Intermittent Issues:
IMAX, XD, BTX, 3D and HFR. Or, This is What Happens When Attendance Declines
By Ben Gruchow
September 14, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“It’s a whole new ballgame, something people have never seen before.”-- James Cameron, in 1996, referencing Universal’s T2: 3-D ride
It’s been a very long time since the theater-going experience hasn’t been augmented in some way or another by a premium format, or pitched with a feature or amenity above and beyond the “average” theatrical experience. In the modern sense, this takes the form of large-format showings (IMAX, Cinemark XD, Regal/UA’s RPX, Atlas Cinema’s XXDXP - really, at a certain point, you could probably just pull an acronym out of thin air and it’ll be the name of a premium format somewhere. My favorite is the New York-based Bow Tie Cinemas and their Bow Tie Xtreme option, which is an incongruous pairing of words on a level with The Last Exorcism, Part II).
Large-format screenings are big business now, but they’re just the latest entry in an ongoing tide of specialty features that include 3D, reclining leather seats, and full food/beverage service; if we go back to the 1990s, we find stadium seating becoming a selective option. Now, of course, it’s everywhere. These tactics are not subtle. The premium screening experience is the ’80s hair of going to the theater. The goal here is to make the entire thing bigger, with the result that going to a premium screening can - depending on the film being shown - exist as an assault on the senses as readily as it can an audiovisual form of storytelling.
Dolby’s Atmos surround sound setup allows theaters - at least, those with the desire to pulverize their audience’s eardrums - the ability to provide sound from up to 64 different speakers. The D-BOX motion system is a theater seat that initiates motion and vibration effects in rough sync with the film being shown. As indicated, none of this is new. Atmos is a logical evolution of SenSurround, and D-BOX really isn’t much more than an advanced version of William Castle’s Percepto gimmick from The Tingler, albeit one that can work with any film.
The purpose of this installment of Intermittent Issues is to take a look at where all of these concepts emanate from, and why they exist. We’ll also be charting the course of premium cinema features in the present, and what they’ve done to simultaneously bolster and diminish the experience of going to the theater. Ultimately, we’ll be looking at how all of these owe their existence in whole or in part to HD and digital projection.
IMAX, IMAX Digital, and DMR
Cinerama wasn’t going to be feasible as a large-format option in the long term. This was evident from the configuration of the format on its own: three projectors, each configured to hit at precise points, using a deeply curved screen to create total envelopment for the audience. The screen itself was actually composed of slightly over 1,100 vertically-hung strips, arranged at slight variations to each other to prevent the projection going to the right of the screen from reflecting onto the center or left, and vice versa across each of the 1,100 flat segments. It was a terrifically precise system, in both the positive and negative sense: with such specification needed for projector placement, a patron sitting slightly outside of a fairly narrow “sweet spot” in the audience would see a distorted image.
A three-projector theater setup meant that the movie had to be shot with the same precision to avoid discontinuity between the three images. The upshot was that Cinerama could produce an immersively widescreen experience, provided the correct production and projection measures were taken, and with the proper seating. The cost of building and maintaining auditoriums fit to display the technology was prohibitive; an attempt by the company to lower cost of entry, by manufacturing a 70mm format with a slight anamorphic squeeze - displayed on a curved screen but not an immersive wraparound - did not produce the same level of industry hype or audience interest, and the format declined.
IMAX emerged roughly 15 years after Cinerama as an heir apparent to the ethic that the earlier large-screen format was chasing. Initially, the format used multiple projectors to display images on a truly gargantuan screen…and like Cinerama, an image groundbreaking in its clarity depended on a complicated and precise setup. The primary difference was that an IMAX frame occupied the rough width of a 70mm film frame while being run through a projector horizontally rather than vertically - making for a significantly bigger picture than what Cinerama’s roughly-70mm size could allow for.
The secondary difference was that IMAX was not originally created or intended for narrative films; its primary commercial employment was for documentaries - usually running less than an hour - that displayed footage in an extremely specialized way. IMAX had its initial success in purpose-built auditoriums, generally in museums and other educational institutions.
From the start, the format targeted a narrower market than feature films; this kept revenues down comparatively, but it also held down construction and operating costs. IMAX theaters - or a new IMAX documentary - were classified as something of a specialty event. Its foray into feature films was tentative; Hollywood was unwilling to commit to the giant format without a greater venue count, and the existing number of IMAX movies wasn’t enough to fill the existing venues. The solutions arrived at took place gradually, and both of them served to introduce IMAX to the arena of digital cinema.
