Hasta La Gadget!

Pretty as it is, 70mm film has been deemed too expensive for shooting Hollywood productions. So this is how IMAX preps finished movies for the up close and personal demands of IMAX.

(Left, 35mm reel. Right, IMAX reel.)

Before we move on, let’s explain IMAX film. Technically, it’s a 70mm standard that—unlike the 70mm that was popular back in the day with big movies like Lawrence of Arabia —has been turned sideways on the celluloid. So while typical 70mm motion picture film runs vertically and takes up 5 perforations on the film strip, IMAX runs horizontally and takes up 15 perforations. Yes, that means that the IMAX 70mm standard is three times bigger than normal 70mm and nine times bigger than 35mm.

Now do you know why we’ve been making such a big deal about it?

Kodak estimates their 35mm film stock to run at an equivalent of 6K digital resolution—that’s 2K better than the famous 4K Red One camera. As Kodak makes IMAX film out of the same ink/material that they make 35mm film, to scale, you can argue that IMAX reaches a theoretical equivalent of 18K digital, or 252 megapixels. In real application, even an expert we talked to within IMAX doubted if the viewer can see 18K projected, estimating that 12K might be a more accurate guess.

IMAX film is—unquestionably—far more impressive than any other standard on the block, analog or digital. So how the heck can IMAX claim they can take a normal 35mm film, like Star Trek, and play it on IMAX screens?

(Left, 35mm reel. Right, IMAX reel.)

To be fair, this insanely high resolution 70mm film format is only used in the huge free-standing IMAX theaters found in museums and parks throughout the world. As you might recall from our previous story on IMAX “retrofitting” in multiplexes, IMAX’s digital projection system used in those theaters is a mere 3K or 4K in resolution. There’s definitely a double standard, and though it’s still an impressive theater experience, it’s not the same and you have the right to feel a bit ripped off if you’re expecting a 70mm print.

But regardless of the film’s destination, it is carried through roughly the same process known as DMR (which, enigmatically, stands for “digital re-mastering”), which starts with a digital encoding of a standard 35mm Hollywood film, and ends with a remastered, (usually) higher-resolution digital format for multiplexes, and a bunch of reels of remastered crazy-high-resolution 70mm film for the true IMAX theaters.

During my day at IMAX HQ, I kept referring to the process as “uprezzing”—the same mundane miracle that allows DVDs to play on HDTVs. But every time I used this term, it was met with a shiver from production personnel. After seeing their process, I still think “uprezzing” fits, but blowing up a film’s resolution requires a lot of tweaking and artistry, so I can appreciate their reaction a bit more.

When IMAX converted Apollo 13, the first 35mm movie to be converted to IMAX, the whole process took three months. Now, a team of about 20 digital artists can convert a movie in three weeks with the help of a powerful render farm.

Source film generally arrives at IMAX pre-digitized in either 2K (2048×1080) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution. In the case of the Dark Knight, some footage reached 5.6K and even 8K. It leaves IMAX at anywhere from 4K to 8K resolution, sharpened with film grain reduced.

The staff views the movie while analyzing general trends like lighting and coloring in a film. Each movie has a certain overall look, and then each scene (exterior night, interior day, spaceship orbiting planet, etc.) has a certain particular lighting and coloring of its own, so they note all of the overarching trends—the keys to each scene type—and then they tailor uprezzing (or just polishing) algorithms to take them into account. The algorithms are unique to the film but the result, after all the painstaking customization, is a fairly automated hit-the-render-button-get-an-IMAX-movie video-scaling process.

Well, almost. About 80% of the film’s frames come out of the automated process looking great. It’s the remaining 20% that’s the real bitch. Sometimes the process arranges pixels in ways that bring forth unforeseen oddities in the image. These tainted frames are either sent back through the render farm again with tweaked settings, or they are fixed by hand.

I watched a member of the IMAX team screen a clip from Night at the Museum 2 in which Owen Wilson is green screened in front of a pile of sand. He had just a few frames of the film looped on his monitor, less than a second of real material, and they looked fine by my account. (Our apologies for a lack of pictures, but acquiring studio rights to images has proven difficult.)

Of course, this was a 20-inch display, and the film would play on a screen…a bit larger than that.

So the film analyst urged me to look closer, at which point I noticed an aura of softness around Wilson’s figure, killing the texture of the sand. With a keypress, the screen snapped to the same frames in the 35mm, which looked fine. The automated uprez process had highlighted some of the intentionally hidden seams of the special effects.

That footage was sent back to the artists to fix by hand, as are a lot of the 10,000 to 20,000 frames of film IMAX processes during a day of DMR work.

That’s just the artistic side, which happens for both the multiplex digital IMAX and the 70mm film IMAX —there’s also the delicate matter of assembling all this film properly back into one big strip for the the true IMAX theaters and their film projectors.

IMAX reels and 35mm reels don’t line up in a convenient 1-to-1 ratio. Because the film is physically bigger, there are almost five IMAX reels for every reel of 35mm. Not only do they have to make sure every single cut from one reel to the next is smooth, they have to make sure everything stays in the right order, a huge pain, especially when just a few frames are being fixed at a time.

The film part of the process culminates in a scene-by-scene analysis of the 70mm dailies—172,800 frames for a 2-hour movie—viewed on a lightbox with the 35mm film right beside the IMAX uprez. If the in-and-out points are the same, things are generally fine. If not…it’s gonna be a long night.

But even with all this earnest work of artists and video wizards, will that original 35mm content look better when either upscaled or just cleaned? I’m going to say yes, not because I’ve had the opportunity to analyze a pre- and post-DMR film with my own eyes, but because a staggering amount of the staff’s efforts are simply to eliminate film grain. And while, to me, that’s a sin to do for archival film restoration or 1080p Blu-ray transfers, I can understand the necessary evil when a movie is expanded to epic proportions and the audience is forced to sit in ridiculously close proximity to the screen. Nobody pays to see blackheads the size of a house, especially on Ben Stiller.

Besides, regular IMAX movies shot on IMAX 70mm film are always going to look better. Anyone who’s ever used Photoshop knows there’s no way that digitally enlarging an image will ever look as good as an already-large image in its native resolution. Parts of The Dark Knight were shot for IMAX, and I’ve seen that footage on true 70mm IMAX projection. I’ve also seen plenty of 35mm movies (like Star Trek) up on the IMAX screen, projected from a 70mm film print, after DMR. There is absolutely no comparison. Star Trek is fun to watch on a big screen. The Dark Knight is so ridiculously detailed that your brain can barely process it.

As much as I can admire IMAX’s DMR process and the truly staggering amount of effort going into digital enhancement, this does beg one question of Hollywood: You’ve got hundreds of millions for talent and marketing, but you don’t have enough cash to buy a truckload of 70mm film and deal with tricky cameras? I find that hard to believe.

Read more from Gizmodo Goes to IMAX

You’ve probably seen the new phenomenon with your own eyes: A cineplex IMAX that doesn’t have the monster screen you grew up with in science-museum IMAX theaters. Here’s the what, the how and the why.

Just last night, comedian Aziz Ansari (from Parks and Recreation) published this piece describing the conspiracy of paying an extra $5 to see an “IMAX” movie that really wasn’t much bigger than a normal screen.

I actually visited IMAX HQ a few weeks back, and a major point of discussion was the retrofitting process so lovingly described by Aziz. Basically, IMAX used to build their own massive theaters in their own buildings. But now, in order to expand, the company has made a deals with major theater chains like AMC in which they’ll provide and install their proprietary mix of projectors, screens, speakers and hardware if the theater will foot the bill for the necessary structural renovations.

This plan, for better or worse, is IMAX’s only current design for expansion in the US.
This conversion process, which has a patented geometry, includes installing a screen that’s only slightly bigger (as little as 10 feet wider than before), but this screen is coupled with the removal of several rows of seats which allows it to be scooted roughly 30 feet closer to the audience, creating a sort of sitting too close the TV effect with a screen that, I was told, is perceived as 75 feet wider than before.

When the process was described to me, I thought it all sounded a bit hokey. But walking into IMAX’s test multiplex, an otherwise typical AMC located in a Canada, I was shown a side-by-side of the same theater before and after the retrofitting process.

I will say, the new screen looked much bigger and far more imposing—”night and day” would make for a fair analogy. My mind wasn’t mentally prepped for such a tangible difference, though I’d agree that it still fell short of, say, the unbelievable, multi-story beast of a screen that I watched Star Trek on several days later at a classic, standalone IMAX.

But the change I didn’t expect (and I can’t pretend to have perceived this tidbit up on my own) was a remarkable difference from acoustic paneling. Clapping in the original theater revealed a very live environment with a frightening amount of echo. The retrofit, however, absorbed the sound in a pleasant way, reminiscent of more than one acoustically-planned stage I performed on back in my band days.

There are other improvements as well, including a specifically non-THX-certified sound system, reaching up to 14,000W, that offers 117db of uncompressed digital sound without distortion. Engineers claimed that in a normal theater, the sweet spot for audio is in the dead center, and technicians make no effort to tend to those sitting in the back. Meanwhile, IMAX’s system promised the same surround experience anywhere in the theater.

