Warner and Newline on board, it is only a matter of time before other Warner franchises like HBO go blu as well. I predict paramount will wriggle out of its contract with HDdud and we will see a Bluray TF movie by 4th quarter 2008

Sid Burn wrote:Well, warner's sister company new line has followed suit, come may of this year, all releases for warner and newline will be blu.

Rumours that paramount has a "get out of jail free" cluase in their exclusivity contract with HDdud are also surfacing. Might see a proper transfer of TF sooner than we thought.

This format war is all but over, all HDdvd has now is paramount and that is only due to a shady pay off.

It was great to read the quotes from the HDdud camp after the warner decision, they really had no idea what to say.

Maybe next time put out a quality product.
2008 is looking blu, as I expected.

with Warner and Newline on board, it is only a matter of time before other Warner franchises like HBO go blu as well. I predict paramount will wriggle out of its contract with HDdud and we will see a Bluray TF movie by 4th quarter 2008

Why do you keep calling it hd-dud and lauding Blu-ray like some idiotic Sony fanboy. I have a player for both formats and there is no difference between them except for capacity and the format for interactive features(HD-DVDs web based HDi or Blu-Rays more rigid java based BD-j), of which early Blu-ray players don't support new features(picture in picture) encompased in the new 1.1 profile and can't be upgraded to support the profile(except the ps3).

By the way saying Transformers will get a better transfer on blu-ray than the current hd-dvd transfer would also be incorrect. Why would Paramount go to the trouble and cost of creating a new transfer instead of using the current one which uses the SAME CODEC(AVC/h.264) at the SAME RESOLUTION(1920x1080p) and AN AUDIO STREAM(DD+5.1) that Blu-Ray uses?

And there are more studios than just Paramount supporting HD-DVD, but it is only one of two HOLLYWOOD studios supporting Blu-Ray, the other being Universal. In terms of international studio support HD-DVD is quite healthy including Momentum and Canal+. Of course we all know the US studios have a monopoly on good films .

Not going to dignify your flamebait but if you think that Sony having 6 of the 8 big hollywood studios behind it while HDdud only has 2 isnts the nail in the coffin, I cant help you.

if you choose to own a HD-DVD player instead of a Blu-ray player, you won't be able to play high definition movies from Disney (Buena Vista), Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, Warner and New Line which have all decided to support Blu-ray exclusively. With the majority of the movie studios supporting Blu-ray, the massive support from consumer electronics companies, the fact that PlayStation 3 features a Blu-ray Disc drive... well you can see the writing on the wall.

Hollywood may not bring us the the best content all the time, but they bring in the biggest money, and in the end, money decides format wars.

Universal and Paramount are the only studios still waving the HDDVD flag, but with Warner going Blu, my prediction is the same as Bay's, HDdud will die.

I am glad hollywood actually picked the better format this time.
You might not see the use of a larger capacity disc now, but in time the benefit will be obvious.