I’ve not really been into films but recently I’ve started to pay more attention to directors and screen writers.
I really want to watch Oppenheimer as it interests me but I really really want to watch it on 70mm IMAX, I am lucky enough to love 6 miles away from one and I don’t know if it will be that good or if the marketing team has done a hell of a job.
I’ve been watching videos and reading up about IMAX and cinematography. Every showing is booked up for the first week that I checked. Even the 7am showings.
Digital still can’t match 70mm IMAX. In fact, IMAX film is even higher resolution than regular 70mm as the film runs through horizontally rather than vertically so more space is used for the image.
But a lot of it has moved digital. IMAX has special laser projectors. They just are not as good. Also, there is a lot of LieMAX (smaller theaters given IMAX branding) that are pretty well all digital.
Actually it won't. A movie on a 4k blu ray is around 80gb without additional compression. And Oppenheimer is shot on 70mm which is more like 8k resolution. Still would fit on a micro SD of course
It's way bigger than that.
Usually cinemas receive movies in multiple terabyte hard drives. Thats because they are using JPEG2000 standard (it varies, but it is close to lossless) and a movie can take up anywhere from 500GB to 2TB (highly dependent on resolution, it can go above 2TB).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000?wprov=sfla1
Some things to keep in mind about the theater experience.
Only a handful of theaters do film IMAX anymore. A lot of IMAX locations are just 4k DCP (Digital Cinema Package)
Most theaters in the world are digital projectors with a max resolution of 1998x1080 or 2048x858
Part of the reason these factors still exist is cost. A poorly maintained film projector with a lousy film print can ruin a movie going experience. Hollywood would sometimes release so very shitty prints. The digital projectors are much easier to maintain so the experience is often more ideal for the average movie goer.
Having said that, if a theater takes good care of their film projectors and they have a well made and well kept print, the experience can be amazing.
King of Prussia seats (center-ish and towards the back) are basically reserved out until August. Even if you want to drive out there you'll have to wait. That's how rare these projectors are lol.
I'm going to make a 3 hour drive to my closest real IMAX. Haven't had the pleasure to even see a mini IMAX film and am a fan of Nolan's work so I'll make the time.
Movies are getting really long and I don't know if I like it. I watched Across the Spider-verse recently which was I think 2.5 hours. To be fair it was a fantastic 2.5 hours, but every other movie in the theater was 2 hours plus and one was over 200 minutes long. Half of them were animated, which are usually on the short side and for good reason, because there's never any real meat to the story (Spider-verse again being the exception). Sometimes you just want a relaxed 1 hour 20 minute story; not every film has to be this gigantic grand experience.
I wouldn't call it astroturfy but its so weird to me. Like nobody is walking around being like "The new PS5 weighs 7.5 pounds and has 139 miles of copper in its motherboard!" repeatedly for weeks. (I made up the amount of copper, but the weight is correct.)
Wasn't normal 35mm film about the equivalent of somewhere between 4k and 8k depending on the film stock?
Plus, the projector optics will always limit the sharpness of the picture. No lense is ideal, and even ideal lenses would have fundamental limitations due to diffraction.
I don't think there's any reason we couldn't make a store 18k video.
And we could make screen at much higher resolutions that that at imax size, or even quite a bit smaller, though I suspect it would be absurdly expensive.
I can't speak for video, but for audio production that isn't true. Audio signals can be perfectly reproduced, up to some frequency determined by the sample rate and up to some noise floor determined by the bit depth, digitally. Set that frequency well beyond that of human hearings and set that noise floor beyond what tape can do or what other factors determine, and you get perfect reproduction.
Yeah, but they're likely digitally editing it all now, so it loses that in the middle of the process. Can't really see why it would make sense to print a digital file back onto film
Idk. One benefit is that if preserved, in the future it might allow digital captures of higher resolution. I say might because maybe we already reached the max level of detail you could extract from these type of analog films I do not know.
Depends on the film itself being used. You can get a pretty insane level of detail on the professional-grade stuff. It's how we're able to do 4K remasters of stuff from decades ago. Digital still has a fair bit to go before it can fully outshine analogue film.
Film is still higher quality than TVs these days. There's a reason it's easy to remaster and rereleasr classic content shot on film than more recent content shot digitally.
To store digitally you would need a compression algorithm. Pretty much all video compression algorithms are lossy, which means you automatically lose detail.
Storing an uncompressed video isn’t feasible as each frame could be hundreds of megabytes (or more) in size. This is due to resolution + color info + audio channels.
