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.
If you can see the film print in the opening week. Christopher Nolan makes his movies in an analog way. So it is a film process all the way though except for VFX. This is one of the only opportunities to see film that was not digitally modified. Only one place in the world can make these imax 70mm film prints and they are all basically hand made. EDIT: link changed to piped link. https://piped.video/watch?v=xa1xJIgLzFk
2k digital projection is typically used in smaller theaters where the screen size is not large enough for anyone to actually see a difference.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=xa1xJIgLzFk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
70mm film to be exact
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
This obsession with the length and weight of the film is such a bizarre marketing strategy.
Yeah, we all know girth is what matters.
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
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.
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
