The 11-mile long, 600 lbs IMAX print of ‘OPPENHEIMER’

hardypart@feddit.de to pics@lemmy.world – 1853 points –
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This is insane. I want to go watch this in IMAX so badly, but there are no IMAX theaters anywhere near me. Maybe one day I'll get a chance. Do they ever reshow older IMAX movies? Like, I would kill to go back and see Interstellar or Dark Knight.

Why do people get so hyped for IMAX? There's gotta be something more to it than just an even bigger screen, right?

It basically a badge for a more premium film experience. It's a bigger screen, on an aspect ratio that fills the vision, with seating that puts you in the right place, rather than trying to see over the person in front.

Huh, yeah I'll just stay on my couch.

That’s as premium as it gets: deep OLED color, pulled pork out of the crock pot, blankets to curl up with, the works.

The confusing part is there are different types of IMAX's. My nearest cinema has IMAX screens but they are just slightly larger theatre screens for the most part. But downtown there's a 70mm film IMAX and if a film was made for it, I'll go out of my way to see it there - Interstellar and Dunkirk come to mind. Seats are closer to the screen and the aspect ratio is more square, and film just has a certain charm to it.

Many years ago, I ended up with a membership to a local museum that had a OMNIMAX theater, which is IMAX, but with a dome and a fisheye lens is used ot shoot the film. The projector is, essentially, in the middle of the room and shoots "up" at the screen / dome at about a 45 degree angle. The net result is the film is pretty much half-a-sphere in front of you. Your entire field of vision is filled by the media.

They almost always showed educational films or documentaries specifically filmed for the format. I specifically recall some stupid one about snowboarding of all things, which was really just an excuse for the filmmakers to go snowboarding and ride helicopters with an expensive movie camera in the mountains. It's very, very cool.

Even if there aren't any major studio movies made for these theaters, if you ever get a chance to see something on one of the few left in operation, take it. Totally worth it.

It's still the highest spatial resolution format. The recent laser systems do win for dynamic range, but for sheer detail you'd need roughly the equivalent of 16K while most theater digital projectors are 2K to 4K.

An estimate for "enough" detail when doing foveated rendering is 12K, so 16K uniform is pretty decent.

It's good at home since it can fit the entire 16/9 display.

I was wondering the same, and it sounds like it all depends on theatre. Someone also said that if you had quite a bit of money (I don't remember how much, but it was in thousands), you could pay for them to get the IMAX film spool (which are apperantly heavily controlled, for piracy I guess) and play it again just for you.

Most people can't just order a print even with money. What you can do is pay for a theater that already has a print for a private screening. They would need studio approval to show it once the fees were paid.

This is true for most films.

yeah, i dont know anything about this topic other than what that guy said, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So during the pandemic around me you could rent a whole ass movie theater for less than $300. But the good projectors would only be able to show movies that they had. There was some kind of fee, transportation, transmission?, to order up something else.

There were like lesser project that you could hook a DVD player or a game system up to but they were the projectors used to sell adds before the trailers and such.

I mean, I'm driving 3 hours and my brother is driving 4 hours (each way) so we can see Oppenheimer in 70 mm / 15 perf together next weekend.

I dunno man, I've been to IMAX to see Dune in and it was so fucking loud i had to leave after 15 minutes, even with 1100 3M ear plugs which are like -30db.

That's a theatre issue, not an IMAX one.

hmm I thought the point of IMAX is you get the same experience no matter the theater

That's a him issue. It's supposed to be fucking loud. When those people go to the lobby and tell them to turn it down, that's when I walk out and buy the midnight ticket.