Maybe this is why it sounds so well:
https://twitter.com/UrsineVulpine/status/656385734891446272
[QUOTE=Frederick Lloyd]So incredibly proud to announce I contributed to the music on the newest Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer.[/QUOTE]

Now that I've started to look at ticket options, can anybody tell me what the difference is between RealD and Imax 3D? Which is better?

2D :-p

Real3D is the normal theater, and IMAX is IMAX.

Now there is digital IMAX and 70mm IMAX, and I've heard digital isn't as great as 70mm (which I can't confirm). Since the movie is shot in 70mm, I assume the digital version is this off-putting upscale?

Thanks.

I'm also seeing many "normal" sized theaters being billed as having IMAX. Which is very confusing, leading me to believe that they are calling different things IMAX.

I'm going to assume that 70mm is a physical reel being projected, and thus of higher quality than a digital file that is projected.

You're assuming that the digital format is necessarily a down-sampled version of the same 70mm reel used in the theaters. What if the master reel was higher quality than both?

To be honest, I don't think most people would notice the difference. There is a sentiment that projecting film is higher in quality than projecting video, perhaps there is a subtle more organic feel to it? I don't go to theaters enough to notice, the last two movies I have seen was Interstellar and Jurassic World, now I'm planning on seeing Spectre and then TFA (already bought my tickets).

Uh, that's pretty unlikely. I suppose that if you were shooting digitally, using something like the Red:One, then maybe. You're probably not getting much better than 70mm.

Furthermore, I'm not sure where everyone is getting the idea that the movie was shot on 70mm. I find that really highly unlikely, as it's a tremendous pain in the ass in addition to being absurdly expensive. The only film I've heard of in recent memory being shot exclusively on 70mm is The Hateful Eight.

Generally you'll see movies like this where scenes are shot in Imax (which is not the same as 70mm, BTW), and that's about it. It's difficult for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's nearly impossible to shoot anything with spoken dialogue in a large format, because the cameras are incredibly noisy. Secondly, unless the director is a serious film fetishist (like Tarantino), it's really just not worth the trouble.

shouldn't you wait to see if it's good before you commit to watching it more than once

Oh hey, a few minutes of research yielded the following:

Exactly none of the movie was shot in 70mm. Some of it was shot in Imax, and a very small amount in digital 4k. It's being mastered in digital 4k with some prints being in 70mm.

99% of people are either going to see it projected digitally (which is even going to include the vast majority of Imax screens) or in 35mm. No one has 70mm projectors because no one shoots on 70mm.

I'm not going alone to the premiere.

I thought most of it was shot on 35mm and only some Jakku scenes were shot in IMAX. Hadn't heard about the 4K digital footage. But you're right, the 70mm print is probably for the red carpet premiere.

Gawd, when Episode I premiered I had bought tickets for two consecutive showings. And I liked it! I was young and naive.

So, my understanding is that most theaters that claim to show IMAX versions of the film don't actually have an IMAX-sized screen, so some of it ends up on the wall. That doesn't sound too bad.

OTOH, I've also read that somehow RealD 3D is less likely to result in headaches IMAX 3D, and is also "less blurry". But then you're not getting the full IMAX shot, right?

I have no idea whether any of this is true, and I probably wouldn't care. Actually, what I hate the most is that a lot of times it's just too bloody loud.

The last time I saw IMAX 3D they were still using active shutter glasses. Don't know if they still are. RealD uses polarization. Both technologies are garbage.

Hmm. I don't see any theaters showing just 2D IMAX. I'm guessing there's no way to see the whole IMAX scene without having to wear the 3D glasses. Maybe the IMAX scenes aren't that important anyway. I mean, they wouldn't shoot a scene that cut off anything crucial for the non-IMAX version.

I've never actually been to a 3D movie; anybody here care to share whether or not they found the whole experience a net plus? I actually kind of think I'd be distracted by it.