The first measure taken involved the creation of something called IMAX DMR, or Digital Media Remastering. DMR was the endpoint in a years-long quest by studios to exhibit Hollywood movies in an IMAX atmosphere. A crucial limitation was the two-hour limit on runtimes; movies that were to be released in IMAX would need to be trimmed down to meet that limit if they had a longer runtime. Visual quality also suffered; the 35mm frame used for most feature films lost perceived clarity and sharpness when simply blown up to the size of an IMAX screen. Disney was the first company to find a way around this with their animated features, by exploiting the fact that they could simply go back to their digital animation source files and re-engineer them to take advantage of IMAX’s far higher resolution and screen size.
DMR addressed this to a degree with live-action films, by presenting a workflow that upconverted the resolution of existing 35mm to the 70mm frame size, and then allowing filmmakers to manipulate color timing and exposure to produce an image brighter and more vibrant than what could be seen in a standard theater auditorium. IMAX Digital projectors, utilizing proprietary technology and two separate IMAX projectors to produce a sharp, bright image, can preserve an image’s clarity even on a giant-sized screen.
The term "IMAX Digital" is problematic, though; it certainly refers to the workflow that’s described here, but it’s also a brand name that’s utilized by theater owners to advertise a more immersive IMAX experience, and therefore charge a ticket premium for…and one of the most well-known narratives about IMAX Digital is the one where theater owners tend to offer the IMAX “experience” in a more or less standard-sized auditorium that happens to have been retrofitted with digital IMAX projection equipment.
What you’ll generally find if you wander into this quagmire of shifting standards and descriptions of what constitutes a premium experience is a generally brighter and clearer image than the norm, set against a giant IMAX screen (for those theaters who have constructed the auditorium for the purpose), a rebuilt or repurposed auditorium with a smaller screen that’s set closer to the audience to achieve the same effect that IMAX has (this is a somewhat-clever way to keep costs down and still allow the audience to feel like they’ve gotten something of a premium experience, as the dual-projector setup avoids the moiré-pattern/stair-stepping effect that you’ll usually get when you’re placed too close to a digital image)…and on the bottom rung of the ladder, you have the IMAX projector that shoots the image onto a screen slightly bigger or no bigger than a conventional auditorium screen. If you squint and tilt your head, you can kind of see a crisper and more detailed version of the thing showing next door in the cheaper, non-IMAX auditorium, but you’ve got to reach for that.
This gives us a conundrum not dissimilar from what Cinerama encountered toward the end of its prominence: with the proper auditorium configuration, any major film could theoretically provide a premium experience. The difference is, of course, that IMAX is a great deal more flexible as a visual standard than Cinerama ever was, and we can attribute that to its digital nature as much as we can the frame size - even if the only way Digital IMAX approaches the large-scale 70mm frame size is through one of multiple permutations of the form.
The other method of bringing IMAX into the realm of digital cinema is sort of a cheat for this article, in that it involves filmmakers actually shooting portions of their films in the IMAX format, which builds in a premium advantage from the outset while not necessarily intrinsically having anything to do with the digital-cinema format at all. This partial-IMAX shooting goes hand-in-hand with the DMR process, though, as it allows the non-IMAX footage to somewhat sync with the true IMAX footage.
The first film to do this kind of hybridization was 2008’s The Dark Knight, with 28 minutes of the movie shot with IMAX cameras. The list of major films to shoot sequences on IMAX stock since then is relatively small, and ranges from the thematically appropriate (the 66 minutes of large-scale sequences in 2014’s Interstellar are destined for IMAX resolution, and I’m particularly fond of the slick way that 2013’s Catching Fire transitions from 35mm stock to IMAX at the 90-minute mark) to the arbitrary (nine minutes of IMAX footage in 2009’s Transformers 2 is a pitiful selling point for a 150-minute feature, especially when the IMAX footage in question is chopped into so many tiny little random pieces).
In an auditorium with a screen of the proper size, IMAX footage can be properly impactful even through a digital projector, or even on a screen that’s not quite as big as the IMAX standard. Even in a minimally-retrofitted auditorium, it’s possible to tell the difference between IMAX and 35mm footage simply by virtue of the cleanliness and depth of the image. It doesn’t provide the experience that the director likely intended, though, and this compromise of vision involved with IMAX Digital helped to pave the way for…
The Other Large Formats: XD/ETX/RPX/BTX/PDX/XPlus/SDX/AVX/XXDXP. Also, UltraScreen.
