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The one at Natural History lost tons of money. They eventually took it out, sold it for parts, and replaced it with offices and a cafe (which does make money).
They kept the theater at Air & Space, but converted it to IMAX digital. As a result, they are able to easily show pretty much any first-run movie, as well as revivals. That helps them sell a lot more tickets.
The real essential difference in IMAX is the physical shape of the theater. A real IMAX theater has very steep seats that are close to an absolutely huge screen, with huge speakers behind it. As opposed to the “IMAX” found in cineplexes where they just took their largest theater and upgraded the projector.
Films really should be shot differently for IMAX. Closeups need to be a lot less close up. People shouldn’t have to turn their heads side to side just to see one or the other eye of your character. IMO it’s a mixed result in The Odyssey. Directors just can’t resist closeups of actors. And the movie needs to work in regular theaters where most people will see it.
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.
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/
To me, the big wide screen Hollywood titles are 2.35:1.
To me IMAX 70 is cropped on the left and right compared to CinemaScope. Watching an IMAX 70 film in a normal theatre at wide screen aspect ratio crops the film again, so it’s effectively cropped on all four sides.
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.
I can more easily relate to music production which i have passing experience with. The analog would be : if you plug your guitar directly in a preamplified audio card, you'll get the cleanest possible signal, right ? Then you'd just have to post-process it through a virtual cabinet and a bunch of effects to get exactly the sound you want. Except in most cases you'll get better results by plugging a guitar on an amplifier and putting that amp in a room with a microphone pointing to it. All that hardware will natively give you a better sound than you could achieve with reasonable effort on a fully digital workflow. Not better quality (in fact you're probably losing definition on that signal at several points in the chain), but qualities that on average will make the sound more pleasing to the ear. You can still manipulate the sound with virtual effects all you want, it will still retain the "grain" of the original setup.
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.
I get putting the final edit to film.
If you’re not doing all that additional garbage, then capturing on film, going digital for basic editing, then back to film might make sense.
The end result is not recreatable with digital assets. i.e.: It doesn't matter your budget, we cannot currently simulate the look of the original footage shot on 35 (let alone 70mm, forget about IMAX 80mm) by shooting digitally.
Also what you're referring to as 'garbage', is colour grading and composite work. It's not adulteration, it's an essential create part of the filmmaking work. Whether you're doing it exclusively as part of the development process of the physical film, or digitally in Nuke or Resolve etc.
Your inability to understand why people do things in a domain you're not familiar with is indicative of gaps in your knowledge, not the futility of the process. Lots of information about how and why all this works as it does online.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122568
Does anybody have the technical knowledge to compare a RED video camera to 70mm IMAX (or maybe you just meant 70mm?)
This article claims Audio is added via USB Stick or CD
https://www.theppt.org/rewind/articles/where-can-you-watch-t...
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...
* 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.
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.
What I do know is that most movies in cinemas these days aren't even close.
The rest is just icing on the cake.
https://planetariums-database.org/list_projectors.php?menu=l...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026846
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.