Isn't another signiture IMAX trait that it's often shot with very wide lenses (that actually do give barrel distortion) and then projected on hemispherical screens so it effectively cancels out the barrel distortion, but also gives that wrap-around feeling in the theater? Rather than reduce the picture area, they added 5 mm outside the perf rows to the print stock, so the 65mm neg could still be contact-printed onto the 70mm print.
Probably the original plan was to run the sound separately on 35mm fullcoat mag rolls like Cinerama did (and IMAX did until DTS) and like CinemaScope originally planned on doing, but then a decision was made to put mag striping on the print itself.
But they wanted to use the whole negative for picture area. But the simplest way of getting a bigger format was to dig up an old 65mm cameras built in 1930 for a widescreen process that never took off. The reason why the negative is 65mm and the print is 70mm was a clever solution to a problem - the format was developed by Michael Todd as a competitor to Cinerama and called Todd-AO (he partnered with American Optical). IMAX, 15-perf horizontal 65/70, is basically 1.33 : 1. To add to what Adam said, 5-perf 65mm has a native aspect ratio of 2.20 : 1 using spherical lenses. I saw the last 40 minutes of the 4-hour "Cleopatra" at the Aero Theater the other week, a new 70mm print made off of the 65mm negative, and it was RAZOR sharp - wide crowd shots were amazing, you could clearly see every person in the wide frame. Trouble is that few people get to see 70mm prints of 65mm photography anymore to know just how good it looks. You can't shoot a historical drama in 65mm and hope to get an IMAX release, nor a major 70mm release.
2001 OVERTURE AND INTERMISSION MUSIC MOVIE
Trouble is that they tend to be for only one movie at a time, and it has to be a really mainstream movie in order to justify the costs of the digital blow-up to IMAX. Ironically, nowadays we have just as many IMAX-DMR blow-up prints from 35mm as we used to have 70mm blow-ups. The rise of the shoebox theaters in multiplexes in the late 1970's didn't help, combined with the fall of so many movie palaces. So even if you shot in 65mm, you'd be hard-pressed to find many chains willing to show a 70mm print even though they still have the projectors. The last 65mm movies were early 1970's films like "Patton" and "Ryan's Daughter", with a few exceptions since then (the live-action for "Tron", all of "Baraka", "Far and Away", "Hamlet", parts of "Brainstorm" and "Little Buddha".)Īnother part of the problem has been cost-cutting at movie theaters, who switched over to a platter system for 35mm movies to reduce the need for skilled projectionists, who are still needed to show 70mm. So you saw the rise of 70mm blow-ups in the mid 1960's through the 1970's, lasting until digital sound hit in the 1990's (until then, 6-track sound was only possible on 70mm prints, another reason why people did blow-ups.)Ĭost-cutting by the studios was another reason, many of them in the dumps financially in the 1970's.
Zhivago", David Lean was not satisfied with the quality of 35mm and shot his next film, "Ryan's Daughter" in 65mm).īut as 35mm stock kept improving, fewer people found a need to shoot in 65mm (even though that was improving equally.) Zhivago", which a lot of people thought was shot in 65mm like "Lawrence of Arabia" (despite the success of "Dr. In the 1960's, a decent optical printer lens was made to blow-up 35mm anamorphic to 70mm, and was used for 35mm movies like "Dr.
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