21–30 of 152 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"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." The 70MM IMAX showings at Lincoln Square are still completely sold out 4x/day for the next month. People are filling the theater at 6AM on a Saturday to see it. The market…
I think that has to do with the marketing and all the memes about how much "less" of the film you see if not watching it on 70mm IMAX
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.
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.
If 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 t…
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):
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.
IMHO, the only reasons for using 70 mm IMAX are nostalgia and marketing. Digital movie cameras have far better color reproduction, more dynamic range, zero frame jitter, and plenty of resolution without grain. They are also small and silent which allows far more interesting shots than what is possible with a 70 mm monster. Kubrick and Lean used 70 mm because it was the best technology available at the time. Today, th…
I'd say one of the advantages of analog filming is it's more expensive to "color correct" digitally after. So maybe you get less monochrome films?