It's entirely dependent on the movie. When the 3D stuff first started coming out regularly and everything was gimmicky (something like "Despicable Me"), then personally I find it annoying as hell. These days, Real3D on a "normal" movie isn't so bad, as it's just adding depth to the picture and doesn't have that in-your-face bull****. "Big Hero 6" looked really good in 3D.

Just to be clear, though, it is IMAX 3D and not RealD that has the extra footage, due to the larger screen area (correct me if I am wrong). If the 3D is tolerable, it might be worth it to see it in IMAX.

****, it was Hateful Eight with 70mm coming out toward the end of the year, not SW. Opps. I was thinking Tarantino was sticking with 35mm.

It's fine. Not super great, but it's fine. High variance, low mean. A few minutes in and you probably won't even notice the 3D anymore, so long as there isn't something seriously wrong with either the setup or the source material, and so long as you don't move your head too much or look at things in the background.

Don't get me wrong, we have a long road ahead to adequacy here. I'm not just talking about the technology, which has been proven to, no joke, cause long-term brain damage. I'm talking about getting filmmakers who at least consent to learn about stereoscopy and physiology of human vision before trying to mess around with it. I don't know why artists who perform in a visual medium feel like they have a free pass on learning about how eyesight works, but here we are. (By the way, Hi Joss! Sweet low key lighting bro.) Basically, though, if all you're looking for is a neato 3D effect to make your crappy movie pop a bit more, this hot garbage is good enough for now.

I'm at least 50% sure I once saw a RealD movie where they had the filters reversed. But honestly, it was a Michael Bay movie, so there's a really good chance the 3D was just that bad.

Technically speaking, in a way, the Imax screen is smaller than what you'd typically see. Hear me out on this, because it's the way it is. Anymore, the garden variety big event movie is going to be shot in a 21:9 (or 2.35:1, depending on how old school you are) aspect ratio. Imax, on the other hand, is 16:9. It's more narrow from side to side. It's a bigger screen, but a smaller frame of reference.

So when you see a movie in Imax that wasn't 100% shot for Imax (read: Nearly every movie that is released in Imax theaters was primarily shot with 35mm), one of two things will happen:

1. There will be jarring aspect ratio changes throughout the picture to avoid cropping. This means that the vast majority of the film will not actually occupy the entire Imax screen, and it'll have to be letterboxed. This doesn't happen on most movies, because it's extremely jarring and pretty much instantly takes you out of the moment. One minute you'll see an image that starts about 10' below the top and ends about 10' above the bottom, and then the next minute you'll see images that take up the whole screen. What's very interesting about this is (as I said before), one of the primary reasons why major pictures aren't shot entirely in Imax is because the camera is about as loud as a ****ing chainsaw, which makes it nearly impossible to shoot any kind of dialogue using it. So you'll be in an action scene, and any part where characters are talking will suddenly be letterboxed. Christ, it's awful.

2. They'll simply crop the entire movie to fit on the Imax screen. It's not going to be jarring, and they don't use any digital panning, since the 2.35:1 frame really isn't THAT much wider than the Imax frame. However, if you ask a purist such as myself, any and all cropping of a film is blasphemy, and you might as well go piss on the cinematographer's face.

Additionally, if a theater claims to show film in Imax and they actually do not, they're going to have some legal problems. An Imax screen must be at least 72' x 53', but it does not have to be exactly that. It can be higher, but it cannot be lower. Furthermore, Imax has specific projectors that are designed just to show films shot on their proprietary film process. If you don't have an Imax projector, and your screen isn't an Imax screen, you're not calling it Imax. I promise.

Now, there are a variety of other large format cinema possibilities. I know that both Texas Instruments and Christie make 4k digital projectors that given a 4k source (which in theatrical showings is pretty much commonplace these days), the quality will rival or surpass that of Imax.

