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The Imax difference, blockbuster size

How The Dark Knight Rises makes use of Imax, a format using special cameras and large-scale film.

Mekado Murphy

In 2008 the director Christopher Nolan?s Dark Knight, the second in his trilogy of Batman movies, introduced some audiences to a character not before seen in the franchise, or any studio narrative feature until that time. But that character wasn?t on the screen. It was the screen.

That would be Imax, a vast screen that can be as tall as an eight-story building. Though the name is popularly used to refer to screens, it is primarily a format involving special cameras and large-scale film, and before Dark Knight it had been known best for short documentaries about ocean life and space travel. Nolan shot parts of The Dark Knight using Imax cameras, with 30 minutes of such footage making it into the final film. When those images were seen in an Imax theater, they filled the screen from top to bottom with a giant, high-resolution image.

Other directors soon followed. For the 2009 Transformers sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay included over seven minutes of Imax-shot footage. And Brad Bird?s 2011 installment in the Mission: Impossible series, Ghost Protocol, included about 25 minutes of Imax-shot scenes.

Nolan?s latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises ? he says the film, will be his last in the series ? features 72 minutes of Imax footage, currently the most any studio film has used. The rest of the movie is presented in 35 millimeter, a squatter, more rectangular look that may be likened to letterbox. The film freely changes format from scene to scene, but viewers who look closely may notice one transition in particular: a gate slams down, and the screen goes from standard to Imax within the shot.

?The sharpness and the depth of the image, projected onto those enormous screens, is simply the best quality image that has ever been invented,? Nolan said from Los Angeles.

How does that quality translate to the big screen? And in what ways is the difference noticeable? Take a look at the accompanying stills from The Dark Knight Rises. The image was shot in Imax, but the smaller still represents what audiences will see in a 35-millimeter print at a standard multiplex. The sprocket holes (for the projector) are on the sides, running four per frame, with the soundtrack vertically to the right of them.

By comparison the Imax version of the frame is about 10 times larger with 10 times the resolution. Greater detail makes it in the shot. To allow for as much screen space as possible, Imax runs its film through the cameras and projectors sideways, with the sprocket holes ? 15 per frame ? at the top and bottom instead of the sides. And the audio track doesn?t appear on the film print, but on a separate programme that is synced to the projector. All this makes for more surface area on the frame to create a denser, sharper image.

To grasp the image clarity, consider a home HD television screen with 1,920 pixels of horizontal resolution. An Imax frame, meanwhile, has a resolution upward of 18,000 pixels, said David Keighley, chief quality officer for Imax, who spoke by phone from Los Angeles.

?It helps make the audience really feel like they?re in the picture,? he said. ?It?s also very bright on the screen because there?s a tremendous amount of light that can be projected on that large frame. The Imax screens are almost twice the brightness of regular screens.?

The size of the Imax image is 40% taller than The Dark Knight?s 35-millimeter moments. This difference can best be seen in Imax theaters where the movie will be projected on film, not digitally ? there are a few more than 100 such sites worldwide ? and that?s the only way to see the Imax material in its boxy fullness. (In digital Imax theaters the screens are more rectangular, so the scenes shot in the larger format will expand only 21% more. And regular theaters will show the Imax scenes in a cropped version, like the image at top.)

The Imax cameras can be noisy and cumbersome, and they only shoot three minutes of film at a time, but Nolan drew on lessons he learned from The Dark Knight about how to modify and move more freely with them, including mounting one on a Steadicam system.

In determining what to shoot in Imax Nolan began with the biggest action scenes, like the prologue, which includes Batman?s return from exile and a midair scene on a Lockheed C-130. But for nonaction shots he and his cinematographer, Wally Pfister, played it by ear.

?We always carried at least one Imax camera through the run of the show,? Nolan said, ?so then wherever we felt a scene would lend itself to Imax, we could decide on the day to go and put that camera in. And we wound up using it more and more.?

The format is drawing more interest in Hollywood. The sequel to the Star Trek reboot, directed by J. J. Abrams, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,? from Francis Lawrence, will include portions in Imax. Other films may be put off by the complications with the cameras.

But Nolan is a believer. ?When you?re talking about this large-scale studio filmmaking, the size of the camera is pretty irrelevant compared to the massive difficulties and the massive resources you?re wrangling on a daily basis,? he said. ?And so having this extra image quality, giving the audience the best possible technical look at what you?ve shot, is the obvious thing to do.?

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First published on: 18-07-2012 at 01:45 IST
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