alt Hacker NewsThis 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...
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Define exporbant? Subjective experience but the differnece in 70mm imax vs Imax was $7ish in SF
I feel the opposite way. Seeing movies in IMAX is the only reason I still go to the cinema, and it’s maybe the best $20 I spend each year.
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.
I don't think the extra production cost, for the Odyssey at least, is likely to be offset by extra box office income. If you read about it, the massive cameras and limited running time of one load of film (less than five minutes) sounds very burdensome. That's not to mention the obscene cost of the film stock, as well as developing dailies and having to edit from film (they actually cut and pasted film together for the Final Cut of the IMAX version).
The trailers also looked much worse than the film which I suspect is related to difficulties with this whole process.