alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
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I am not even sure why the theoretical resolution matters when they seem to have so much trouble pulling focus on the actors on an old film camera like the IMAX cameras they use to where the footage is fairly blurry in a lot of cases.
If they used a 6.5K or 8K digital cinema camera they would get all the advanced autofocus abilities those camera have nowadays to keep the actors sharply focused and would end up with more detail in the end.
18K seems high. I did some tests for Universal once and we pulled 10K from some 70mm IMAX ride prints. 8K was solid, 10K was very borderline.
To add another nit-pick to the list, the author confuses 18K as being four times the resolution of 4K.
8K is four times the resolution of 4K. (counter-intuitively to most people as it only measures the pixels in one dimension yet the image resolution is increased in both width and height)
Diagram:
https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/07toBDd6lpyucCyM0xWrcQv...
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):
There is no such thing as resolution in films. There is accutance and sharpness, but it is not resolution.
7 or 8 of which are in California
Thank you very much for the corrections here. As someone else who has professionally worked in the film space, it always irks me when people talk about film in digital resolutions for the reason you mention.
I also agree with many of your other corrections but that is the one I wanted to ageee with the most as it’s my biggest pet peeve when I see people claim “film” is equivalent to a given resolution.
Anything analogue can be (almost) infinitely resolved but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be effectively good at all those resolutions. Almost nobody thinks of the quality of medium and lenses when making those claims.