Week 17- The Dark Knight- the IMAX experience

It may be that the awful events at the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado, will forever cast a shadow over cinema-going. Yet The Dark Knight Rises could also point the way to a brighter future for an increasingly troubled industry. It could help reshape the way we watch movies.

The film includes 72 minutes of footage shot on the Imax system, the most ever for a studio narrative feature. For director Christopher Nolan, that meant working with cumbersome, jitter-sensitive and noisy cameras capable of only three-minute takes and requiring 20 minutes to reload. Still, he's in no doubt that the extra effort was worth it. He believes he has secured in return "the best quality image that has ever been invented".

In an Imax ("image maximum") camera or projector, 70mm film runs sideways, taking up 15 sprocket holes per frame instead of 35mm's four. The resulting picture is 10 times larger with 10 times the resolution. Ideally, it's displayed at up to twice the usual brightness, on a curved screen that can be as tall as an eight-storey building. Together with 360-degree surround sound and stadium seating, it's supposed to provide the "most immersive motion picture entertainment" available.

The rest of the movie is presented in 35 millimeter, a squatter, more rectangular look that may be likened to letterbox. The film freely changes format from scene to scene, but viewers who look closely may notice one transition in particular: a gate slams down, and the screen goes from standard to Imax within the shot.

“The sharpness and the depth of the image, projected onto those enormous screens, is simply the best quality image that has ever been invented,” Mr. Nolan said by phone from Los Angeles.

By comparison the Imax version of the frame is about 10 times larger with 10 times the resolution. Greater detail makes it in the shot, like the smoke and fog, and also more vivid-looking extras. To allow for as much screen space as possible, Imax runs its film through the cameras and projectors sideways, with the sprocket holes — 15 per frame — at the top and bottom instead of the sides. And the audio track doesn’t appear on the film print, but on a separate program that is synced to the projector. All this makes for more surface area on the frame to create a denser, sharper image.

To grasp the image clarity, consider a home HD television screen with 1,920 pixels of horizontal resolution. An Imax frame, meanwhile, has a resolution upward of 18,000 pixels, said David Keighley, chief quality officer for Imax, who spoke by phone from Los Angeles.

“It helps make the audience really feel like they’re in the picture,” he said. “It’s also very bright on the screen because there’s a tremendous amount of light that can be projected on that large frame. The Imax screens are almost twice the brightness of regular screens.” 

The size of the Imax image is 40 percent taller than “The Dark Knight’s” 35-millimeter moments. This difference can best be seen in Imax theaters where the movie will be projected on film, not digitally — there are a few more than 100 such sites worldwide — and that’s the only way to see the Imax material in its boxy fullness. (In digital Imax theaters the screens are more rectangular, so the scenes shot in the larger format will expand only 21 percent more. And regular theaters will show the Imax scenes in a cropped version, like the image at top.) 

The Imax cameras can be noisy and cumbersome, and they only shoot three minutes of film at a time, but Mr. Nolan drew on lessons he learned from “The Dark Knight” about how to modify and move more freely with them, including mounting one on a Steadicam system. 

In determining what to shoot in Imax Mr. Nolan began with the biggest action scenes, like the prologue, which includes Batman’s return from exile and a midair scene on a Lockheed C-130. But for nonaction shots he and his cinematographer, Wally Pfister, played it by ear. 

“We always carried at least one Imax camera through the run of the show,” Mr. Nolan said, “so then wherever we felt a scene would lend itself to Imax, we could decide on the day to go and put that camera in. And we wound up using it more and more.” 

The format is drawing more interest in Hollywood. The sequel to the “Star Trek” reboot, directed by J. J. Abrams, and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” from Francis Lawrence, will include portions in Imax. Other films may be put off by the complications with the cameras. 

But Mr. Nolan is a believer. “When you’re talking about this large-scale studio filmmaking, the size of the camera is pretty irrelevant compared to the massive difficulties and the massive resources you’re wrangling on a daily basis,” he said. “And so having this extra image quality, giving the audience the best possible technical look at what you’ve shot, is the obvious thing to do.”