If you want a very in depth technical look at the differences between IMAX 70mm, 70mm and 35mm for _The Odyssey_, I wrote an article about this last month.
But here are my nit-picks from the article linked here. I'm only commenting on the 15/70mm IMAX parts, because I'm not knowledgable enough about the digital IMAX foramats.
> The extra resolution, up to 18K equivalent
The claim of 18K is entirely untested. No one has ever measured what the theoretical resolution of an 15/70mm IMAX system is. Kodak's film may me theoretically capable of resolving this, but what about the camera lens, the GT projector lens and field flattener, and everything else involved? Until a study is actually done, I don't think the 18K is a good number to band about.
> thanks to the use of single or even dual 15kW water-cooled xenon bulbs
No cinema is using dual lamps. The dual lamps are used for 3D - one lamp per "eye" (right and left). But no 15/70mm IMAX is currently showing 3D, I think the last was the London Science Museum (but that's a guess, so don't take as truth). So it is only single lamp. 15kW is also not always true - some smaller 15/70mm IMAXes use 12kW or around that.
> However, there are only around 24 such theaters in the US, nine in Canada and six elsewhere around the world.
This is incorrect. There are actually 25 in the US, and 7 in the rest of the world, totalling 41 prints.
dagmx 24 minutes ago [-]
Thank you very much for the corrections here. As someone else who has professionally worked in the film space, it always irks me when people talk about film in digital resolutions for the reason you mention.
I also agree with many of your other corrections but that is the one I wanted to ageee with the most as it’s my biggest pet peeve when I see people claim “film” is equivalent to a given resolution.
Anything analogue can be (almost) infinitely resolved but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be effectively good at all those resolutions. Almost nobody thinks of the quality of medium and lenses when making those claims.
qingcharles 49 minutes ago [-]
18K seems high. I did some tests for Universal once and we pulled 10K from some 70mm IMAX ride prints. 8K was solid, 10K was very borderline.
KaiserPro 26 minutes ago [-]
I'm trying to remember what resolution we rendered two face for when it went into imax.
This was using 32bit renderman, and it was constantly OOM'ing because we were really pushing it.
I seem to recall that we rendered out at 7k, even though the optical resolution was meant to be 12k.
derbOac 6 hours ago [-]
Not a complaint about your post but this stuff about film formats and aspect ratios has always had me scratching my head.
For years I heard people arguing that wider aspect ratios were preferable because they afforded a wider view, and that narrower aspect ratios were too restrictive horizontally. This always seemed confusing to me because theoretically they should allow for more vertical space for the same width.
Now we're being told the opposite. Obviously if the full frame is being cut for different formats, you're losing some of the shot, so maybe this all reduces to what the director wants, and what is being lost relative to that in different formats.
But then this brings me to my second source of confusion:
> If you watch it in IMAX 70mm, you are seeing it in the full 1.43:1 aspect ratio, which will probably be the only way to experience this format. It would be unprecedented for this full picture to be released on Blu-ray or on streaming, so watching it in a cinema on IMAX 70mm is your chance to experience this.
Why can't releases just be scaled to fit on a screen? You could take that IMAX70mm and scale it down to fit on a different aspect ratios. You'd end up with black bars on the sides of the screen, but then you'd see the same shot, just shrunk down. Everyone has a different TV size anyway so it's all relative.
Clearly resolution plays a role, but IMAX70mm isn't going to be low resolution, and none of this will matter for home viewing anyway.
All of these discussions ultimately seem odd to me. I understand the projection format constraints in movie theaters, but at some point it seems possible to just downscale everything to every aspect ratio format.
They've done it here, so in theory they could just release all these versions as part of a physical disc set (or stream them all):
> For years I heard people arguing that wider aspect ratios were preferable because they afforded a wider view
> Now we're being told the opposite.
I agree with you, but I must also make a special case for IMAX 70mm. It's about the seating position. What we call IMAX 70mm now, was once just "IMAX" and its gimmick was a floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall screen with a relatively close seating position, such that the viewer felt immersed in the movie. Back then it was commonly used for science documentaries where they could soar you over landscapes and in amongst the sea creatures. So this print of The Odyssey is allowing users to enjoy this same gimmick, but with a legit movie. I remember watching an earlier Nolan Batman film in an IMAX 70mm auditorium --while the picture quality was good, it was not shot to take up all the vertical real estate. So presumably they did not use IMAX cameras when filming (just normal 70mm).
As for widescreen, in ye olden times theatrical releases would use it as a gimmick for big visually impressive movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Eventually nearly every movie in the theater used a relatively wide aspect ratio, and as these were converted to VHS and DVD they were commonly butchered into a "full screen" format that erased the left and right part of the image. (They had to slide the view left and right to keep characters on the screen; people called this pan-and-scan.)
There's nothing inherently better about any particular aspect ratio IMO. What's most important is that you are seeing what the director wants you to see.
gamblor956 53 seconds ago [-]
Nolan used Imax 70mm cameras to film some scenes in the Dark Knight Rises, like the plane scene to open the movie. Dunkirk and Interstellar used 65mm IMAX cameras.
tshaddox 56 minutes ago [-]
Aspect ratio by itself tells you very little about the theatrical viewing experience. What really matters is the "angular image size," i.e. the horizontal and vertical angle that the image fills in your field of view. This is determined by the aspect ratio of the image, but also critically the size of the screen and the distance from the screen to the viewer.
1.43 IMAX screens are really really big and fill more of your field of view than most other cinema screens. You can't just look at the 1.43 aspect ratio and say "it's skinnier than 2.39 scope" or "it's wider than 2.39 anamorphic." It would be more accurate to say "in your field of view, it's both wider and taller than most theater's 2.39 anamorphic projection."
This is also why pleas for the 1.43 aspect ratio on home video are slightly misguided. It's not the shape of the 1.43 IMAX image that's so compelling. It's the angular image size! And you probably are not going to view an IMAX film at home with the intended image size. (To be clear, I think it would still be interesting to see that 1.43 image at home, and in VR it's reportedly an excellent experience.)
Marsymars 15 minutes ago [-]
> This is also why pleas for the 1.43 aspect ratio on home video are slightly misguided. It's not the shape of the 1.43 IMAX image that's so compelling. It's the angular image size! And you probably are not going to view an IMAX film at home with the intended image size.
Yes, exactly. If you really care about the theatrical experience, you'll be using a projector at home... and it's really up to your particular space whether you'd be able to fit in a bigger screen at a 1.43 or a 16:9 aspect ratio.
For some rough math, I rule-of-thumb 5 feet vertically as a reasonable max size for a home projector - it gives you a couple feet at the bottom for coffee tables, consoles etc. and doesn't reach too high, so you don't need to be looking too far upwards or to invest in stadium seating. 60 inches vertically gives you a 105 inch 1.43:1 screen, or a wider 122 inch 16:9 screen. Assuming you don't have other constraints (brightness, horizontal space, etc.) you may as well get the wider/bigger screen.
isx726552 46 minutes ago [-]
I bet it’s as simple as Nolan just wanting the biggest screen and biggest film negative he could practically get his hands on without inventing a whole new format. I do wonder if we’ll see him try to add anamorphic lenses to 15/70 IMAX at some point to try to make it widescreen again, which would be crazy (in a mad scientist way).
