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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…

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