Transformers director favours Blu-ray Disc

Michael Bay, the director of Transformers, has slammed distributor Paramount's decision to release the hi-def version of the film only on HD DVD. He said the move was "short-sighted" and alleged it would delay consumers' adoption of HD content. "As a director, my critical eye is that Blu-ray is where my money is," Bay said …

[Iain]

Minor correction:

I think what Bay was _trying_ to say was

"As a director whose best work was all released by Blu-Ray exclusive studios, my critical eye is that Blu-ray is where my money is,"

Apart from Transformers, the only other Michael Bay film owned by a HD-DVD-supporting studio is the execrable flop "The Island". Which, as a Warner-distributed title could come to both formats, should they see a point in bothering. Everything else is either Disney or Sony.

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to September

This was reported well over a month ago.

And reportedly, he turned down the role of directing Transformers 2 as he's so pissed.

Now with a sub-£300 PS3 any refusal to release on BD seems far more silly than it did last month.

[Frank Bough]

I hate to agree with Michael Bay...

..but BluRay SHOULD win this battle. If it wasn't for MicroSoft meddling in the market, I think the war would be coming to an end about now. Make no mistake, MicroSoft want NEITHER format to succeed, and will support the underdog just long enough to make sure that doesn't happen - they want you to download HD movies via your XBOX, and higher quality disc formats make that proposition look less attractive.

[Tom]

Could have been 400,000

"As a director, my critical eye is that Blu-ray is where my money is,"

If Blu is outselling HD-DVD 2:1 as reported they could have had 400,000 sales by now...

[Anonymous Coward]

@Frank

Errr if you're so annoyed about the format war caused by two incompatible formats why aren't you demanding that Blu-Ray is abandoned? The DVD Consortium named HD-DVD as the official follow-on to DVD *before* Blu-Ray was even demonstrated. HD-DVD finalised a standard and shipped players before the rival camp had even decided what should go into a Blu-Ray spec (and by the state of recent events even the specification is still up for grabs).

Blu-Ray was nothing more than an attempt by Sony to own the entire media production cycle from content creation through to encoding, licencing, disk manufacture and playback devices. It's also incredibly customer unfriendly. If Blu-Ray wins, we all lose.

As for Microsoft, they were a founder member of the HD-DVD group so they are hardly meddling in the market.

But I do agree with you on one point, Microsoft definitely sees XBox Live as the way of delivering high definition content to the home. The market is theirs to take and they'd be foolish to lose the download market to Apple for a second time.

[Jason The Saj]

Both are wrong..

Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD is what the consumers want. And that's the biggest problem.

Both are the 8-track of our day. Both will die a short death. In most data cycles there have been night an order of magnitude improvement (ie: CD over floppy, ). Or similar data storage but much reduced form factor (ie: floppy over old mag tape reels).

CD's held 650mb, DVD's came on the seen and hold 8g-16gb of data. Now, we get Blu-Ray & HD-DVD and we're at 50/30gb. Not that big of a jump....

:(

[Neil Hoskins]

How important is this?

I'm actually starting to think that this bluray/HD battle is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Comparisons with the VHS/Betamax thing are really not valid because now we have many other methods of recording, storing, and delivering. OK, no chance of fibre-to-the-door anytime soon, so I suppose we'll be buying hi-def pre-recorded films on them for a while. But other applications? Writeable disks? Absolutely no way, with flash memory getting so cheap and reliable. RW disks were always a complete shambles, and not compatible between different readers. CDR and DVDR are just as bad: they take ages to write with a low success rate. Quite a few people have DVD-RAM recorders for their TV now, but the hard-disk recorders are now cheaper and far more clever.

I have to take a 300MB database file home this evening, and I've just given up after five attempts to burn it to a CDR and have bluetoothed it to the flash card in my phone.

[Sy]

Errrm...

Would someone like to tell Play.com to stop selling the 2007 Transformers movie on Blu-Ray then...

[Jamie White]

Time Travelling Robots ?

Erm - Did I just wake up from watching transformers the first time ? this is October yes ?

[Anonymous Coward]

For God's Sake Get Your Facts Right!

This was reported SO long ago its not even funny. This article should have dust on it by now.

Bay feels that it should be out on all formats as that is where his work will get the most exposure - and fair play to him for wanting that.

@Anon

He IS directing Transformers 2, and played a part in resigning the screenwriters from the first movie.

@Frank Bough,

OFC! I should have known! Something isn't going the way someone wants so lets BLAME MICROSOFT!! Obviously you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. HDDVD is doing perfectly well without MS 360 addon sales, and more HDDVD's are being sold per player owner than BD's.

Yes I own a 360 Elite. Guess what? I run Linux on my laptop which sits next to my PS3 and 40" Sony Bravia.

Stop being such a sheep.

[TeeCee]

.....turned down the role of directing Transformers 2 as he's so pissed.

