Jonathan Poritsky

We have been locked in a quag­mire of a bat­tle for years now and there is prac­ti­cally no end in sight. The pub­lic is cry­ing out for an end to the mad­ness, but nei­ther Red nor Blue rep­re­sen­ta­tives have come up with a log­i­cal timetable to do so. Our lead­ers seem to be only con­cerned with the amount of money to be made by pro­long­ing the con­flict, rather than find­ing a viable solu­tion to bring peace and free­dom to the public.

That’s right. I’m talk­ing about the Blu-Ray HD DVD for­mat war.

Just this week, the armed forces’ favorite film­maker, Michael Bay, aired his frus­tra­tion over Paramount’s drop­ping of the Blu Ray for­mat. While the rest of us banded together to sim­ply label him a douche, as has now become com­mon suf­fix for Mr. Bay, tan­ta­mount to Esqire. But the over­paid moron’s state­ments seems to be a reflec­tion of what’s going on in the media indus­try in gen­eral right now. See, the whole con­cept of dig­i­tal deliv­ery is incred­i­bly new to us, and the grow­ing pains are drawn out and, quite frankly, awful.

So there are 2 amaz­ing for­mats out there which have been started by var­i­ous com­pa­nies, Sony being the big cat in the Blu-Ray camp up against Toshiba’s rabid dog over at HD DVD. The tech specs on the actual for­mats are extremely con­fus­ing, but it mostly boils down to the same thing. They are both incred­i­bly secure (though hack­ers have already got­ten through to rip them) and both offer dif­fer­ent fla­vors of sweet script­ing, so you can write mini pro­grams for some sweet spe­cial fea­tures. Both have extremely high capac­ity and thus, here’s the one we care about, can hold full frame HD media in pro­gres­sive scan.

For those aware of HD’s 20–30 year his­tory (depend­ing on who you ask), you know that the fight to bring HD where it is today has been an ugly uphill bat­tle, much of it involv­ing nego­ti­a­tions with the FCC and other gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies. If you con­sider how long the for­mat has been around, you’ll see that it’s ridicu­lous how long things are tak­ing. It’s nearly 2008 and still, few providers offer more than a dozen HD chan­nels. We already have 720p TVs cross­ing well below $1000 and 1080p on their way, it is in fact con­ceiv­able to get HD into every Americans’ home. The Europeans may not have as many net­works as us, but they’ve already got their shit together in the HD world, offer­ing tons of cool con­tent and tele­vi­sions that we are yet to enjoy.

But that’s a dif­fer­ent story. We’re here to talk about opti­cal media.

The amount of titles avail­able in these for­mats is enough to get a col­lec­tion started, but the issue for us end users is pick­ing a for­mat. You don’t want to get the wrong one and then have all these titles, then have to repur­chase them later. Sony should have been the declared vic­tor by now, but a lot of things hap­pened to keep Blu Ray down, much of it Sony’s fault. The biggest fluke was the Nintendo Wii, which has been killing the PS3 in the mar­ket. No one saw it com­ing. Sony has been recit­ing their mantra of func­tion over form in regards to graph­ics per­for­mance and HD out­put, and Nintendo slipped right under their radar with a supe­rior gam­ing experience.

For those not keep­ing score at home, the PS3 was setup by Sony to be the HD DVD killer. The PS2’s pop­u­lar­ity was so great, Sony fig­ured for the money you’d get a top of the line gam­ing sys­tem and a Blu Ray player, stock up on media, and for­get about the com­pe­ti­tion. But any­one who’s ever used the PS2’s DVD player knows that it sucked…a lot. Beyond that, peo­ple are much hap­pier shelling out $200 for a Wii than $600 for a PS3. The amaz­ing part of it all is that the Wii is beat­ing them EVEN THOUGH they are incred­i­bly hard to find. After the PS3 mixup kept HD DVD alive, we’ve moved to our cur­rent state, with play­ers being over­priced on both sides, mak­ing the deci­sion to con­vert even more frustrating.

In the world of post pro­duc­tion, where I spend my days and nights, this frus­tra­tion is 10-fold, because we work with HD con­tent all the time and have to deliver to our clients either cost-prohibitive tape or a stan­dard def DVD. We’re in the process of test­ing Blu-Ray soft­ware, but it almost never comes out right. The only other option is to drop $25K on one of only 2 legit Blu-Ray author­ing pro­grams. The sec­ond is $50K. Why not go HD DVD then, you say, since Apple’s DVD Studio Pro sup­ports it? Well, burn­ers aren’t avail­able in the US. So the con­fu­sion drags on ever longer, much longer than the Beta/VHS war went on.

Don’t for­get, this for­mat has been around over 2 decades and just now it’s gain­ing legit­i­macy. We’ve already begun invent­ing 2K work­flows and the first 4K plas­mas will make their way to the pro mar­ket soon. By the time the dust set­tles on HD, which I sorely hope will be in 2008, we’ll already be on to the next thing. Let’s hope we can pick up the pieces of stan­dard­iza­tion the next time around and not screw the public.