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.
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):
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".
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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):
https://www.odysseymovie.com/explore-formats/
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".
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
I would guess that the film was still mastered/produced digitally
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
What is inaccurate about this size comparison?
* 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 interesting question isn't "what's biggest" but what's the best viewing experience.
>"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.
4x a day for a month on so few screens isn’t even that many tickets comparatively.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I go to IMAX to see less smartphones show up during the movie.
The rest is just icing on the cake.
i go to independent local cinemas, people are pretty respectful there too.
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
https://planetariums-database.org/list_projectors.php?menu=l...
Maybe related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026846
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.