"Bloody GIANT ROBOTS. I meeeeaaan whassafucksh that all about then? Go on? Tell me? Carn't be arshed any more me. You should shee my neksht filurm. Fucking maaagic it is! Gunsh, bombsh, wooosshhhhm, boooommm, blooody maaaarrvellous! I looovvvee you, I reeealllyyy doooo."

[Cliff]

@teecee

Bloody priceless man,

Thank you! I'm so sick of people using 'pissed' when they mean 'upset'

[Joerg]

You are wrong...

@Jason The Saj: You are wrong, instead. DVD can hold a maximum of 8.2GB of data approx. 16GB since when, in you dreams perhaps !?

Exactly, CDs maximum capacity was/is 700MB which means that they are roughly 6 times smaller than DVD-5 and 12 times smaller than DVD-9. This ratio holds with Blu-Ray discs Vs DVDs since a BD-25 is roughly 6 times bigger than a DVD-5 and a BD-50 is roughly 12 times bigger than a DVD-5.

So, what is your point ? DVD weren't needed as well, uh ?

What do people need, DRM downloadable content on Microsoft servers playable only on Microsoft trusted devices which gives no rights to customers other than keep paying and never own a copy of the content ? Do you work for Microsoft, perhaps ?

[Andy Bright]

Both formats have too little storage capacity

They're better, but even now tv resolution is once again outpacing media. Neither format has the capacity to make use of 2160p or whatever comes along after that.

Both formats should be regarded as an intermediatory stage, while we wait for either gigabit internet downloading to living room media players to become the norm, or disk capacity of at least 1 terabyte.

When we have the equivalent of a netapp replacing our old-fashioned dvrs then we'll have finally got somewhere.

[Bad Beaver]

Frankly...

I don't give a rat's ass about what Michael Bay thinks. He regularly insults the brains of the paying audience with crappy movies that all look 98% alike. That is unless he gets someone else to direct his retarded "vision" of a classic. If he could just shut up please.

[Alex]

Re: For God's Sake Get Your Facts Right!

I think he's referring to the hundreds of millions of dollars Microsoft paid out to get the studios HD-DVD exclusive. You know, bribing them.

[Scottie Taylor]

Re:For God's Sake Get Your Facts Right!

so Bay is directing the next TF movie? Damn. I had my hopes up for a minute there when someone posted that he wasn't. I was hoping against hope that there might be some redemption from that first piece of crap that was Michael Bay's Transformers. I guess not. Oh well. I still have my original series DVDs and G1/G2 comics from the different continuities so I'll happily boycott that piece of shit when it comes out.

[Jach]

HD

Hardly Different. I won't be shelling out any cash for this slightly-upgraded crap until they make something more like The Matrix.

But honestly, it doesn't matter to me who wins between HD-DVD and Bluray. Whoever wins, we lose.

[Jason Harvey]

and I still just use DVDs on my 19" screen

cause I'm not a lemming that I should follow every new thing on the shelf. My dvds work fine and have the content I want and I can sit 2 feet away from the screen and be immersed in it. of course I don't have that big screen for parties, but that's what some of my friends are for ;-)

besides... my place wouldn't do well for a party anyhow (too small).

once the format wars are over... or the next big format comes out that really makes a big difference... then maybe I'll "upgrade"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: For God's Sake Get Your Facts Right!

The facts were right. You though the only involvement MS had in HD DVD was releasing the HD DVD drive fro the XBOX?

Wow, read this: http://tinyurl.com/2x8zsh

Then you'll find the only reason HD-DVD exists is because of Microsoft and their typical illegal behavior of bribes.

[Scott Mckenzie]

Alarmingly poor reporting...

..as has already been stated this was first reported in early September, it then followed up by a very hasty retreat from Michael Bay stating that wasn't what he intended etc etc and that he would do Transformers 2.... is it really that hard to get facts right?

As for the MS paying for the deal, that too was rubbish

As is the fact that BR is better, they use the same codecs, they're identical.... one presently has a pointlessly larger disc as you can't get the advanced content on to take advantage of it and equally the advanced content available for BR is so complex it takes up eons more space on a disk than the stuff on HD DVD and as such the disc size advantage summounts to nothing!

If you like either buy them (or even both!), if you don't, don't... it really is that simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Alarmingly poor comments

Yes, there were reports back in September. Then, if you were actually paying any attention, Paramount had a little chat with him and brought him back on message.

This is NEW news that he's gone back to his BluRay loving ways. Not entirely unconnected with discussions going on with Jerry Bruckheimer and Buena Vista, I suspect.

The Paramount "bribery" money did not come from Microsoft, but Toshiba, so you can all stop blaming Ballmer. And start explaining how this is any different to the way Sony have paid all mastering and pressing costs for Fox and Paramount until that announcement.