The Video:
For my day job, I work at a movie theater. I was there when Transformers opened. Michael Bay came to our theater personally and told us that we had the best presentation of any theater in Los Angeles. Later, when Transformers got an IMAX release, Michael Bay chose our theater to take his friends and family to. I have seen the film under scrupulously calibrated conditions and have in fact assisted with said calibrations. I have seen and ran the movie in 35mm and 2K digital, and watched it several times in IMAX. I don't say this to gloat, but rather to inform all of you that I know a hell of a lot about the technical presentation of Transformers.
With that in mind, this 2.35:1 AVC-encoded 1080p transfer is about the best home video representation of Transformers that you can expect to see for a very, very long time. The movie had an incredible digital interpositive made that became the source of the digital prints, IMAX prints, and presumably this HD DVD. I could make out every detail that I saw in the theaters, including the Cybertronian characters etched into the bodies of the Autobots and Decepticons. Color reproduction was perfect. Bay shot the film with many orange and blue hues, and this transfer does not wipe those away in favor of a more neutral palette. The movie was also much grainier than most people probably noticed, but we get all the grain just as if we were seeing it in the theater. What most impressed me that Paramount made no changes to this transfer was that in the film, many of the blacks are actually a dark blue. Same thing on the disc. There were no artifacts or other compression problems that I could find, including during sunset sequences, which are notoriously difficult to compress.
In other words, this transfer maintains all the character and vivaciousness of the theatrical exhibition. I watched several sequences from this disc in a screening room at Paramount, and if someone had told me I was watching an actual print of the movie, I would have believed them. That's how good it looks. While at times Bay's shooting style may be a little too grainy or dirty for aficionados who want nothing but a crystal clear image that looks like it was shot with the latest HD cameras, there's no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what both formats should be aiming for: A perfect recreation of the filmmakers' intentions.
The Audio:
Although Paramount has used lossless audio on a few of their other releases, the space of everything they wanted to include in this set meant that instead of including a Dolby True HD or a DTS-HD MA track, they went for a Dolby Digital Plus track encoded at 1.5 mbps. There's been a lot of buzz about the difference between 1.5 mbps DD+ and Dolby True HD, with many knowledgeable people saying that there is no audible difference even on professional equipment, while others claim to be able to hear the difference right in their own homes. I was very vocal about my outrage that Transformers, which aims to be a benchmark HD DVD, does not feature a lossless track of any kind. But now, having heard the audio for myself, I can understand why professional film mixers, HD DVD technical directors, and more claim that the difference is negligible.
Put simply, this 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus rocks hard. The level of aural detail is most impressive. I could hear every click and whine of the transforming parts, the grinding of metal when the robots fought, and even the startup sound of the 360 when it comes alive. During big action sequences, the surrounds were often used to assault the senses, but I noticed that the mixers would often use the rears for isolated sounds that they wanted to highlight, such as Frenzy's gibbering when he's on Air Force One. The bass has to be felt to be believed. At times it was so thunderous that I thought it might actually affect my bowels. Everything about this track just screams "REFERENCE!" and it holds up easily to the best PCM and True HD mixes that I have heard. Call me a doubter no more.
C O N T E N T 4/5
V I D E O 5/5
A U D I O 5/5
E X T R A S 5/5
R E P L A Y 4 and a half/5
A D V I C E DVD Talk Collector Series