Also, I am kinda frustrated that he pushes for large formats so much and yet lights everything so plainly. I’d love to see him go for a more high-contrast lighting scheme like we saw in typical Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s.
mchristen 5 hours ago [-]
It can definitely be confusing.
For example, traditionally still film cameras used 35mm film, but cinema cameras also used 35mm film. However the cinema cameras capture the image vertically instead of horizontally on the film, otherwise known as a Super 35. Literally the film runs through the camera vertically instead of horizontally.
In order to make an image work that is understandable to our brains you either need to do heavy cropping and waste tons of film, or you use an anamorphic lens to "squeeze" more light onto the film. You then have to reverse that when you go to project the film.
qingcharles 45 minutes ago [-]
Don't want to particularly wade into an aspect ratio discussion, but the common thought around the standardization of 16:9 in home cinema/HDTV was due to the aspect ratio of human vision being somewhat of that ratio, due to use having two horizontally-spaced eyes.
I think the part you’re missing is the screen size in theatres. I saw The Odyssey in two formats (70mm normal film, and Dolby Cinema).
In both theatres, the screen and image took up the nearly entire height and width of the theatre. The image filled the screen. The 70mm theatre I saw it at had a very wide screen, but not very tall. Filled the wall though
So even if it’s possible to project a digital version in the 1.43:1 aspect ratio, you’d end up with severe cropping on the edges.
That’s not the point of this IMAX format.
The point of this IMAX format is to have a screen that’s literally twice as tall as those normal screens. To accomplish that, you need a really, really big room. Most theatres can’t physically fit these screen sizes. That’s why 1.43:1 IMAX is so rare compared to 1.90:1.
So when you see it in a theatre like that, firstly the image is really big. But the main thing is that the image stretches past your peripheral vision vertically. In fact, at my local one (which recently shut down, no Odyssey), you can’t even see the bottom of the screen, just a slight curve at the edge of the floor. Which doesn’t matter because the image is framed to not put important info there. The point is for the image to be bigger than life.
Showing a cropped version is just not equivalent to that. You could argue that we should have the choice. But I think generally because of how it’s framed, I’d rather it just take up the full size of my TV. So IMAX releases sometimes come out 16:9 instead of cropped top and bottom.
xdertz 5 hours ago [-]
You can also watch 1.43:1 in a virtual cinema in VR.
MetaWhirledPeas 1 hours ago [-]
Only if the media is published in that format.
ralferoo 4 hours ago [-]
> Now we're being told the opposite.
The choice of unusual film standards has always been to make the film a bit "special" when viewed in a suitable cinema.
The original format 1.33:1 was simply using 35mm wide film (originally 1.35") and after putting sprocket holes on each side, there was 1" of usable width, and someone decided to make a frame 1" x 0.75". The projected image was just scaled linearly.
When they started adding audio, the image was shrunk slightly to 22mm x 16mm (the ratio of this image was modified slightly to 1.375:1), and the audio track was just placed between the right hand edge and sprockets. They could use the same projector technology, just with a mask between the film and the lens so that the audio track didn't appear on the screen, and an optical pickup head for the audio that was placed below the mask and lens.
As an aside - a silent movie projector has a complicated gear system that advances the film 4 sprockets in a jerk, once every 24 times per second, while before and after that it is fed smoothly (so you have a "loop" of film above and below to take up the slack). You also have a shutter that closes for half the frame to hide the film when it's actually moving, and open when it's stationary. When the audio passes the audio sensor after the bottom loop, it's moving linearly, so the amount of light that can pass through a narrow slit is proportional to the voltage sent to the speaker. Later when stereo was added to films, they just fit 2 audio tracks into the space of one, so mono films would work on stereo projectors and vice versa. And even later, Dolby surround was encoded as a dot matrix pattern in between the sprockets (actually, it was just a film ID and timecode that was encoded) and the audio itself came from the 3-5 CDs that came with each film. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
These two standards stuck around for quite a while and then some of the later experimental TV systems started also using this ratio, probably to making filming non-live TV possible / easier as they could use the film process and show it on a TV using a telecine without wasting any of the image space.
Once TVs started to become popular, directors started wanting to make their films more special, something that couldn't be experienced the same way on a TV. And so began the arms race on picture formats. For a while 1.66:1 was popular, which used the same projectors as before but changed out the lens for an anamorphic lens which squished the image to make it wider. And soon, 1.85:1 was standardised (with a different anamorphic lens and mask). This was known as "flat" and was used by the majority of films. Some of the higher budget films were produced in 2.35:1, known as cinemascope or just "scope" and so now most cinemas had 3 sets of masks and lenses - square, flat and scope - and could show pretty much everything with a pair of projectors just by swapping the lenses. A few special aspect ratios were tried, but these were usually limited distribution to specialised cinemas, and cropped to a standard size for regular cinemas. In this era, usually the curtains could move to the correct width for each film, or fully closed.
70mm film has been around for quite a long time, but never really caught on as it was expensive to shoot - non standard cameras, roughly 4 times the area of film (and so at least 4 times the cost, but more because demand was lower), and limited where it could be seen as most projectors were 35mm only. It was possible to get projectors that had a swappable gate so you could also show 70mm film, but they were relatively rare - probably less than 10% of cinemas had these. The aspect ratio was almost always 2.2:1, and so while it was narrower than scope format, people would pay extra for the 70mm experience because of the higher quality (and less grainy look).
In the 1990s, TVs started shifting to 16:9 (1.77:1) which was a half-way compromise between improving the quality for films (1.85:1 scope doesn't need to be cropped much or only has small bars top and bottom) and leaving masses of unused space for older 4:3 TV broadcasts. However 16:9 was never used for cinema, and more directors switched to 2.35:1 for films after that to keep the "better in cinema" quality.
So personally, I don't think 1.43:1 is really any better for 70mm (after all the film is so much bigger, the quality is already improved), rather it's almost certainly been chosen so that it looks different, and much better at cinema. Just as films shown in "letterbox format" on TV with half the screen black looked bad on a 4:3 TV, now pretty much every TV is 16:9, watching a 1.43:1 film on it will have big black bars on the side and detract from the experience. The cinema will be the best place to watch this.
So, IMHO, it's all just a marketing gimmick aimed at those that want to pay a premium to see a film as the director intended it.
anon7000 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t think you covered the difference between 70mm and IMAX 70mm. One frame of IMAX is basically 3 frames of normal 70mm. So it is physically 3 times bigger
I’d say that yes it’s a marketing technique, but for these releases it’s not a gimmick. If you have a chance to watch a film in 1.43:1, you should try it. The difference is how big it is, and especially how tall it is. Most theatres don’t physically have the size for it. Film could be gimmicky, but I can clearly notice the difference. (Was at a film release that had to fall back to digital at a couple points, and it was very obvious to me, but not my friends with me.)
What’s gimmicky is when normal movies release for IMAX without filling that full aspect ratio. Or when you have a tiny IMAX screen
ubercore 5 hours ago [-]
Originally a lot of HDTV would present SDTV with black bars on the sides. People don't like it.