Okay. So now in regard to Jon's complaint that a large number of films appear too dark in 3d, this really isn't something you can blame on the director. Particularly in the case of The Avengers, Joss Whedon was ardently opposed to having the film post-converted into 3d, because it's not how he shot the movie. You've got to plan for the entire thing to be in 3d, and shoot accordingly. This typically means absolutely no handheld whatsoever, no fast cuts, and then really bizarre particular **** like the color palette and so on. The studios don't care about this sort of thing, because it's not like it's really costing them a ton of money to have the film post converted, and then they get the 3d surcharge. It's a win/win for them. However, the 3d process generally causes you to lose about an entire f-stop as far as the exposure goes, and the editors aren't going to master the damned movie twice just so the 3d version that they wish didn't even exist can be visible.

So does the 3d version of most movies suck? Yes. It absolutely does. Is it the fault of the director? In most scenarios it absolutely is not. The vast majority of directors urge the public to watch the 2d version of the movie because it's the actual movie that they shot, not some half-assed garbage outsourced to a bottom-bidder effects studio to do a quick and dirty post conversion.

So where does that leave us? You want 100% Imax? Too bad. Movies have talking in them. Want more movies that have entirely large format footage? Stop seeing the ones that are pieced together from multiple formats. Want good 3d? Stop seeing movies with bad 3d.

And most of all, have a little respect for the cinematographer. He/she worked his/her ass off to make that movie beautiful. Don't patronize cinemas that cut parts of the damned image off. Mainstream films are terrible in Imax anyway. The goddamn screen is too big for the focus to register with your brain. You just can't possibly focus on enough of the screen to be able to distinguish as much of the frame as you're supposed to.

You're dealing with The Greatest Artistic Medium here. Act like it.

Technically speaking, in a way, the Imax screen is smaller than what you'd typically see. Hear me out on this, because it's the way it is. Anymore, the garden variety big event movie is going to be shot in a 21:9 (or 2.35:1, depending on how old school you are) aspect ratio. Imax, on the other hand, is 16:9. It's more narrow from side to side. It's a bigger screen, but a smaller frame of reference.

So when you see a movie in Imax that wasn't 100% shot for Imax (read: Nearly every movie that is released in Imax theaters was primarily shot with 35mm), one of two things will happen:

1. There will be jarring aspect ratio changes throughout the picture to avoid cropping. This means that the vast majority of the film will not actually occupy the entire Imax screen, and it'll have to be letterboxed. This doesn't happen on most movies, because it's extremely jarring and pretty much instantly takes you out of the moment. One minute you'll see an image that starts about 10' below the top and ends about 10' above the bottom, and then the next minute you'll see images that take up the whole screen. What's very interesting about this is (as I said before), one of the primary reasons why major pictures aren't shot entirely in Imax is because the camera is about as loud as a ****ing chainsaw, which makes it nearly impossible to shoot any kind of dialogue using it. So you'll be in an action scene, and any part where characters are talking will suddenly be letterboxed. Christ, it's awful.

2. They'll simply crop the entire movie to fit on the Imax screen. It's not going to be jarring, and they don't use any digital panning, since the 2.35:1 frame really isn't THAT much wider than the Imax frame. However, if you ask a purist such as myself, any and all cropping of a film is blasphemy, and you might as well go piss on the cinematographer's face.

Additionally, if a theater claims to show film in Imax and they actually do not, they're going to have some legal problems. An Imax screen must be at least 72' x 53', but it does not have to be exactly that. It can be higher, but it cannot be lower. Furthermore, Imax has specific projectors that are designed just to show films shot on their proprietary film process. If you don't have an Imax projector, and your screen isn't an Imax screen, you're not calling it Imax. I promise.

Now, there are a variety of other large format cinema possibilities. I know that both Texas Instruments and Christie make 4k digital projectors that given a 4k source (which in theatrical showings is pretty much commonplace these days), the quality will rival or surpass that of Imax.

Okay. So now in regard to Jon's complaint that a large number of films appear too dark in 3d, this really isn't something you can blame on the director. Particularly in the case of The Avengers, Joss Whedon was ardently opposed to having the film post-converted into 3d, because it's not how he shot the movie. You've got to plan for the entire thing to be in 3d, and shoot accordingly. This typically means absolutely no handheld whatsoever, no fast cuts, and then really bizarre particular **** like the color palette and so on. The studios don't care about this sort of thing, because it's not like it's really costing them a ton of money to have the film post converted, and then they get the 3d surcharge. It's a win/win for them. However, the 3d process generally causes you to lose about an entire f-stop as far as the exposure goes, and the editors aren't going to master the damned movie twice just so the 3d version that they wish didn't even exist can be visible.