Even uncompressed, they would be large, but not unfeasible. Even assuming about 12 MB per frame (reasonable for lossless 4k) that gives us about 1TB per hour. Using lossless video compression would push that smaller. That's very large for consumers, but not for a film studio. I'm certain a few terrabytes Iof storage are way cheaper than that much film.
Quality so good they can come back to it 20 years from now when blu-ray is an outdated format to make a higher-quality home release, like what's been done with VHS to DVD or DVD to BD
The vast majority is. This is one of only a dozenish theaters showing a true film image full 70mm print. Every other version is either a smaller mm print or digital.
This is insane. I want to go watch this in IMAX so badly, but there are no IMAX theaters anywhere near me. Maybe one day I'll get a chance. Do they ever reshow older IMAX movies? Like, I would kill to go back and see Interstellar or Dark Knight.
It basically a badge for a more premium film experience. It's a bigger screen, on an aspect ratio that fills the vision, with seating that puts you in the right place, rather than trying to see over the person in front.
The confusing part is there are different types of IMAX's. My nearest cinema has IMAX screens but they are just slightly larger theatre screens for the most part. But downtown there's a 70mm film IMAX and if a film was made for it, I'll go out of my way to see it there - Interstellar and Dunkirk come to mind. Seats are closer to the screen and the aspect ratio is more square, and film just has a certain charm to it.
It's still the highest spatial resolution format. The recent laser systems do win for dynamic range, but for sheer detail you'd need roughly the equivalent of 16K while most theater digital projectors are 2K to 4K.
An estimate for "enough" detail when doing foveated rendering is 12K, so 16K uniform is pretty decent.
I was wondering the same, and it sounds like it all depends on theatre. Someone also said that if you had quite a bit of money (I don't remember how much, but it was in thousands), you could pay for them to get the IMAX film spool (which are apperantly heavily controlled, for piracy I guess) and play it again just for you.
I dunno man, I've been to IMAX to see Dune in and it was so fucking loud i had to leave after 15 minutes, even with 1100 3M ear plugs which are like -30db.
I think the theater near Lincoln Center in NYC has this format. I saw 300 there, and something else but I can't remember what. It looks absolutely insane.
Going to see Oppenheimer in imax soon and this post got me researching about imax and fake imax and now im a little disappointed that the imwx theater im going to is just digital imax (fake imax). Oh well :/
I was also disappointed when I checked how many true IMAX theaters the movie is playing in in the US. We have a real IMAX theater in our natural history museum in my city, but Oppenheimer won't be playing there :(
There's one full imax in CT being demolished for a bridge. It is a very necessary bridge that's 125 years old and supports the commuter rail into NYC. I doubt the IMAX will be replaced.
Probably not. 3 hours of uncompressed 1080p video is around 2tb. The film is closer to 16k which is 64 times more pixels than 1080p. This ain't your web rip off pirate bay.
Surely even a lossless compression is incredibly smaller. (But you can't truly losslessly convert from film to digital, only commenting on uncompressed 1080p.)
Still works if you replace the SD card with an SSD, only slightly larger in comparison to the reel. Of course this ignores any losses when you digitise the film.
A surprising number of films are still shot on film and then transfered to a digital intermediate for editing and later distribution. Not only the few film imax ones. I wonder if anyone is still doing their editing on film, I highly doubt it.
Smaller reels that are spliced together as they're fed on the feed platter you see. My dad was a a projectionist, he'd make these up when a film arrived then break it down to ship it. I'd go on and help him as a kid.
Are they an actual leftist podcast? Not tankies in disguise?
Also looking into it, it's a true crime podcast? Seems an odd name choice if it isn't somewhat related to politics. Unless I've 100% misunderstood the naming convention.
Not related to politics, they're horror fans - name is a reference to 'Last House on the Left'. They cover anything that's macabre, be it real or fake, so true crime, serial killers, paranormal events, cults, conspiracy theories, cryptids; that sort of thing.
I used to be a projectionist at an art house theater. We just did 16 mm prints. Just imagining this going wrong due to some threading issue and the film going everywhere is giving me anxiety.
I used to work as an IMAX projectionist and that has happened. The timings on those projectors are so precise. It’s traveling at about 6ft/sec so it doesn’t take long to make a mess.
Directors that film on Imax generally still have a hard on for physical film.
Not that I blame them. I ran movie theaters for 20 years and while I really did appreciate how much easier my job was after we went digital, I legitimately missed working projection booth shifts when it was all film. Threading and starting two dozen projectors all day long and building prints, it was some of the most fun I ever had at a job. It was really zen, just you and the machines.
They stopped distributing 35mm film to regular movie theaters in 2014. Only a few modern releases are printed in 70mm IMAX, and only a few IMAX theaters can still project it.
It’s practically useless for viewers. I had a friend who was a projectionist in a theater: they went digital and used both 1080 uncompressed or 4K uncompressed. He pointed me to the different formats when they were projected and we couldn’t tell from the seats. Not imax, just a regular theater with 300 something seats.
The film being that close to the edge of the platter gives me MASSIVE anxiety. I've dealt with brain wraps or film melting in the gate, but those are easy compared to film slinkying off the edge of the platter. Nothing like coming into a booth to find hundreds of feet of film in a rats nest of sadness and rainchecks.
I was watching this video on IMAX film and noticed that the outside film is actually fixed in place and the reel unspools from the center and fills up the reel on the other rack. So fortunately it isn't possible for it to unspools from the outside. https://youtu.be/gENOhw1Q3vM
Correct. That's how most 35mm projectors work as well. The film feeds out from the middle of one platter, through the projector then onto a return platter where it spools from the center out. But if the tail of the film (which is on the outer edge) comes loose and falls off the edge it could cause the entire print to spin off the edge of the platter, one layer at a time. It's like a slinky, the weight of the film falling will make it fall faster and faster. It would end up in a big circular pile that would be an absolute nightmare to get back on the platter.
There's nothing worse than coming into the booth and finding hundreds of feet of film tangled on the ground.
It's a bit off an off-topic but, can someone explain me the difference between IMAX and iSense? I've googled it but don't fully understand it. How does iSense compare to this beast of an IMAX film reel for example? What about more standard IMAX theatres?
Guessing this will beat Interstellar record for longest IMAX film. Interstellar has the record being 2 hours and 47 minutes. But looks like Oppenheimer is 3 hours long.
I wish there was a full size imax theater near me, but there isn’t even one in my state. Going to see Oppenheimer in the biggest screen I can, but it not being imax is gonna be rough
Christopher Nolan tends to make beautiful IMAX films like Inception or The Dark Knight, and he supposedly put in a lot of effort to simulate a nuclear blast using physical effects and not CG by using massive amounts of dynamite, so people are excited.
Barbie movie is made by Greta Gerwig and the trailer made it out to be a smart satire of the Barbie concept with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken. Also they used so much pink paint for the sets that it caused a nationwide shortage of that color (of that one brand only).
Both have a lot of hype and are expected to be top movies of the summer. They happen to overlap on the same opening weekend, which is amusing since they’re such different movies.
Oppenheimer is expected to be really good, mainly because it's made by Christopher Nolan. Barbie is releasing on the same day, so it probably gained some popularity off of that.
Lol I don’t think Barbie gained popularity from Oppenheimer. A lot of people are just excited for it, it’s getting advertised a lot lately and it has some crazy aesthetics/vibes.
have you seen the trailers? barbie actually looks good as shit - the first teaser was a shot for shot recreation of 2001: A Space Odyssey trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6vPuIMAOlA
I don't think you quite understand the hold on culture barbie has.
Though the two being such polar opposites of each other in vibe and tone likely did boost each other cause of them coming out at the same time.
Dammit I was going to watch Oppenheimer in my local laser IMAX, but this picture made me buy a ticket to Prague to decide for myself if 1570mm worth it :D
This reminds me of one of those documentaries where they show some ridiculous mechanical contraption in a scene, and the narrator says, "Before the technology became extinct, it had become vastly more complex and sophisticated, but alas, it's days were numbered..."
A lot of the time, the complexity is the main reason something goes bye bye; something just as sophisticated comes along, but is far less complex. Making it less prone to failure/easier to use/implement.
I just outright refuse to watch a Nolan movie in theaters anymore. That dude is so far up his own ass the movie is probably silent with no subtitles, and he'll give us some snob answer about how movies aren't meant to be understood
Guessing this will beat Interstellar record for longest IMAX film. Interstellar has the record being 2 hours and 47 minutes. But looks like Oppenheimer is 3 hours long.
I disagree. Have you ever been to a real 70mm IMAX screening? I don't mean your typical "IMAX". There's only a handful in the whole world.
The quality is gorgeous, and the screens are huge. You also get significantly more of the frame than you will in traditional cinema and on bluray releases.
Don't call it unnecessary until you've actually seen it. Digital IMAX isn't close yet.
The reason it's unnecessary is that digital can completely capture a 70mm in high enough resolution that you perceive no difference at all. 8 or 16K projection is completely feasible in commercial projection systems. It means the cinema only has to deal with a small box instead of an enormous roll of film.
That doesn't mean either digital IMAX since that's old tech using something like 2K projection which isn't adequate.