JimsonYang 1 hours ago [-]
7 or 8 of which are in California
Ccecil 13 minutes ago [-]
Some locals I know built a few of these cameras. I just ran into one of them the other day.
They started the local makerspace. There was an article last week in the local paper about it.
For those in the Bay Area, AMC Metreon has the capabilities to show the best of all of these formats: 70mm film, dual laser GT, and also a Dolby Cinema theater in there as well.
rvschuilenburg 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's interesting how we went from 4:3 to 16:9, and are now back to something very close to 4:3 again. And both changes were sold as "you can now see even more of the movie".
wuliwong 1 hours ago [-]
I'm a videography hobbyist, there is so much discussion about aspect ratios, particularly around anamorphic lenses. In those circles, wider aspect ratio is almost always considered better (there's more to anamorphics than just aspect ratio but that's separate from this discussion). I have felt the "wider is better" idea is not so much fundamental but more learned through seeing the widescreen in movie theaters which have massive screens with a crazy sound systems. But yea, seeing the opposite argued as seeing more of the movie is pretty funny. Feels pretty arbitrary but there probably is an idea aspect ratio. Probably 16x9. haha.
tshaddox 53 minutes ago [-]
If the angular image size (which is determined by the aspect ratio, screen size, and viewing distance) increases each time, it's accurate to say "you can now see even more of the movie."
And that is typically what happened. Typical 16:9 flatscreen TVs at home offer a larger angular image size than the typical 4:3 CRTs did. And typical 1.43 IMAX viewings offer a larger angular image size than typical 16:9 flatscreen TVs.
Bluestrike2 2 hours ago [-]
Most of that discussion is less about any advantages inherent to either aspect ratio and more about just viewing the film as the director originally intended.
The cinematographer would have composed shots for the main 1.43:1 aspect ratio first while taking into consideration the other aspect ratios (the viewfinder will overlay the different framelines to help make those decisions). The DP then gets to go back in during post and recompose each shot for the different formats as needed, tweaking what was originally shot to do their best to maintain a cohesive feel and emphasis across each crop. With five different formats for The Odyssey[0], I'm sure that was a fun experience.
It's not that one format is inherently better. The frame is a storytelling tool, and you can use different aspect ratios to influence how audiences perceive the film.[1] It's when you start changing it afterwards with little regard for the director's original intentions that we see problems. The old pan-and-scan movie releases for VHS or cheap 16:9 conversions are frustrating examples.
The sibling comments are spot on, but also worth noting IMAX is not something you're going to get at a regular multiplex, and definitely not at home. The screens are like 10 storeys high and designed to completely immerse you. While it's much better than 3D, for example, it's not supposed to be the new thing for all films.
ant6n 5 hours ago [-]
It went much farther - CinemaScope 2.35 to 2.75, or even Polyvision 4.0.
To me, the big wide screen Hollywood titles are 2.35:1.
To me IMAX 70 is cropped on the left and right compared to CinemaScope. Watching an IMAX 70 film in a normal theatre at wide screen aspect ratio crops the film again, so it’s effectively cropped on all four sides.
fsh 7 hours ago [-]
IMHO, the only reasons for using 70 mm IMAX are nostalgia and marketing. Digital movie cameras have far better color reproduction, more dynamic range, zero frame jitter, and plenty of resolution without grain. They are also small and silent which allows far more interesting shots than what is possible with a 70 mm monster. Kubrick and Lean used 70 mm because it was the best technology available at the time. Today, the best technology is digital.
tshaddox 40 minutes ago [-]
I think it's misguided to say things like "IMAX 70 mm has an equivalent of 18k resolution." But have you seen a 70 mm IMAX projection? In my experience, the 70 mm image looks noticeably sharper than an equivalent 4K digital IMAX projection.
1.43 IMAX 4K is also a great experience, but its resolution is a meaningful and noticeable limitation given its massive angular image size. It's a compromise compared to a more traditional 4K cinema screen (like a typical Dolby Cinema screen): with IMAX 4k you gain angular image size and lose "pixels per degree of visual angle." And both are noticeable!
I agree with you that the latter has all the advantages you listed, but there is still something truly special about the apparent resolution of IMAX 70 mm projection.
nottorp 7 hours ago [-]
I'd say one of the advantages of analog filming is it's more expensive to "color correct" digitally after. So maybe you get less monochrome films?
dbspin 6 hours ago [-]
Every film is colour corrected and graded digitally (in addition to all the special effects and compositing work), and this is in fact one of the cheapest parts of the process. So no, it's not remotely a consideration.
tshaddox 30 minutes ago [-]
Not every film. It was widely reported that Oppenheimer was color graded photochemically, and the 65mm film physically spliced (the editor of course worked in Avid with digital film scans). This means that 70 mm screenings were projecting a fully analog end-to-end pipeline. The exception, of course, is the visual effects shots, which went through a digital intermediary.
The same seems to be true of The Odyssey, although the reporting is less clear as of now, and I suspect there are many more visual effects shots than Oppenheimer.
nottorp 1 hours ago [-]
Sad. A little more cheap colour correction and grading and we'll be back to b&w movies.
afiori 6 hours ago [-]
I would guess that the film was still mastered/produced digitally
lemoncookiechip 7 hours ago [-]
This is purely my opinion. I see 70mm as mostly a movie scam to extort exorbitant amounts of cash from a ticket for something that's vaguely noticeable outside the aspect ratio itself.
Note that I'm not disputing that there is a visual difference, there is, the image is clearer, shaper, with better darks, but the entry fee paired with how out of the way 70mm is, it's just ends up feeling like FOMO.
My opinion doesn't hold much value since I just dislike the cinema experience in general. I like being able to control the environment I'm in when watching something (pausing, eating, loudness...) and whenever I go to cinemas I have to deal with people having their smartphones screens brighten up, people yapping and laughing at things that aren't funny, eating noises, etc...
Tarq0n 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think the extra production cost, for the Odyssey at least, is likely to be offset by extra box office income. If you read about it, the massive cameras and limited running time of one load of film (less than five minutes) sounds very burdensome. That's not to mention the obscene cost of the film stock, as well as developing dailies and having to edit from film (they actually cut and pasted film together for the Final Cut of the IMAX version).
The trailers also looked much worse than the film which I suspect is related to difficulties with this whole process.
JimsonYang 1 hours ago [-]
Define exporbant? Subjective experience but the differnece in 70mm imax vs Imax was $7ish in SF
microtonal 6 hours ago [-]
I am with you. I completely believe that the difference is there and that it is probably more immersive.
However, these discussions always feel similar to MP3 192kbit/s vs AAC 256kbit/s vs lossless vs lossless 24-bit 192KHz. Trained listeners can hear the difference between MP3 192kbit and AAC 256 kbit. Perhaps even AAC 256kbit vs lossless. But IRL it does not matter:
- Some people listen on very crappy headphones/speakers.
- Some people listen on good headphones with AAC, but even with AAC on, external sound leakage probably has a larger effect on the perceived signal than compression artifacts of AAC 256kbit/s.
- Most of the time people listen to music in the background, so there is not a lot of attention on it anyway.
