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.
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That will fit nicely in my 32gb micro sdxc the size of a fingernail.
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
If I pay to see a movie in an IMAX theater, this is the film being loaded? Is this normal for IMAX?
No. This is called “15/70 Imax”. There are very very few theaters that have this. The “Imax” you’ll find at the local mall is totally different.
I didn’t realize imax was still film. I figured it went digital with everything else.
There’s only a handful of IMAX theatres in the world that can play this format. Most of them are digital.
Our local one did, but I guess not all. It’s a shame, you used to be able to watch the film being wound through windows
You can still do it through Linux, if you know the right commands…
70mm film to be exact
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.
I read quite a few comments, admittedly not all. But I haven’t seen this asked.
How is this 600 pounder handled? Forklift? Hoist? WTH?
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.
Can confirm! I worked projection in high school and college. IIRC the longest one I built was one of the Lord of the Rings movies.
600 lbs ~ 272 kg
Or approximately 2400 cheeseburgers for the Americans in the audience.
I assumed even an IMAX film would be digital now.
Imax film is some of the highest resolution formats we have it’s like 16k resolution, and using that for a projector gets ya some really good quality.
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
Kinda already is
Wait, they’re still printing movies O_o
I thought it was only stored on computer nowadays. This is sick !I’m sure I’m wrong, but it’s hard to imagine this being better quality than what we can do digitally these days.
You are in fact wrong lol. Actual film has a resolution equivalent of something like 18K.
Not enough to justify using such a proprietary technology
proprietary technology
Not like the off the shelf stuff you can get to store and show 18K.
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.
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.
Something like that.
As far as lens optics, we’re really splitting hairs here. 70mm through a quality lens in an imax theater is going to look absolutely fantastic and stunning. Digital is just more convenient and at some point it will catch up and surpass film.
My point was more like that even IMAX film doesn’t quite get to 18k equivalent, more like 12 to 16k. Honestly, anything above 4k (for normal widescreen content) even on big screens is barely noticeable if noticeable at all. THX recommends that the screen should cover 40° of your FOV; IMAX is what, 70°, so 8k for it is already good enough. Extra resolution is not useful if human eye can’t tell the difference; it just gets to the meaningless bragging rights territory like 192 kHz audio and DAC-s with 140 dB+ S/N ratio. Contrast, black levels, shadow details, color accuracy are IMO more important than raw resolution at which modern 8k cameras are good enough and 16k digital cameras will be more than plenty.
Resolution and color reproduction is still unmatched. Plus there are a lot of things happening in the analog domain that our eyes notice as beautiful.
Same thing is true for analog vs digital music production btw
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.
See here. https://youtu.be/UqiBJbREUgU
I don’t know if perfect reproduction necessarily sounds better. It’s probably subjective, but projects I’ve worked on that were tracked with tape have a quality that you can’t get from digital. I’m not talking about tape hiss or anything like that. There’s a roundness to the sound.
True! Analog can distort the audio in a way some people like.
But, it is a distortion. It’s not there in the original audio. Sometimes, that is desired though.
Valves and vinyl still sound better
Some people do like the distortion that analog audio provides, that’s true. But it is because of something that wasn’t in the original audio. It’s an artistic choice.
Don’t they send them on encrypted hard drives these days
It would be more inconvenient shipping that hunk of a thing compared to a hard drive
Then again it makes it easy for the movie to be leaked early by someone since it’s not encrypted
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.
What does “building prints” mean?
You should do an AMA!
I don’t think leaking physical film (in a high quality manner) is easy.
All it takes is one cinema owner that secretly leaks movies to do it
There are productions that still use film?
EDIT: Missed the iMAX part.
This obsession with the length and weight of the film is such a bizarre marketing strategy.
It’s something you don’t see every day. What are you asking for?
It’s interesting, calm down.
Big and heavy means quality, don’t you know?
Never believe anyone who says size doesn’t matter.
The weight is sign of reliability. I always go for reliability.
Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn’t work you can always hit them with it.
- Borris the bullet dodger
Ya this feels really astroturfy. Are they bragging that the movie is really long?
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.
Yeah, we all know girth is what matters.
16k, it’s iMAX, which is about as good as it gets.
Go watch the movie. A lot of people worked very hard on it. But still, remember to show your support to the strike.
