As Hollywood has gone 3D crazy, some filmmakers are embracing an entirely different experience — IMAX. Brad Bird‘s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, in theaters now, features 23-minutes shot with 15-perf 70mm IMAX cameras. The much anticipated The Dark Knight Rises will feature nearly 50 minutes of full IMAX footage. There is no denying that the IMAX shot footage looks breathtaking, and having the image expand to the full IMAX screen results in an experience unlike anything else.
So the question is: Do you know where to experience these films in full 70mm IMAX? Or have you been watching Digital IMAX, known to most film geeks as “LIEmax”? Because the difference can be EVERYTHING. We will explain the difference, chronicle the history, and answer the question in this week’s edition of Q&A!
A Brief History of 70mm Feature Films
You might recall that classic movies like Lawrence of Arabia and West Side Story were shot in 70mm on the Super Panavision 70 camera and projected in 70mm at special roadshow screenings. In the 1970′s, the IMAX corporation developed a new way to shoot and project 70mm film run through the projector horizontally, so that the width of the film is the height of the frame. The result is a much MUCH larger resolution, from both 35mm film and even the old school “70mm”.
With IMAX format, each frame is 15 perforations wide, and the area of the frame is about 52mm high by 70mm wide — almost 9 times larger than the conventional 35mm frame used in traditional movie theaters. While the aspect ratio of traditional movies is a widescreen (usually 1.85:1 or 2.35:1), IMAX is closer to that of a rectangle at 1.43:1. The IMAX format was originally found in museums and sometimes dome theaters. IMAX theaters began to expand in the late 1990′s/early 2000′s around the time that they developed the IMAX 3D format — it was something unlike what most people had even seen at their local movie theater.
IMAX Goes Hollywood
Around this time, in 2002, Hollywood began releasing up-conversions of movies in IMAX theaters. These up-conversions do not look anywhere as good as a movie shot in 15perf 70mm IMAX, but the argument is made that making a 70mm copy of the 35mm original looks better than a 35mm copy of a 35mm original as it loses less in the transfer and gains from IMAX’s Digital Media Remastering system. Early IMAX up-conversions like The Matrix sequels and a rerelease of Apollo 13 were considered successful, but the 2004 computer animated film The Polar Express in IMAX 3D was a game-winning grand slam (at least a quarter of the film’s gross of $302 million came from less than 100 IMAX screens).
Warner Bros converted scenes from the Harry Potter films and Superman Returns into IMAX 3D, which proved very profitable. But Nolan’s The Dark Knight was a game-changer, and the film’s large format 33-week run grossed $49.9 million from IMAX venues alone — nearly 10% of the film’s gross. The film premiered on 46 times that many standard screens (4,366 domestically).
Mission: Impossible had an exclusive release in IMAX theatres, grossing an amazing $13 million from only 425 screens. Hollywood is taking note, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a couple more tentpole films each year employ IMAX cameras in their production.
Enter IMAX Digital
The Hollywood success of IMAX resulted in even more expansion. But the 70mm projectors and huge box screens were found to be way too expensive to build in mass quantities. In 2008 the company began the rollout of its solution — a new IMAX Digital theater.
The 70mm projector has been replaced with two Christie 2K projectors which use proprietary image processing. The two 2k images are projected over each other. The resolution is estimated to be about 12,000 × 8,700 theoretical pixels or 6,120 × 4,500 actually discernible pixels. The resulting image is said to be brighter than the standard 2K digital cinema projectors in most cinemas. While IMAX believe their IMAX Digital system offers a sub-pixel accuracy that looks better than Sony’s 4K projectors, there are a lot of vocal critics. The sound system is also much improved from a standard cinema set-up, able to reach up to 14,000W, and offers 117db of uncompressed digital sound without distortion. IMAX also claims that they have devised a way to provide better surround sound to all areas of the theater, including the very back, but critics have not found that to be true.
The system was designed to be installed in existing multiplex auditoriums — moving the screen 30 feet closer to the audience, covering more space from ceiling to ground and left to right, which is said to be perceived as 75 feet wider than before. So while the screen seems much much larger than your normal multiplex screen, it still doesn’t compare to that or a “real” 70mm 15 perf IMAX theater (see the image at the top of this article to see a size comparison).
Also the aspect ratio, 1.9:1, is much closer to that or a traditional movie theater (1.85:1) than a 70mm 15perf IMAX screen (1.44:1). So while the image on the screen should expand some during the IMAX sequences in films like Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, it is nowhere near as dramatic as a real IMAX theater. More subjectively, the lower resolution is not quite as breathtaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment