High Def Forum - Your High Definition Community & High Definition Resource - View Single Post - 'Dark Knight' To Bring IMAX Home to Blu-ray

anythingwt · 07-17-2008, 06:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dare

So the obvious question from me is, how do you know cropping it to 2:35 will ruin the composition?

A properly composed IMAX frame only puts action in about the center 50% of the frame horizontally, and all below the centerline vertically. So there's plenty of air on either side, and expansive air above. (At least, that's how IMAX should be shot, which is why most mainstream movies presented in IMAX, but not specifically shot for it, are unwatchable as far as I'm concerned.)

So if this was shot for IMAX, certainly there would be lots of room to play. I wouldn't expect anything vital to be cropped off, just margins. In fact, the sequences in question will probably have lots of breathing room even in 35mm.

P.S. I can't wait until midnight. This day is going way too slow.

Check this out:

How The Dark Knight Went IMAX

I’ve said it before, and ’ll say it again - You haven’t seen The Dark Knight, unless you’ve seen it in IMAX. OVer 20 minutes of the film was shot with 70mm IMAX cameras, and the result is a cinematic experience like you’ve never seen before. But how did this all come together?

“It was always Chris [Nolan]’s idea, he’s wanted to shoot on IMAX for years,” producer Emma Thomas told us at The Dark Knight junket. “I mean a long long time, has been talking about doing this and then this, when we were talking about where to go with the sequel to Batman Begins and he really wanted to expand the world and make the film feel really huge and it just seemed like the right, finally we had the right project.”

Part of the preparation included a couple test shots on The Prestige, explained Emma Thomas: “We actually, on The Prestige shot, did a couple of shots with the IMAX camera just so that we could get a sense of what the issues were going to be

Nolan originally planned to shoot five of the scenes in IMAX but he kept increasing the use of the cameras through out the production.

“He liked what he was seeing,” says producer Charles Rovan. Thomas adding: “As we went along there was just some shots that just he felt like would be great in IMAX and so we just sort of peppered those, so we definitely an added some, because it just turned out to be much much easier than we thought it would be.

Not that filming using IMAX cameras is necessarily easy. They are big and clunky, and a short load time of two and a half minutes.

“Yes, two and a half minutes. Well, they actually have two cameras, one is even shorter like, one is 30 seconds. And there’s one that’s two and a half minutes,” said Rovan. “We had to modify the arms that we put on the equipment that we attached those IMAX cameras to in order to carry the weight.”

Full Read