With Warners picking Blu-ray, and Paramount rumored to have an escape clause letting it follow right behind, I finally bought my first Blu-ray disc: Big Fish. And a PS3 to play it on.1
Movies I’ve written are available on both formats, so I didn’t really care who won in the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray battle. I just didn’t want to get stuck with the loser.2 Or, better put, I wanted to pick the format that would lose last. Any disc-based format is ultimately going to fall as internet distribution increases. That’s the future. (And a primary issue in the WGA strike.)
Because you’ll ask: The Nines is a standard DVD. While it’s possible that there would be Blu-ray version at some point, it’s not on any calendar.
When I was working with Blue Collar, the folks who developed the menus and special features for The Nines, they were salivating over the sophisticated features you can build into Blu-ray discs, such interactive, animated guides with transparency. Without knowing the real technology behind it, it seems to move beyond the “decision-tree-with-loops” setup of current DVDs and closer to the realm of real programming.
Most of all, Blu-ray discs are big. My dream — which I pitched at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — is to use the extra capacity to include compressed clips of all the original source material, so ambitious viewers could recut the movie on their own systems. That’s a big thing to ask for Sony to support, so reasonable success with this month’s DVD release will be a major factor.
- Yes, I could have gotten something other than a PS3. But it was a very handy excuse for buying one. You know, for research. ↩
- Of course, isn’t really “over.” Even if all the studios sign on to Blu-ray, there may be alternative producers (porn, for example) who find a good reason why the other format is better, such as more flexible licensing terms. So here’s hoping that “universal” players are forthcoming, eliminating the confusion much the way the CD-RW+/- has largely gone away. ↩