So does the 3d version of most movies suck? Yes. It absolutely does. Is it the fault of the director? In most scenarios it absolutely is not. The vast majority of directors urge the public to watch the 2d version of the movie because it's the actual movie that they shot, not some half-assed garbage outsourced to a bottom-bidder effects studio to do a quick and dirty post conversion.

So where does that leave us? You want 100% Imax? Too bad. Movies have talking in them. Want more movies that have entirely large format footage? Stop seeing the ones that are pieced together from multiple formats. Want good 3d? Stop seeing movies with bad 3d.

And most of all, have a little respect for the cinematographer. He/she worked his/her ass off to make that movie beautiful. Don't patronize cinemas that cut parts of the damned image off. Mainstream films are terrible in Imax anyway. The goddamn screen is too big for the focus to register with your brain. You just can't possibly focus on enough of the screen to be able to distinguish as much of the frame as you're supposed to.

You're dealing with The Greatest Artistic Medium here. Act like it.

"too dark". Yeah that's my complaint. Not the fact that in both polarizing and active shutter stereo you get bleed through from high contrasts. Nope. Just too dern dark. I definitely didn't do funded academic research into stereoscopic displays in a real brick and mortar lab, nope. Dark.

Thanks Antony, I really appreciate it. Your synopsis of the situation sounds sufficiently dysfunctional for me to believe that it could be true.

Based on your comments, it sounds like IMAX is probably not the best option for somebody like me who just wants to see the film the way the director / cinematographer envisioned it. (Though I know your comments were intended to be taken generally, and of course every film is different. Perhaps SFGold would be kind enough to share the secret details about how the movie was filmed, and we can make a decision.)

Do directors and cinematographers ever compensate for the possibility of their movies getting cropped in some theaters by just making the edges less important as they would like to? Like if they would otherwise include something on the edges that they feel would be important to the overall shot, will they sometimes leave that out or set up the shot differently in fear of cropping?

They must! I mean, with the reign of VHS for all those years and 4:3 aspect ratio, cropping was going to happen in a big way, every single time.

True, I actually thought about that too, but VHS and cropping for 4:3 aren't relevant anymore.

Probably depends on the people involved. I bet Stanley Kubrick would have never left something on the edge of the frame because "it's cool, we can remove it in post".

(Unlike Finnley Nikumubrick who took tremendous advantage over adding arbitrary widescreen black bars in TODOA to hide stuff on the top and the bottom of the screen, mainly to make Darth Vader appear taller than the player model was)

That reminds me of how the first two (I think) House MD season sets were cropped to 4:3 in Europe in effin' 2007 or so. Oh well.

Unlike that reign of Ach for all those months, right, Krokodile?

I hate movies in 3D... they give me headaches, I barely can see the 3D effect, and all the distortions, etc... just distracting. Waste of money. 2D FTW.

1. Exactly zero cinematographers shoot with any kind of cropping in mind. They shoot with the intended medium in mind, which is the film being shown in the aspect ratio they intended.

2. Unless you're Stanley Kubrick, in which case you shoot the vast majority of your films in 16:9 and crop them to 4:3 theatrically because you're a psychopath and you absolutely cannot stand the idea of viewers seeing something different on a TV screen than what they saw on a cinema screen.

Jon: While offering my sincerest apologies for oversimplifying the circumstances of why Joss Whedon does not remotely consider why his movie won't look good in a format that he does not want it shown in to begin with. You may notice a reoccurring trend of filmmakers not wanting people to **** around with their art.

What's the difference between 70mm and IMAX?

Also, this may just be me, but 3D glasses seem like they push back the screen 50 yards when I put them on.