- Many (most?) people primarily listen to melody and lyrics and not to the fine grained details of how the instruments sound.
Similarly, a lot of people who watch movies, as long as the image/audio quality is good enough, they focus on the storyline, the dialogs, the general atmosphere, etc.
I am not denying that there is a market for audiophile audio or the best quality image for movie visuals buffs, but for most people these are just overpriced gimmicks. I mean, we used to watch movies at home on crappy, small CRT TVs, and many of us still have fond memories of many movies despite seeing it in a format that could as well be from the stone age compared to even a standard projector used in an average cinema nowadays.
To avoid any straw manning: I am certainly in favor of all the improvements in tech we have seen, it's more that the experience does not linearly with it. More like exponential saturation.
mariusmg 6 hours ago [-]
>To understand IMAX, it helps to know how movies are captured in the first place. Many are shot digitally, as it's cheaper and more convenient than using film. However, many filmmakers still want, well, film
The illogical part about this process is that they convert the shot film to digital, they add CGI and color correction and then they print back the digital version to....film.
So the whole point of shooting a Hollywood movie on film today is because some directors like....film. There is no practicality/cost/reasoning to it.
dbspin 6 hours ago [-]
Some directors like the appearance of film... Given that the spectacle is a large part of the reason we go to the cinema, the colour fidelity and (and in the case of IMAX) unique scale and aspect ratio are the point... Not sure why practicality or cost would override that?
As a director who doesn't shoot on film - I still see the appeal, there's a particular quality to skin tones - especially in response to older arc lights and the like - that digital still doesn't quite capture. Ditto motion cadence, halation and grain that are all emulated in digital post to greater or lesser degrees of fidelity.
jagged-chisel 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand how even the preference for shooting on film makes any sense if you’re digitizing, heavily processing, adding entirely digital elements …
I get putting the final edit to film.
If you’re not doing all that additional garbage, then capturing on film, going digital for basic editing, then back to film might make sense.
dbspin 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, let me explain it to you.
The end result is not recreatable with digital assets. i.e.: It doesn't matter your budget, we cannot currently simulate the look of the original footage shot on 35 (let alone 70mm, forget about IMAX 80mm) by shooting digitally.
Also what you're referring to as 'garbage', is colour grading and composite work. It's not adulteration, it's an essential create part of the filmmaking work. Whether you're doing it exclusively as part of the development process of the physical film, or digitally in Nuke or Resolve etc.
Your inability to understand why people do things in a domain you're not familiar with is indicative of gaps in your knowledge, not the futility of the process. Lots of information about how and why all this works as it does online.
nimbleal 3 hours ago [-]
I work in this industry and I don’t think this is true. Look at these tests, using a camera that’s now two generations out of date:
I think what makes film great is more the process. It forces slower more deliberate filmmaking and somehow that seems to show up in the product. Only celebrated/respected filmmakers have the influence to force production to allow them to shoot film so there’s a selection bias at play too.
wuliwong 43 minutes ago [-]
I cannot speak to film->digital->film but for audio recording if you did a similar thing like tape->digital->tape you would impart some real stuff to the recording versus just digital all the way through.
Tarq0n 5 hours ago [-]
This is out of my area of expertise a bit, but digitization quality loss often depends on whether you quantize things, at what level of fidelity and also what kind of transformations you apply (stepped discrete or continuous for instance).
Consider how music production is often done on audio recorded at a higher sample rate, so when effects are applied artifacting is reduced for the eventual export sample rate. For video, one analogy is recording slow-motion shots at a higher framerate rather than slowing down regular footage.
chris_va 5 hours ago [-]
I know extensive thought goes into filters in front of the camera and the lighting, but one can probably change the bayer filter transmission function to get them to match better (and maybe add one or two channels at the cost of shot noise).
I see this in industrial cameras, do you know if any filmmakers use non standard Bayer filters?
zos_kia 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's as illogical as it sounds. The qualities of the signal you feed your digital pipeline are very important to the finished product. And i'm using the plural intentionally here : not quality as in "it's better" but qualities as in "it has specific characteristics".
I can more easily relate to music production which i have passing experience with. The analog would be : if you plug your guitar directly in a preamplified audio card, you'll get the cleanest possible signal, right ? Then you'd just have to post-process it through a virtual cabinet and a bunch of effects to get exactly the sound you want. Except in most cases you'll get better results by plugging a guitar on an amplifier and putting that amp in a room with a microphone pointing to it. All that hardware will natively give you a better sound than you could achieve with reasonable effort on a fully digital workflow. Not better quality (in fact you're probably losing definition on that signal at several points in the chain), but qualities that on average will make the sound more pleasing to the ear. You can still manipulate the sound with virtual effects all you want, it will still retain the "grain" of the original setup.
xdertz 5 hours ago [-]
The guitar claim is not true anymore. Companies like NeuralDSP have reached the point where it is indistinguishable from analogue. Virtual amps have pretty much completely replaced analogue amps in live setups and many studio recordings.
anonymous_user9 5 hours ago [-]
It's not illogical, because film behaves differently than CMOS/CCD image sensors. Film scanners can then digitize the film's nuances more very accurately, resulting in an digital image with better dynamic range etc.
snowwrestler 5 hours ago [-]
The DC area used to have two IMAX theaters with film projectors: one at the Natural History museum, and one at the Air & Space museum.
The one at Natural History lost tons of money. They eventually took it out, sold it for parts, and replaced it with offices and a cafe (which does make money).
They kept the theater at Air & Space, but converted it to IMAX digital. As a result, they are able to easily show pretty much any first-run movie, as well as revivals. That helps them sell a lot more tickets.
The real essential difference in IMAX is the physical shape of the theater. A real IMAX theater has very steep seats that are close to an absolutely huge screen, with huge speakers behind it. As opposed to the “IMAX” found in cineplexes where they just took their largest theater and upgraded the projector.
Films really should be shot differently for IMAX. Closeups need to be a lot less close up. People shouldn’t have to turn their heads side to side just to see one or the other eye of your character. IMO it’s a mixed result in The Odyssey. Directors just can’t resist closeups of actors. And the movie needs to work in regular theaters where most people will see it.
gempir 7 hours ago [-]
I'm curious about the opinions on 70mm (non-IMAX) vs Digital IMAX.
What do you prefer if you have tried both.
Because those are the only mostly accessible options around the world.
Sound is also something to consider, because depending on the Theater they might have wildy different sound setups even different audio standards.
ungreased0675 7 hours ago [-]
For me, sound is more impactful than screen resolution or aspect ratio. Subwoofer arrays powerful enough for the audience to feel sub-bass are expensive, large, and need to be placed precisely in the room. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a movie theater that had acoustics rivaling a top-tier music venue or concert hall.
sgt 6 hours ago [-]
Tried both, 70mm (65mm is video, 5mm is audio) is just superior in every way. There's nothing out there that compares, digital projections are still far behind.
rpdillon 5 hours ago [-]
Knowing nothing about this, it's a little bit wild to see two comments on the same page making diametrically opposed claims.
I was referring to regular 70mm, in which 65mm is for the picture and 5mm is to allow for the sound channels. I am not surprised - squeezing even more out of the film, that IMAX would just put audio separately.
gempir 5 hours ago [-]
I am also referring to regular 70mm, not IMAX, so is that part of the article.