I tested that theory during a screening of some Rolling Stones at the Max footage by moving from the center of the theater to the back right corner. And there’s absolutely no doubt, I lost a good deal of the side channels while the rear channel (in this case, it was the lead guitar, I believe), dominated the audio spectrum. I wouldn’t have expected IMAX to have achieved the impossible unless, you know, they claimed that they had.
The other chief part of this retrofitting process is the new digital IMAX projector. Since its debut in the 70s, the Xenon-lamp-powered projector has stayed mostly unchanged. But with film prints reaching around $40,000 apiece, IMAX has embraced the digital revolution in their theaters (the cameras are still film with no plans mentioned to change that).
With the digital installations, films arrive on a standard hard drive, encrypted with DRM provisions that state just when a theater is authorized to play a film…errr…video.
Their projector is actually two, 2K Christie projectors that spit out the same image at the same time. A camera is positioned in between the projector lenses, tracking screen brightness in real time. An integrated server aggregates this and other data, adjusting both projectors for thermal shift, making sure the images don’t change as they play. There are also a slew of other, top secret proprietary imaging adjustments going on at all times.

I know what you’re thinking: Why didn’t IMAX just use a 4K projector and save the hassle, especially with AMC announcing that all of their theaters would be equipped with 4K Sony projectors by 2012? IMAX does believe their projector offers a sub-pixel accuracy that, when combined with some extra imaging processing, looks better than Sony’s 4K.

You can see imperfections in their digital projection system just like any digital system. The screen door effect, while minimized, can be noticed in bright spots of the image—if you’re looking as closely and skeptically as I was. And you only need to move back in the theater to realize that the picture does appear sharper as you step away from the screen. In other words, it’s not hitting some theoretical maximum perceived resolution…or even the best of what IMAX film can show. (As IMAX archives their own film into 8K and 12K prints, you can assume that the company feels the resolution of their product is much higher that their digital projectors may show).

The good news is that IMAX’s digital projection system is “projector agnostic,” meaning if a more suitable base projector comes around (be it 2K, 4K or higher), the realtime syncing and adjustment system can scale accordingly. In other words, when every AMC is stocked with 4K projectors in a few years, hopefully IMAX will be upping the ante as necessary by dual wielding 4K+ projectors instead.

So is this new IMAX, with smaller screens, with digital projection, still IMAX? Honestly, there are probably only a small handful of technicians—who aren’t exactly sharing proprietary knowledge and decisions—capable of answering that question with scientific earnestness. To my eyes and my gut, it’s more IMAX Lite or Normal Theater Enhanced. Is a retrofitted theater worth your extra $5? For the movies most likely to make it to the screen (big budget action), I think so…though maybe not for a family of four.

The price probably shouldn’t be the same as a standalone IMAX theater, but I think that the point Ansari misses is that cineplexes are already benefiting from a pricing structure that makes viewers pay the same amount no matter what screen they see a movie on (how many times do beautiful art films get shunned to a broom closet of a theater while summer blockbusters are played on a plex’s largest screen?). At minimum, the $5 IMAX premium ensures you see a movie on a screen that’s better than the best AMC or whoever has in their building.

Personally, I hate to know that we will probably never see another 12,700sqft foot IMAX screen built (like that found in Mumbai), and that 70mm film projection is being traded for digital before digital is undeniable image perfection. But if the compromise is that more people will be seeing movies in theaters with bigger pictures and tighter quality control, then maybe it’s a compromise worth making.

Look for lots more on our IMAX visit in the coming weeks.

Yep, you heard right — the DSLR is totally the new camcorder. With the reality being that most mid- and high-end DSLRs from here on out will tout at least 720p movie modes, Redrock Micro is looking to make the most of a most opportune situation. The DSLR 2.0 line of its Hybrid Cinema Rigs enables the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Nikon D90, and Panasonic Lumix HG1 to become filmmaking machines (at least on some level), and as we’ve seen, DSLR filmmaking is no laughing matter. The company sells all sorts of racks, rails and shoulder mounts, with solutions starting for as little as $195. Look, you’ve been putting off making that dust-collecting screenplay into a masterpiece of cinema for ages — what legitimate excuse do you really have now?

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Peripherals

Redrock Micro Hybrid Cinema Rigs turn DSLRs into filmmakers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Things have been pretty bleak for Polaroid fans ever since the company filed for Chapter 11. Once the producer of an iconic American gadget, the company has been reduced to a corporate shell, its good name taunting us from the face plates of a myriad of consumer electronics — including instant digital cameras that are not nearly as cool as their forebears. That’s why it does our heart good to hear about the crazy, Fitzcarraldo-esque plans of an outfit called IMPOSSIBLE. The company has already purchased all the essential gear and signed a lease on one of the buildings at the old Polaroid plant in the Netherlands, where they’ll be hard at work developing new versions of the venerable Instant Integral film that can be produced using modern manufacturing methods. The company hopes to be in the swing of things by sometime in 2010. Best of luck, kids!

[Thanks, Sebastiaan ter Burg]

Filed under: Digital Cameras

IMPOSSIBLE’s on a mission to revive Polaroid film originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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