In any case, 3D is just awful. I hate that it's being marketed as a "superior" experience to 2D.

3d isn't "awful." Virtually none of the cinematic tools that are generally awful are fundamentally awful. I mean, everyone hates the "shaky cam" style of filmmaking, but that doesn't mean handheld camerawork is always bad. It's just usually terrible because people like Michael Bay don't understand the idea of restraint. People hate fast cuts, too. That doesn't mean they're always bad. They're just bad in Michael Bay movies.

Hell, people even complain about color correction. You see it all the time in articles about how this or that thing is ruining Hollywood movies. Apparently it's a terrible thing to do the whole "teal and orange" color palette. Well, no it isn't. That's just how color composition works. Those colors work well together. It's just that a lot of people (like Michael Bay, again) are ****ing awful at utilizing it.

CG isn't even bad. It gets a lot of flack for ruining movies, but how the hell is CG ruining a movie? CG is used to great results in hundreds and hundreds of movies for things that you aren't even aware of while watching. It's just that people like Michael Bay consider it a license to go ape**** with elaborate action scenes and overdesigned bull****. Why put actual work into principal photography? You can just edit around everything and fix things with CG later on. There's no way that kind of devil may care attitude could spill over onto the basic quality of your film, right?

So that finally brings us to 3d. 3d isn't bad in and of itself. It's just really poorly used most of the time. I mean, Avatar is kind of sterile and strangely forgettable, but the 3d in it is utterly outstanding. It's made with that thrill-ride sentiment in mind, that the 3d is a pivotal aspect of the experience of watching the movie, and as a result, it suffers on home video. It's kind of a problem with a lot of movies, for that matter. The formats aren't equal. Some movies are considerably better in the cinema than they are at home, but the filmmakers don't care because they aren't making movies for people to watch at home. They're making movies for people to watch in theaters. The production companies want the movies released on home video, just like the production companies want movies converted to 3d so they can make more money.

There are a few other notable examples of great 3d work. Dredd's 3d is fantastic, and it made the movie better. It's still pretty great on home video, but it was better in the theater. Say what you will about the Hobbit movies being Peter Jackson's equivalent of the Star Wars prequels, but the 3d was used well in it.

The biggest problem with 3d is that it almost always isn't the director's choice. Why does the 3d in The Avengers suck? It's because Kevin Feige decided that it needed to be converted to 3d after it was finished shooting already. Whedon didn't shoot with 3d in mind because it wasn't the plan to make it a 3d movie, so then it gets outsourced and gets a half-assed conversion, and it sucks. This is pretty much how it works in 99% of the movies that are released in 3d. The director and cinematographer have no intention whatsoever of shooting the movie for 3d, and as a result it ends up being terrible. In order for it to be good, it needs to be shot in 3d (not converted), and it needs to be the plan from minute one. It's an elaborate and expensive process, which is why studios favor post conversions. Just like nearly every other scenario of studio meddling, it hurts the movie. But they don't care, because they know people will still pay extra to see it in 3d.

You might even see stuff in press releases and so on that the director personally oversaw the conversion process. Well, that's great and all that you say that, but maybe we should let the director make the movie that they want to make to begin with. Or maybe they should just be honest about what it means for the director to personally oversee it. They stand there and say "Christ, this is awful. Can we just make this passable and get this over with?"

It may come as a big surprise to everyone, but making a movie well is a thing that is really, really hard to do. And, more often than not, it's best if you just let the professionals do their jobs. It also hopes if those professionals have some idea of restraint, too. What do handheld camerawork, color correction, hyper-editing, CG, and 3d all have in common? They're only actually really good if you barely notice them. The technical aspects of a movie shouldn't stand out to the audience, because if they do, the viewer isn't paying attention to the right thing, and you've failed as a narrative storyteller. Yes, even 3d. You should pretty much stop noticing it after about 10 minutes.

Let's keep perspective here. The biggest problem with 3D is that the display technology is garbage. Low quality content <<<<<<<<< permanent vision damage.