> 70mm film uses DTS audio, which is supplied to the cinema on either CD-ROMs, or (more recently) via USB sticks.
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
I have never seen that in real life though, only regular 70 mm film of which 65 mm is definitely used for the picture and audio channels for the rest. E.g Lawrence of Arabia
throw0101a 7 hours ago [-]
I've seen non-IMAX 70mm referred to 5/70 because the image uses five perforations per frame; IMAX 70mm is then 15/70 because it uses fifteen perforations.
How much can we trust the "Reddit IMAX community"? The people heavily invested in a technology as their hobby aren't always the best sources of objective technical information; is /r/imax more of an "audiophile forum" or more of a forum of people who actually know their stuff?
Certainly we need to be mindful of biases, but you can also simply be falling into a tu quoque, ad hominem fallacy.
At the end of the day, are these 'fancy' theatre experiences (IMAX and the others out there) worth the extra ticket price to you? Certainly Christopher Nolan thinks so since he was willing to put up with the hassle of the IMAX gear for months on end (including airlifting them up to top of mountains), but what will you get out of it watching is something on you can answer.
Of course the largest complaint I tend to hear about Nolan films is the audio mixing, not the visuals.
mort96 6 hours ago [-]
The interesting question isn't "what's biggest" but what's the best viewing experience.
ramesh31 7 hours ago [-]
>"Certainly Christopher Nolan thinks so since he was willing to put up with the hassle of the IMAX gear for months on end (including airlifting them up to top of mountains), but what will you get out of it watching is something on you can answer."
The 70MM IMAX showings at Lincoln Square are still completely sold out 4x/day for the next month. People are filling the theater at 6AM on a Saturday to see it. The market has clearly spoken.
phoghed 6 hours ago [-]
4x a day for a month on so few screens isn’t even that many tickets comparatively.
6 hours ago [-]
dudefeliciano 7 hours ago [-]
I think that has to do with the marketing and all the memes about how much "less" of the film you see if not watching it on 70mm IMAX
scrlk 5 hours ago [-]
1.43 IMAX isn't exclusive to 15/70mm, it can also be screened with IMAX's dual laser projection system.
AdamN 6 hours ago [-]
Which is true. He didn't shoot in 35mm so if you want to get the full shot on the screen you must go to an IMAX theater.
rpdillon 5 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting choice as an artist to produce work for mass consumption that 99% of the population will never be able to experience as intended.
jl6 7 hours ago [-]
Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective weight on distinctions that would be without difference to a "normal" person. Audio gear, gourmet food, fine wine, running shoes... It's XKCD 915 all the way down. I also recommend Penn & Teller: Bullshit! S03E12 ("The Best") on this subject.
Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.
mort96 6 hours ago [-]
I think we're giving too much credit to audiophiles. We're talking people who might have discussions on their forums about whether audio buffers in memory allocated with malloc or in memory allocated with C++'s `new` sounds best. Stuff which doesn't have "microscopic effects dwarfed by other factors" but stuff which has literally no effect.
danielthor 6 hours ago [-]
An IMAX 70mm drama is by necessity blurry because of the low depth of field you get with such a large image frame. IMAX is great for flyover films, but a movie filmed in it will look amateurish compared to a standard RED digital camera.
That said, the Odyssey is a perfectly decent film. It would have looked better if captured with more appropriate technology, but it's an entertaining and uniquely American spin on the story.
hcfman 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't it just a film about a lot of fighting ?
PUSH_AX 6 hours ago [-]
Reading this made me start to remember how my thinking changed around expensive/elaborate gear and art.
When an artist performs a gig or releases an album, no one really remembers or connects with the fact that the audio went through some insane signal chain, no one at their gig would hear the difference between a $500 guitar and a $12,000 guitar.
What resonates with people and what people will remember is the writing, the performance, the story, the energies... Everything else is the 0.1%, and yes it can stack but it's still on the peripherals.
Everyone I respect in the arts has done the full bell curve, started out with crappy fundamentals -> gear will solve all my issues -> gear is marginally important but the fundamentals were always key. It's really interesting to me to see people I should expect to be on the other side of the bell curve still obsessing with marginal gains.
My favourite movies, I couldn't even tell you what it was filmed on, and it probably could have been filmed on a range of comparible mediums and I would have never known.
nntwozz 7 hours ago [-]
I go to IMAX to see less smartphones show up during the movie.
The rest is just icing on the cake.
dudefeliciano 7 hours ago [-]
i go to independent local cinemas, people are pretty respectful there too.
bob1029 5 hours ago [-]
I find the sound system to be more compelling than the projection system.
The audio amplification in some IMAX venues are rated for
more power consumption than their projector lamp. 15kW across 12 channels in some cases. You could never recreate this part of the experience at home. The power you could replicate but not the acoustics of a gigantic auditorium combined with that power. You can get 20hz floor shaking in small parts of your living room where the standing waves build up, but at imax it works smoothly across every seat.
martinald 5 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to me when I go to the cinema how poor the quality is compared to at home on an OLED TV. The blacks are so grey and dark stuff is hard to make out.The resolution is far less noticeable than that (but obviously worse).
Seems to me the real improvement in cinema would be OLED-style contrast ratio panels. Is this a thing being worked on?
yread 7 hours ago [-]
I've recently been to a planetarium which was pretty cool. It has in theory even better specs: 45 million pixels (8K has 33 million), ~500nits, 60Hz. It did seem to use PWM at very low brightness though
I enjoyed the Odyssey movie, but didn't think it looked that good. Too sharp and kind of fake looking, almost like TV. (To be fair, I don't live in a real city so we just have LieMAX.) Disappointing visually, but I did quite enjoy the "Braveheart meets Greek myth meets Jason Bourne" aspect of the whole thing.
sgt 6 hours ago [-]
I've seen a real 70mm projection print, the sharpness combined with brightness is hard to describe. But nowadays I can't find anything close to me that has this option.
What I do know is that most movies in cinemas these days aren't even close.
Most "IMAX" branded theaters these days are just the biggest screen in the cineplex rebranded and with a more expensive (but still 4K) projector.
ubermonkey 6 hours ago [-]
The thing is: It's kind of irrelevant for most theatergoers, as there are only 24 IMAX 70mm venues in the whole country. And many of them don't even show theatrical releases.
For example, I used to live in Houston, and we tried to find a 70mm theater for OPPENHEIMER. There aren't any there despite being a city of nearly 8 million.
fortran77 5 hours ago [-]
IMAX really cheapened their brand with the LIEMax format. Most "IMAX" are actually LIEMax, projecting a 4K image and not even with the extra tall IMAX aspect ratio.
expedition32 1 hours ago [-]
Hollywood auteur clowns shooting om formats that no movie plex actually uses. I admire the grift.
Kon5ole 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:40:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.theppt.org/rewind/articles/where-can-you-watch-t...
But here are my nit-picks from the article linked here. I'm only commenting on the 15/70mm IMAX parts, because I'm not knowledgable enough about the digital IMAX foramats.