…a much shorter and more direct segment of this Intermittent Issues. The existence of a digital and somewhat-customizable version of IMAX gave theater chains the idea that, if IMAX could scale down their own ambitions and present a solution that could theoretically apply to just about any multiplex built within the last 15 to 20 years, they could do the same. This they did, in what are easily the most confusing and arbitrary exercises in brand development and extension in years.
Forget the format war of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, or of VHS and Betamax; this is no case where the industry rallies around a common alternative to the IMAX brand. All of those acronyms in the title of this section are actual living, breathing “premium” cinematic offerings by the major theater chains. Cinemark has XD, AMC has ETX, Regal has RPX, we’ve already covered Bow Tie eXtreme…and Marcus Theaters has chosen to take the comparatively serene and straightforward approach of UltraScreen.
There’s no common standard between any of these, of course; each theater is free and clear to use whatever technology they want to for their large-format option. Most theaters use some derivative of the IMAX Digital workflow: two projectors, set to overlap each other and provide a bigger and brighter image (AMC’s ETX uses a single 4K digital projector). Where I live, we are provided Cinemark XD as a large-format option, and I’ve had the opportunity to see several major films in this format. The Barco projectors do their work well, and the effect is similar to seeing a relatively advanced upconversion of a DVD on an HDTV.
The screen is indeed significantly bigger than the screens in other auditoriums, but this carries a caveat: it is a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall fixed screen in an aspect ratio of roughly 1.85:1, or spherical. This does not change, meaning that any film with an aspect ratio wider than this (a good healthy chunk of tentpoles released are released in the ultra-wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio) is going to be matted with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. This slightly cheapens the experience. The sound, on the other hand, is fantastic - it’s louder, but it’s also superior in terms of fidelity, with midtones that are noticeably crisper than in a regular auditorium.
Since there are no ETX, RPX, PDX, XXPXPXLXXDDX, et al. theaters in my area, I’m restricted to seeking out written opinion on the relative quality of the experience, and it seems to be similar with other off-brand large-format screens: marginally better image depending on aspect ratio, still not a patch on genuine 70mm IMAX, and superior sound engineering. Another common factor seems to be the relative plushness of the environment: seats are reclining leather rather than cloth, and larger than normal seats, and thicker sound insulation prevents any audio bleed from the auditorium next door. The question it produces a is tougher to answer, at any rate, than the subject of our next topic: an opportunity for surcharge it certainly is, but is there also any way in which it’s inferior to the standard format?
Reality and Fusion: 3D
As this article is published, 3D’s third wave has crested and been receding for some time. The first real breakthrough of 3D as an added experience/marketing tool was in the mid-1950s; its revival technically started in 1970, but achieved a kind of critical mass and a very fast flameout in the early '80s. The third wave of 3D was digital, and comprised of several different offerings by different companies. Three of these offerings have maintained their prominence: IMAX 3D, Disney Digital 3D, and RealD 3D - the latter being the most common method of screening a film in 3D at a theater. These are delivery formats for 3D, but they don’t have much to do with the act of producing a film in 3D.
The title of this segment is called “Reality and Fusion”; those are both terms for the same 3D camera system, one developed by James Cameron alongside Vince Pace and Patrick Campbell, specifically for the purpose of creating a high level of immersion. The technology involved in its conception is really fairly simple: two HD professional cameras, pointing in the same direction and set at a precise distance from each other - the distance being most easily illustrated as the rough amount of space between each of our eyes. Each lens is provided with a specific filter that removes information only from that lens, which gives the impression that each eye is seeing a different image.
The viewer is provided with a pair of lightweight glasses to wear, each lens of which is polarized in a slightly different way in accordance with how the respective lens was used during filming. The visual results of the Fusion Camera System are well-known off of the performance of 2009’s Avatar, although equally attractive results were produced by Transformers 3 and On Stranger Tides in 2011 (I do not claim that either of these two movies were in any way better-looking than Avatar, because they weren’t; however, they did possess roughly the same level of 3D finesse).
Certain smaller films took advantage of Fusion, too, although for more specific and incidental reasons; Steven Quale used Fusion for his Final Destination 5, owing to his past experience as a Cameron second-unit director; Paul W.S. Anderson trumpeted the use of Fusion in 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife, which acquits itself well with that director’s tendency to experiment with whatever already-invented cinematic technology he can get his hands on.
