Michael Bay And James Cameron Talk 3D: The Full Discussion

If you've been waiting for the full video of Michael Bay and James Cameron getting all geeky and talking about 3D, we've got good news and bad news. The good news is, that video has been released. The bad news is that it's only about 15 minutes long. Even so, it's a jam-packed 15 minutes filled with positive and negative spins on 3D and discussion of how Cameron helped Bay decide to bring 3D to the $195 million third Transformers film Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which opens June 29. The full discussion is embedded after the jump.

Thanks to the Hollywood Reporter for putting together such an awesome event and then posting the video of it. If you head over to their site, they've also go a full transcript with annotations to help describe some of the crazy detail the two filmmakers get into. Click here to read that or just watch it below.

Here's one of the highlights as a tease.

Michael Bay on the cost of 3D:

The bottom line is, if you want to do good 3D, it's very expensive. The camera equipment is expensive because it comes with a lot of techs, the labor. When you're doing special effects, you have digital artists, but they have to do about a third more work when they have to match two eyes. So depending how many shots you have, that incrementally increases. And there's a lot of tech fixes — it's not easy shooting 3D. It's never technically perfect, like where you shoot film and you get it back from a lab and it's like, "Oh, that's great." It doesn't come out like that with 3D....Bottom line in terms of financial impact, it's about $30 million to the budget.

From what you've seen of Dark of the Moon, maybe with the new trailer in theaters with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, do you think Bay's film can turn the tide back on 3D?