> The extra resolution, up to 18K equivalent
The claim of 18K is entirely untested. No one has ever measured what the theoretical resolution of an 15/70mm IMAX system is. Kodak's film may me theoretically capable of resolving this, but what about the camera lens, the GT projector lens and field flattener, and everything else involved? Until a study is actually done, I don't think the 18K is a good number to band about.
> thanks to the use of single or even dual 15kW water-cooled xenon bulbs
No cinema is using dual lamps. The dual lamps are used for 3D - one lamp per "eye" (right and left). But no 15/70mm IMAX is currently showing 3D, I think the last was the London Science Museum (but that's a guess, so don't take as truth). So it is only single lamp. 15kW is also not always true - some smaller 15/70mm IMAXes use 12kW or around that.
> However, there are only around 24 such theaters in the US, nine in Canada and six elsewhere around the world.
This is incorrect. There are actually 25 in the US, and 7 in the rest of the world, totalling 41 prints.
I also agree with many of your other corrections but that is the one I wanted to ageee with the most as it’s my biggest pet peeve when I see people claim “film” is equivalent to a given resolution.
Anything analogue can be (almost) infinitely resolved but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be effectively good at all those resolutions. Almost nobody thinks of the quality of medium and lenses when making those claims.
This was using 32bit renderman, and it was constantly OOM'ing because we were really pushing it.
I seem to recall that we rendered out at 7k, even though the optical resolution was meant to be 12k.
For years I heard people arguing that wider aspect ratios were preferable because they afforded a wider view, and that narrower aspect ratios were too restrictive horizontally. This always seemed confusing to me because theoretically they should allow for more vertical space for the same width.
Now we're being told the opposite. Obviously if the full frame is being cut for different formats, you're losing some of the shot, so maybe this all reduces to what the director wants, and what is being lost relative to that in different formats.
But then this brings me to my second source of confusion:
> If you watch it in IMAX 70mm, you are seeing it in the full 1.43:1 aspect ratio, which will probably be the only way to experience this format. It would be unprecedented for this full picture to be released on Blu-ray or on streaming, so watching it in a cinema on IMAX 70mm is your chance to experience this.
Why can't releases just be scaled to fit on a screen? You could take that IMAX70mm and scale it down to fit on a different aspect ratios. You'd end up with black bars on the sides of the screen, but then you'd see the same shot, just shrunk down. Everyone has a different TV size anyway so it's all relative.
Clearly resolution plays a role, but IMAX70mm isn't going to be low resolution, and none of this will matter for home viewing anyway.
All of these discussions ultimately seem odd to me. I understand the projection format constraints in movie theaters, but at some point it seems possible to just downscale everything to every aspect ratio format.
They've done it here, so in theory they could just release all these versions as part of a physical disc set (or stream them all):
https://www.odysseymovie.com/explore-formats/
I agree with you, but I must also make a special case for IMAX 70mm. It's about the seating position. What we call IMAX 70mm now, was once just "IMAX" and its gimmick was a floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall screen with a relatively close seating position, such that the viewer felt immersed in the movie. Back then it was commonly used for science documentaries where they could soar you over landscapes and in amongst the sea creatures. So this print of The Odyssey is allowing users to enjoy this same gimmick, but with a legit movie. I remember watching an earlier Nolan Batman film in an IMAX 70mm auditorium --while the picture quality was good, it was not shot to take up all the vertical real estate. So presumably they did not use IMAX cameras when filming (just normal 70mm).
As for widescreen, in ye olden times theatrical releases would use it as a gimmick for big visually impressive movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Eventually nearly every movie in the theater used a relatively wide aspect ratio, and as these were converted to VHS and DVD they were commonly butchered into a "full screen" format that erased the left and right part of the image. (They had to slide the view left and right to keep characters on the screen; people called this pan-and-scan.)
There's nothing inherently better about any particular aspect ratio IMO. What's most important is that you are seeing what the director wants you to see.
1.43 IMAX screens are really really big and fill more of your field of view than most other cinema screens. You can't just look at the 1.43 aspect ratio and say "it's skinnier than 2.39 scope" or "it's wider than 2.39 anamorphic." It would be more accurate to say "in your field of view, it's both wider and taller than most theater's 2.39 anamorphic projection."
This is also why pleas for the 1.43 aspect ratio on home video are slightly misguided. It's not the shape of the 1.43 IMAX image that's so compelling. It's the angular image size! And you probably are not going to view an IMAX film at home with the intended image size. (To be clear, I think it would still be interesting to see that 1.43 image at home, and in VR it's reportedly an excellent experience.)
Yes, exactly. If you really care about the theatrical experience, you'll be using a projector at home... and it's really up to your particular space whether you'd be able to fit in a bigger screen at a 1.43 or a 16:9 aspect ratio.
For some rough math, I rule-of-thumb 5 feet vertically as a reasonable max size for a home projector - it gives you a couple feet at the bottom for coffee tables, consoles etc. and doesn't reach too high, so you don't need to be looking too far upwards or to invest in stadium seating. 60 inches vertically gives you a 105 inch 1.43:1 screen, or a wider 122 inch 16:9 screen. Assuming you don't have other constraints (brightness, horizontal space, etc.) you may as well get the wider/bigger screen.
Also, I am kinda frustrated that he pushes for large formats so much and yet lights everything so plainly. I’d love to see him go for a more high-contrast lighting scheme like we saw in typical Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s.
For example, traditionally still film cameras used 35mm film, but cinema cameras also used 35mm film. However the cinema cameras capture the image vertically instead of horizontally on the film, otherwise known as a Super 35. Literally the film runs through the camera vertically instead of horizontally.
In order to make an image work that is understandable to our brains you either need to do heavy cropping and waste tons of film, or you use an anamorphic lens to "squeeze" more light onto the film. You then have to reverse that when you go to project the film.
In both theatres, the screen and image took up the nearly entire height and width of the theatre. The image filled the screen. The 70mm theatre I saw it at had a very wide screen, but not very tall. Filled the wall though
So even if it’s possible to project a digital version in the 1.43:1 aspect ratio, you’d end up with severe cropping on the edges.
That’s not the point of this IMAX format.
The point of this IMAX format is to have a screen that’s literally twice as tall as those normal screens. To accomplish that, you need a really, really big room. Most theatres can’t physically fit these screen sizes. That’s why 1.43:1 IMAX is so rare compared to 1.90:1.
So when you see it in a theatre like that, firstly the image is really big. But the main thing is that the image stretches past your peripheral vision vertically. In fact, at my local one (which recently shut down, no Odyssey), you can’t even see the bottom of the screen, just a slight curve at the edge of the floor. Which doesn’t matter because the image is framed to not put important info there. The point is for the image to be bigger than life.
Showing a cropped version is just not equivalent to that. You could argue that we should have the choice. But I think generally because of how it’s framed, I’d rather it just take up the full size of my TV. So IMAX releases sometimes come out 16:9 instead of cropped top and bottom.
The choice of unusual film standards has always been to make the film a bit "special" when viewed in a suitable cinema.
The original format 1.33:1 was simply using 35mm wide film (originally 1.35") and after putting sprocket holes on each side, there was 1" of usable width, and someone decided to make a frame 1" x 0.75". The projected image was just scaled linearly.