The effect of natively-shot 3D versus post-converted 3D (which we’ll get to) is somewhat subjective, but it takes the general shape of more subtle depth and texture to the image. Individuals on-screen appear to reside within their own unique space, somehow both inside and outside the screen. The tradeoff involves spontaneity and movement. A movie planned and shot for 3D will not have much of an opportunity to build momentum via fast camera movements or fast cuts. This is partly due to the strobing or ghosting effect that fast movement can have on the audience, somewhat like seeing stuttering afterimages of movement), and in large part due to viewer perception due to the inherent oddness of a 3D picture.
The editor Walter Murch wrote a letter to Roger Ebert in 2011 explaining the disparity between focus and convergence that 3D creates for the theater viewer; put very (very very) simply, it outlines an oddity where our species, which has evolved to focus and converge our eyes on the same point, is now being asked to focus at one point (the distance between us and the screen) and converge at another (the depth of the image). The extra concentration this requires is responsible, he argues, for some viewers getting headaches from attending 3D films. The other aspect of 3D that forces a filmmaker’s hand is shot length; our eyes take longer to figure out a 3D shot spatially than we do a 2D shot, which mandates longer shots in the movie.
3D in film has decreased in frequency; it would be sensible to assume that it’s partly due to the extra set of circumstances it places on the filmmaker and the audience. It would also be sensible to assume that the cost of the surcharge ended up outweighing the benefit of the manufactured extra dimension. There are a couple of major films yet to come this year that were shot in 3D: Ridley Scott’s The Martian is one, and Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk is another. Both of these are experienced technicians, though, adept in the mechanics of 3D and cognizant of how to use it in an effective way. I believe we will see fewer and fewer instances of directors picking up 3D as a new type of production choice.
Interpolation and HFR48
This part was originally just going to be one long, continuous angry hiss, but that doesn’t play nearly as well in writing as it does in speech. Truth be told, it doesn’t play that well in speech, either.
Interpolation and HFR (which stands for High Frame Rate) are lumped together as two very different technologies, because their end result is very similar, if not identical. This has to do with the number of frames per second that are projected onto the screen. Movies are traditionally shot at 24 frames per second. This frame rate was originally due to nothing more than the advent of sound in movie theaters; early silent films, using hand-cranked film cameras and hand-cranked projectors, would display movies with anywhere between 16 and 26 frames per second. When sound came along, and once it became possible to print an audio track directly onto the film itself, it became necessary to pick a standard and go with it…with the fewer frames used and the less money spent, the better.
A frame rate of 16 did not produce workable sound, and the lowest frequency that did was 24. Thus, 24 frames per second in film (and 24p in digital cinema) became an industry standard on the back of a decision that was entirely motivated by cost control…and in the current environment, where frame rate does not affect cost at all if you’re shooting digitally, a frame rate of 24 is an entirely arbitrary decision mathematically.
There was a side effect to 24 frames per second being an industry standard for decades, though: it didn’t depict motion very fluidly. Any part of a film where the subjects were exhibiting significant movement, or if the camera was moving, exhibited a trait known as frame judder - or more colloquially, motion blur. This was a visual characteristic that was only present in film, and the association of cinema with that unique judder was total. Film trained the human eye to perceive its world in a certain way, one that was very different from how the human eye processes the signal of a TV show or a video game (or real life, for that matter). 24 frames per second is just slightly fast enough for the eye to recognize what it’s seeing as motion, instead of a series of photographs.
This causes a slight but unmistakable disconnect between how we perceive the reality of life and the reality of movies, and everything about a film shot at 24 frames per second - the sets, the lighting, the dialogue, the music, and especially the actors - possesses a certain mystique. To use a rather artful expression, there is a veil of mysticism between the audience and what is happening onscreen. This is a psychological trick more than anything else, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone not invested in the form who could deduce why a movie looks like a movie.
The theoretical advantages of going higher than 24 frames per second are fairly obvious: with more frames in the same amount of time, judder or blur on motion is diminished or removed. This produces a much clearer and cleaner image. Projection systems operating off of a higher frame rate give the impression of having a far higher resolution.
And with the advent of 3D into theaters in the mid-2000s, there was a refreshed opportunity for HFR systems to establish themselves. With the right amount of planning during preproduction and production, the kind of strobing/ghosting effect we’ve talked about could be minimized - but as we’ll see in the next section, planning for 3D exhibition was not generally done very successfully. HFR was tremendously beneficial to 3D visuals: quick movement and motion could be depicted in full 3D with no strobing or motion blur.
