Good News: Paramount finally got off their behind
As you may know Paramount’s HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases are handled by other companies such as 1K Studios of Burbank, California. However, in the past few weeks, there has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty. 1K Studios specialized mostly in HD-DVD and HDi. After the Toshiba announcement, they were forced to lay off a few of their HD-DVD experts and retrain some of the workers to program in BD-J. Many of New Line titles were also handled by 1K Studios. This added to their uncertainty as New Line was absorbed by Warner.
Now the good news:
Paramount finally decided to get off their ass and make a commitment to Blu-Ray. I heard that about 10 movies were submitted for production. The Transformers is one of them and probably the only one with market potential. Since they had already done the production for HD-DVD, most of the work for the Blu-Ray release has to be done in BD-J and high resolution sound. The movie will probably get released in the next month or so. Of course, many of you may know that Michael Bay likes to get involved in his movies and I have heard that he can be a bit finicky. My best guess as far as the quality is concerned.
Picture Quality: Probably the same as the HD-DVD release. They will probably use the same master.
Java stuff: Nobody knows
Sound: Most definitely better than HD-DVD. Either PCM or Dolby TrueHD.
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