When they started adding audio, the image was shrunk slightly to 22mm x 16mm (the ratio of this image was modified slightly to 1.375:1), and the audio track was just placed between the right hand edge and sprockets. They could use the same projector technology, just with a mask between the film and the lens so that the audio track didn't appear on the screen, and an optical pickup head for the audio that was placed below the mask and lens.
As an aside - a silent movie projector has a complicated gear system that advances the film 4 sprockets in a jerk, once every 24 times per second, while before and after that it is fed smoothly (so you have a "loop" of film above and below to take up the slack). You also have a shutter that closes for half the frame to hide the film when it's actually moving, and open when it's stationary. When the audio passes the audio sensor after the bottom loop, it's moving linearly, so the amount of light that can pass through a narrow slit is proportional to the voltage sent to the speaker. Later when stereo was added to films, they just fit 2 audio tracks into the space of one, so mono films would work on stereo projectors and vice versa. And even later, Dolby surround was encoded as a dot matrix pattern in between the sprockets (actually, it was just a film ID and timecode that was encoded) and the audio itself came from the 3-5 CDs that came with each film. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
These two standards stuck around for quite a while and then some of the later experimental TV systems started also using this ratio, probably to making filming non-live TV possible / easier as they could use the film process and show it on a TV using a telecine without wasting any of the image space.
Once TVs started to become popular, directors started wanting to make their films more special, something that couldn't be experienced the same way on a TV. And so began the arms race on picture formats. For a while 1.66:1 was popular, which used the same projectors as before but changed out the lens for an anamorphic lens which squished the image to make it wider. And soon, 1.85:1 was standardised (with a different anamorphic lens and mask). This was known as "flat" and was used by the majority of films. Some of the higher budget films were produced in 2.35:1, known as cinemascope or just "scope" and so now most cinemas had 3 sets of masks and lenses - square, flat and scope - and could show pretty much everything with a pair of projectors just by swapping the lenses. A few special aspect ratios were tried, but these were usually limited distribution to specialised cinemas, and cropped to a standard size for regular cinemas. In this era, usually the curtains could move to the correct width for each film, or fully closed.
70mm film has been around for quite a long time, but never really caught on as it was expensive to shoot - non standard cameras, roughly 4 times the area of film (and so at least 4 times the cost, but more because demand was lower), and limited where it could be seen as most projectors were 35mm only. It was possible to get projectors that had a swappable gate so you could also show 70mm film, but they were relatively rare - probably less than 10% of cinemas had these. The aspect ratio was almost always 2.2:1, and so while it was narrower than scope format, people would pay extra for the 70mm experience because of the higher quality (and less grainy look).
In the 1990s, TVs started shifting to 16:9 (1.77:1) which was a half-way compromise between improving the quality for films (1.85:1 scope doesn't need to be cropped much or only has small bars top and bottom) and leaving masses of unused space for older 4:3 TV broadcasts. However 16:9 was never used for cinema, and more directors switched to 2.35:1 for films after that to keep the "better in cinema" quality.
So personally, I don't think 1.43:1 is really any better for 70mm (after all the film is so much bigger, the quality is already improved), rather it's almost certainly been chosen so that it looks different, and much better at cinema. Just as films shown in "letterbox format" on TV with half the screen black looked bad on a 4:3 TV, now pretty much every TV is 16:9, watching a 1.43:1 film on it will have big black bars on the side and detract from the experience. The cinema will be the best place to watch this.
So, IMHO, it's all just a marketing gimmick aimed at those that want to pay a premium to see a film as the director intended it.
I’d say that yes it’s a marketing technique, but for these releases it’s not a gimmick. If you have a chance to watch a film in 1.43:1, you should try it. The difference is how big it is, and especially how tall it is. Most theatres don’t physically have the size for it. Film could be gimmicky, but I can clearly notice the difference. (Was at a film release that had to fall back to digital at a couple points, and it was very obvious to me, but not my friends with me.)
What’s gimmicky is when normal movies release for IMAX without filling that full aspect ratio. Or when you have a tiny IMAX screen
They started the local makerspace. There was an article last week in the local paper about it.
https://cdapress.com/news/2026/jul/25/couples-imax-camera-fi...
And that is typically what happened. Typical 16:9 flatscreen TVs at home offer a larger angular image size than the typical 4:3 CRTs did. And typical 1.43 IMAX viewings offer a larger angular image size than typical 16:9 flatscreen TVs.
The cinematographer would have composed shots for the main 1.43:1 aspect ratio first while taking into consideration the other aspect ratios (the viewfinder will overlay the different framelines to help make those decisions). The DP then gets to go back in during post and recompose each shot for the different formats as needed, tweaking what was originally shot to do their best to maintain a cohesive feel and emphasis across each crop. With five different formats for The Odyssey[0], I'm sure that was a fun experience.
It's not that one format is inherently better. The frame is a storytelling tool, and you can use different aspect ratios to influence how audiences perceive the film.[1] It's when you start changing it afterwards with little regard for the director's original intentions that we see problems. The old pan-and-scan movie releases for VHS or cheap 16:9 conversions are frustrating examples.
0. https://www.odysseymovie.co.uk/explore-formats/
1. https://www.cined.com/aspect-ratio-as-a-storytelling-tool-a-...
To me, the big wide screen Hollywood titles are 2.35:1.
To me IMAX 70 is cropped on the left and right compared to CinemaScope. Watching an IMAX 70 film in a normal theatre at wide screen aspect ratio crops the film again, so it’s effectively cropped on all four sides.
1.43 IMAX 4K is also a great experience, but its resolution is a meaningful and noticeable limitation given its massive angular image size. It's a compromise compared to a more traditional 4K cinema screen (like a typical Dolby Cinema screen): with IMAX 4k you gain angular image size and lose "pixels per degree of visual angle." And both are noticeable!
I agree with you that the latter has all the advantages you listed, but there is still something truly special about the apparent resolution of IMAX 70 mm projection.
The same seems to be true of The Odyssey, although the reporting is less clear as of now, and I suspect there are many more visual effects shots than Oppenheimer.
Note that I'm not disputing that there is a visual difference, there is, the image is clearer, shaper, with better darks, but the entry fee paired with how out of the way 70mm is, it's just ends up feeling like FOMO.
My opinion doesn't hold much value since I just dislike the cinema experience in general. I like being able to control the environment I'm in when watching something (pausing, eating, loudness...) and whenever I go to cinemas I have to deal with people having their smartphones screens brighten up, people yapping and laughing at things that aren't funny, eating noises, etc...
The trailers also looked much worse than the film which I suspect is related to difficulties with this whole process.
However, these discussions always feel similar to MP3 192kbit/s vs AAC 256kbit/s vs lossless vs lossless 24-bit 192KHz. Trained listeners can hear the difference between MP3 192kbit and AAC 256 kbit. Perhaps even AAC 256kbit vs lossless. But IRL it does not matter:
- Some people listen on very crappy headphones/speakers.
- Some people listen on good headphones with AAC, but even with AAC on, external sound leakage probably has a larger effect on the perceived signal than compression artifacts of AAC 256kbit/s.