There is perhaps no better example of HFR in a mass-market setting than Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films. The movie itself may have been shot with the Red Epic, with all of that 3D system’s disadvantages against something like Fusion, but it was shot in 3D for exhibition in 3D, and the camera movements and edits were orchestrated with this in mind. The use of HFR-48 on the movies is what set it apart, and what initiated a rather intensely love-it-or-hate-it reaction among test audiences, with most of the reaction coming down firmly in the “hate it” column.
The points for and against using HFR weren’t really any different from what we’ve identified here in our controlled environment; it was the totality of the response that garnered attention. With fantasy films like The Hobbit, where effects and makeup and costuming and set design combine to create an artificial reality, the immediacy of the visuals - arrived at by shooting at a frame rate much closer to the 60 interlaced “fields” per second we get on reality TV shows and news broadcasts - have the effect of decisively removing the viewer from the world of the film.
This may be partially due to culture. We have been exposed to 24 frames per second for generations; movies and TV shows with higher frame rates enjoy greater acceptance and prevalence in other countries. Here, though, it’s unlikely that we’ll see HFR advertised theatrically to nearly the degree that we saw with the initial Hobbit film (promotion for HFR for both of the sequels was noticeably diminished). In marked contrast, frame interpolation is omnipresent in home cinema; it generally presents itself as something like TruMotion or Smooth Motion or Cinemotion or some other portmanteau of two terms.
Motion interpolation on an HDTV is generally a matter of a processor within the TV artificially creating frames in between those already present: if the original media has Frame A, Frame B, and Frame C, motion interpolation would create an intermediary image between each of these actual ones. If you put them in sequence, the frames would look like this: A-AB-B-BC-C. Frame interpolation is a fairly common way to optimize a video sequence, and it’s been around long enough for most HDTVs to accomplish it with little to no artifacting of the image. If HFR does gain a wider acceptance down the road, it’s likely to be due to frame interpolation making inroads in the home-theater space.
It’s still awful, though.
Post-Converted 3D: Or, The Part(s) Where Everybody Stopped Caring
Quick: when was the last time you heard anyone be excited to see a movie in 3D? This has little-to-nothing to do with the movie itself, but the 3D format specifically, not as in, “I can’t wait to see Age of Ultron” but “Age of Ultron is gonna be awesome in 3D." Such people doubtlessly exist, but they’re very likely to be in the vast minority, and fairly ignorant of the 3D process to begin with. “Post-converted 3D” refers to the act of digitally manipulating and engineering a film shot in two dimensions to appear as if it were shot in three.
A post-conversion house will take a 2D shot, a program will be used to map out the geography of the shot - extrapolating a concept of geometry, perspective, and distance relative to each object in the frame - and that geography will be used to create an impression of depth and dimension. A great deal of technician involvement, artistry, and nuance is required to pull a convincing three-dimensional shot out of a two-dimensional source, and some post-conversion houses are better than others at completing this illusion in a believable way. One thing is fairly universal, though: post-conversion is inferior to natively-shot 3D, and the list of Hollywood 3D releases accomplished via post-conversion has a high correlation with a list of 3D releases called out and noted for visible evidence of that inferiority.
The goal of IMAX, large-format, 3D, HFR, and any premium feature is partially to advance the technology, and always has been; the other part of it, though, has to do with emphasizing the multiplex as the optimal location for watching movies…and the reason for this has very much to do with the encroachment of the home environment on the multiplex environment. With respect to a couple of yearly spikes that are relative to their nearest neighbors, ticket sales have been on a steady decline since 2002; the only two of those relative spikes that are really significant belong to 2009 (which birthed Transformers 2 and Avatar) and 2012 (which had the trifecta of Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hunger Games).
In an odd coincidence, that ticket-sale apex of 2002 coincided with the year that Hollywood introduced IMAX DMR by re-releasing 1995’s Apollo 13, and you can draw a relatively straight line from IMAX DMR to large-format exhibitions, which are the current premium feature in theaters; 3D is still present, but the boom in native and post-converted 3D that began after Avatar peaked in 2012 and dropped sharply from 2014 to this year; 2016 is sparer still. Something will likewise take large-format’s place; whatever does will have to contend with a home-cinema environment that continues to grow in versatility and democracy. That will be covered in Part 4 of our 4-part series on HD and digital cinema. Thanks for sticking around for this installment, and we’ll see you in just a bit.