Last Update Was Sunday - IMAX Resolution
Well folks sorry for the lack of updates been a busy week 1st week of the new quarter so I have been driving a lot and just have not had the time to get on this blog. But I thought I would share with you an e-mail from my archive that I have never shared before. This inquiry came up last december when Me, and Kacey ventured out with some friends to go see the Polar Express movie in 3D IMAX at the Seattle Pacific Science Center. I had never been to the new Boeing IMAX theater since it was opened for the release of Fantasia 2000 in 2000. When I got home I was reading this article about how the Producer of Star Wars Rick McCallum was saying that Home Theater was destroying the movie business.
So on this note I thought well lets see there is really no joy in going to the movies you have 30 mins of commercials before the movie and then you have 20 mins of previews before the movie and you can watch all of those at home. So I thought how much better is a movie theater screen over an IMAX Screen so I sent of this e-mail to IMAX customer Service.
Hello my name is Tristan Pipo and I am just a general huge fan of movies and the technology behind the film. I was doing some research of the standard 35mm film that we see in movie theaters and did a little research and I heard that they have approx 4000 lines of resolution on a typical movie. I was wondering what the number of lines that would be approx. in a typical frame of IMAX film.
I can understand that is a lot of down conversion between the 4000 lines of a standard film to DVD which is 480p on a high end system. I was just wondering if you could pass that data along to me because I just like knowing those kind of details.
Thanks. Love the Imax technology.
A little over a week later I got my response.
Dear Tristan,
Thank you so much for your interest in IMAX. Hopefully the following will answer your question.
The smallest resolve power of neg film is about 6 microns. As a result, the limiting resolution on a 35mm negative frame is around 3700×2700 pixels. This means a maximum of 2000 lines of vertical resolution for an image with a 1.85 aspect ratio and even less for a 2.35:1 aspect ratio (1570 lines).
The resolution on a 35mm release print is much lower due to MTF generation loss in the film process. A recent paper from SMPTE journal reported that the real resolution that audience can discern in a high-quality 35mm cinema is about 1600 horizontal pixels, which translates to about 850 lines for 1:85 and less than 700 lines for 2.35. Most 35mm cinemas fair even worse than those numbers.
Similarly, an IMAX 15/70 frame has a limiting resolution of close to 12,000 horizontal pixels. For an aspect ratio of 1.36:1, there are about 8700 lines of vertical resolution on each 15/70 negative frame. Because the release print for a typical IMAX documentary is printed directly from the negative, the geneartion MTF loss will be reduced. It is estimated that audience can discern no less than 4500 lines of vertical resolution from a good IMAX release print. So as you can see there exists quite a difference between the image quality of an IMAX image vs that of a 35mm image.
Best Regards,
Brian Bonnick
_________________________________________
Brian Bonnick, P.Eng.
Sr. Vice President, Technology
There you have it fellow bloggers some reason I can’t ever seem to read enough or do enough with this technology they use for movies I am always asking questions like this my friends think I am a total dork because of this but hey I can always say I know more then them about this kinda stuff. What knowledge do they have? I know my friends are great at being friends but watching them not have jobs or not going to school is depressing.
My current goal is to see what it takes to get my CCNA been seeing where the training is offered because from what I view of the industry a MCSE isn’t really worth my time. But I could be wrong since from all the people with a CCNA that I have talked always seem to make more money then the MCSE and the CCNA is on track to get a CCNP and then the uber mega CCIE but we will see. Current Goal though is to take classes to get my CCNA and go get my CCNA.