- Most of the time people listen to music in the background, so there is not a lot of attention on it anyway.
- Many (most?) people primarily listen to melody and lyrics and not to the fine grained details of how the instruments sound.
Similarly, a lot of people who watch movies, as long as the image/audio quality is good enough, they focus on the storyline, the dialogs, the general atmosphere, etc.
I am not denying that there is a market for audiophile audio or the best quality image for movie visuals buffs, but for most people these are just overpriced gimmicks. I mean, we used to watch movies at home on crappy, small CRT TVs, and many of us still have fond memories of many movies despite seeing it in a format that could as well be from the stone age compared to even a standard projector used in an average cinema nowadays.
To avoid any straw manning: I am certainly in favor of all the improvements in tech we have seen, it's more that the experience does not linearly with it. More like exponential saturation.
The illogical part about this process is that they convert the shot film to digital, they add CGI and color correction and then they print back the digital version to....film.
So the whole point of shooting a Hollywood movie on film today is because some directors like....film. There is no practicality/cost/reasoning to it.
As a director who doesn't shoot on film - I still see the appeal, there's a particular quality to skin tones - especially in response to older arc lights and the like - that digital still doesn't quite capture. Ditto motion cadence, halation and grain that are all emulated in digital post to greater or lesser degrees of fidelity.
I get putting the final edit to film.
If you’re not doing all that additional garbage, then capturing on film, going digital for basic editing, then back to film might make sense.
The end result is not recreatable with digital assets. i.e.: It doesn't matter your budget, we cannot currently simulate the look of the original footage shot on 35 (let alone 70mm, forget about IMAX 80mm) by shooting digitally.
Also what you're referring to as 'garbage', is colour grading and composite work. It's not adulteration, it's an essential create part of the filmmaking work. Whether you're doing it exclusively as part of the development process of the physical film, or digitally in Nuke or Resolve etc.
Your inability to understand why people do things in a domain you're not familiar with is indicative of gaps in your knowledge, not the futility of the process. Lots of information about how and why all this works as it does online.
https://youtu.be/suZtYPIADHM?si=KMgFb1gEhA7z7QVm
I think what makes film great is more the process. It forces slower more deliberate filmmaking and somehow that seems to show up in the product. Only celebrated/respected filmmakers have the influence to force production to allow them to shoot film so there’s a selection bias at play too.
Consider how music production is often done on audio recorded at a higher sample rate, so when effects are applied artifacting is reduced for the eventual export sample rate. For video, one analogy is recording slow-motion shots at a higher framerate rather than slowing down regular footage.
I see this in industrial cameras, do you know if any filmmakers use non standard Bayer filters?
I can more easily relate to music production which i have passing experience with. The analog would be : if you plug your guitar directly in a preamplified audio card, you'll get the cleanest possible signal, right ? Then you'd just have to post-process it through a virtual cabinet and a bunch of effects to get exactly the sound you want. Except in most cases you'll get better results by plugging a guitar on an amplifier and putting that amp in a room with a microphone pointing to it. All that hardware will natively give you a better sound than you could achieve with reasonable effort on a fully digital workflow. Not better quality (in fact you're probably losing definition on that signal at several points in the chain), but qualities that on average will make the sound more pleasing to the ear. You can still manipulate the sound with virtual effects all you want, it will still retain the "grain" of the original setup.
The one at Natural History lost tons of money. They eventually took it out, sold it for parts, and replaced it with offices and a cafe (which does make money).
They kept the theater at Air & Space, but converted it to IMAX digital. As a result, they are able to easily show pretty much any first-run movie, as well as revivals. That helps them sell a lot more tickets.
The real essential difference in IMAX is the physical shape of the theater. A real IMAX theater has very steep seats that are close to an absolutely huge screen, with huge speakers behind it. As opposed to the “IMAX” found in cineplexes where they just took their largest theater and upgraded the projector.
Films really should be shot differently for IMAX. Closeups need to be a lot less close up. People shouldn’t have to turn their heads side to side just to see one or the other eye of your character. IMO it’s a mixed result in The Odyssey. Directors just can’t resist closeups of actors. And the movie needs to work in regular theaters where most people will see it.
What do you prefer if you have tried both. Because those are the only mostly accessible options around the world.
Sound is also something to consider, because depending on the Theater they might have wildy different sound setups even different audio standards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122568
Does anybody have the technical knowledge to compare a RED video camera to 70mm IMAX (or maybe you just meant 70mm?)
Edit: and yes, I meant 70mm super panavision
This article claims Audio is added via USB Stick or CD
https://www.theppt.org/rewind/articles/where-can-you-watch-t...
> 70mm film uses DTS audio, which is supplied to the cinema on either CD-ROMs, or (more recently) via USB sticks.
Digital IMAX is much bigger:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/imax/comments/pysn87/tremendously_h...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/imax/comments/1405mz0/standard_70mm...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/imax/comments/1tw4jyy/psa_70mm_and_...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBEcjZN8io
Certainly we need to be mindful of biases, but you can also simply be falling into a tu quoque, ad hominem fallacy.
At the end of the day, are these 'fancy' theatre experiences (IMAX and the others out there) worth the extra ticket price to you? Certainly Christopher Nolan thinks so since he was willing to put up with the hassle of the IMAX gear for months on end (including airlifting them up to top of mountains), but what will you get out of it watching is something on you can answer.
Of course the largest complaint I tend to hear about Nolan films is the audio mixing, not the visuals.
The 70MM IMAX showings at Lincoln Square are still completely sold out 4x/day for the next month. People are filling the theater at 6AM on a Saturday to see it. The market has clearly spoken.
Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.
That said, the Odyssey is a perfectly decent film. It would have looked better if captured with more appropriate technology, but it's an entertaining and uniquely American spin on the story.
When an artist performs a gig or releases an album, no one really remembers or connects with the fact that the audio went through some insane signal chain, no one at their gig would hear the difference between a $500 guitar and a $12,000 guitar.
What resonates with people and what people will remember is the writing, the performance, the story, the energies... Everything else is the 0.1%, and yes it can stack but it's still on the peripherals.
Everyone I respect in the arts has done the full bell curve, started out with crappy fundamentals -> gear will solve all my issues -> gear is marginally important but the fundamentals were always key. It's really interesting to me to see people I should expect to be on the other side of the bell curve still obsessing with marginal gains.
My favourite movies, I couldn't even tell you what it was filmed on, and it probably could have been filmed on a range of comparible mediums and I would have never known.
The rest is just icing on the cake.
The audio amplification in some IMAX venues are rated for more power consumption than their projector lamp. 15kW across 12 channels in some cases. You could never recreate this part of the experience at home. The power you could replicate but not the acoustics of a gigantic auditorium combined with that power. You can get 20hz floor shaking in small parts of your living room where the standing waves build up, but at imax it works smoothly across every seat.
Seems to me the real improvement in cinema would be OLED-style contrast ratio panels. Is this a thing being worked on?
https://planetariums-database.org/list_projectors.php?menu=l...
What I do know is that most movies in cinemas these days aren't even close.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026846
For example, I used to live in Houston, and we tried to find a 70mm theater for OPPENHEIMER. There aren't any there despite being a city of nearly 8 million.