Star Wars:Clones to get IMAX release!? (1 Viewer)

[CraigL]

Hate to tell you but the version i saw tonight had NO (count em) black bars. ZERO. I saw the very top and very bottom of the screen. So I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Sean Laughter]

Hmmm, if that's the case perhaps the dome theater I work at has gotten a print we shouldn't have, because ours is letterboxed and looks pretty awful on the dome. If there is a truly IMAX full-frame version than that would be far more preferrable for a dome screen. In fact, looking at theater listings that are running the show there are quite a few domes, and I highly doubt any of them would run the print I saw on a dome without raising significant noise over the image distortion due to the letterboxing.

 

[Scott L]

Well this is wonderful, some IMAX's get widescreen, and some get Pan & scan. I guess I have to hope for the best as I go to the theater.

 

[Jeff Adkins]

There's only about 65 prints or so made and they are all letterboxed. There are no full screen prints. It's definitely not 2.35, but it looked about 1.95-2.00 to my eye (slightly wider than the 1.85 of Beauty & The Beast).
Jeff

 

[Kirk Tsai]

The movie did not look wider than 1.85: 1 to me. My guess would be somewhere in the 1.60s: 1, but definitly between 4:3 and 1.85: 1. The black bar in my theater is the same with my experience with Apollo 13 (different theaters btw), which is that the top of the screen was not fully occupied, and the bottom was filled.

 

[CraigL]

Interesting...because I KNOW that the top to bottom was filled on my screen and yes (at times) the picture looked a little too "long" for my taste. Is it possible they stretched the image?

Again...i repeat...NO black bars.

It was also the very first showing (before it was even supposed to open) so maybe someone messed up?

A PERFECT example of how it's been cut is Obi Wan meeting Lama Su on Kamino. They are usually both in the same frame and they had to cut between the two. There was no way they were fitting both in the same shot.

 

[Sean Laughter]

A PERFECT example of how it's been cut is Obi Wan meeting Lama Su on Kamino. They are usually both in the same frame and they had to cut between the two. There was no way they were fitting both in the same shot.

Well, even if the theater stretched it optically with a lens (doubtful) they obviously couldn't have edited the shot in that kind of manner. It's very odd. Did people seem "tall and skinny" (since you said "longer" that makes me think horizontally, but why would they stretch it that way?)

 

[CraigL]

Tall and skinny. If I had to answer, I'd say yes...but EVER so slightly. In that case, maybe the film is ACTUALLY 1.66 or something and they just stretched it but who knows. I just asked my friend and she said she didn't notice it because she "was too busy looking at people's pores."
Regardless, yes there was some cutting between what would be the left/right hand side of the screen. I've seen the film enough to notice the composition of certain shots.
As for the showing, I dunno what the deal was. I randomly checked the Fandango ticket website and it told me there would be two showings last night. Most places that were showing it had a midnight showing but nothing earlier. I dunno how they had an earlier showing but they did and I was at it! Not much to brag about considering...but...whatever.

 

[Sean Laughter]

We had an 8pm showing last night, or somewhere in that time frame. It definately wasn't a midnight showing. Anyway, I'll get to see it tonight because I run it for the first time. I'm preparing myself for the pain.

 

[Chauncey_G]

Craig,
I wonder if the IMAX you saw AOTC at had movable curtain masking? If so, they could have covered the unused top section of the screen to give it the "fullscreen" illusion.
I ask because the prints ARE letterboxed, and it seems doubtful that they would make the one print you saw different from everyone else's. If there truly were no black bars, then I'm guessing they had movable masking. As Sean stated earlier, I wouldn't think they had a different lens hanging around just for this (those lenses are REALLY expensive!).
May I ask what IMAX theater you saw it at?

 

[Sean Laughter]

And, at least on our projector, there is no way that I know of to attach another auxillary (sp?) lens to the projector to create any kind of stretching.

 

[CraigL]

I saw it at the Sony Lowes theater on 68th street in Manhattan. The only theater in NYC showing it.

 

[Chauncey_G]

Sean, you're right. If one were to want to use a different lens, you'd have to remove the existing one from the lens block and put in another. Like I said, I can't imagine they'd keep an extra lens for a just-in-case scenario like this one!
Craig, do they also show 35mm films in that IMAX theater? I mean conventional 35mm films, not reformatted like AOTC or Apollo 13. I know that many IMAX's do: they have a 35mm projector with a special lens alongside the IMAX projector. I ask because I would think the likelyhood of them having movable masking would be much greater if they had occasion to show smaller-than-screen films on a regular basis.

 

[AndrewG]

I saw AOTC IMAX this evening in the IMAX Theater in Charleston, SC and as far as I could tell it was definately not OAR and very close to 4:3. There was no letterboxing and I could see the top of the screen very well. Perhaps some are correct in saying it is in an altered AR but I would have to say it is no more than 1.66:1. There is a lot of cropped scene and some clear P&S.

Since I had assumed it was going to be this way I wasn't expecting OAR. This was my first IMAX and I thought it was amazing. I have to agree that IMAX was obviously designed for slow pans and not action movies because you have to pan your head to follow some scenes. However, like someone commented you can really see some of the background scenes in the battles and that was a new experience. Of course, I found some of the light sabre battles to be too tight in the cropped version of the film.

I also found most of the cuts in the film to help the pacing, but I think they should have left the Palpetine tricking Jar Jar scene it, because its important for development of the Palp character, and they should have left the Owen / Beru introduction in because it ties them to Star Wars.

One more question, which I am sure has been addressed but I can't find a link. Why are IMAX films limited to 2 hours?

Thanks
Andy

 

[Chauncey_G]

Andy,
IMAX films are limited in length mostly because of the physical nature of the film. The film shows horizontally through the projector (unlike conventional 35mm theaters where their films show vertically), and is 70mm wide. What this means is that the film is twice as wide and the individual frames are extended to 15 perforations (the sprocket holes along the edges of the film) in length. This compares to a conventional frame length of 4 perforations. So, it takes a lot more film to show an IMAX film than it does a conventional one. In conventional theaters (I part time in the booth at one around here), AOTC came on 7 reels, if I remember correctly. The IMAX AOTC came on 35 reels, and no it was not fun putting it together.
We've got one of our IMAX service techs here doing the regular check-up on the equipment, so I asked him about these theaters that are being reported as showing AOTC fullscreen. He's got info on all IMAX theaters on his laptop, and the only common denominator between the Sony IMAX in NY and the one in Charleston is that they are both 3D systems (3D systems can also run 2D, but not vice versa). If they were both using the same lenses, that might explain it, but both use different lenses from each other, so the lens possibility is out the window. He suggested the idea of the movable masking just as I did earlier, though that practice is more common in conventional theaters than in IMAX.
No offense to any here (truly), but he suggested that maybe the top bar simply wasn't being noticed. The top of the frame is a very sharp, clean line (unlike conventional theaters whose appertures can just be crazy) that can give the illusion of the top of a screen simply because it is so precise. A lot of people miss it. He did on AOTC until it was pointed out to him. It could also have something to do with the fact that the film isn't letterboxed like we're used to seeing; there are not equally sized black bars on both the top and the bottom of the film. The top black bar is considerably larger than the bottom (at our theater, the bottom bar isn't even visible on screen), so the image goes all the way down to the lower edge of the screen, but does not reach the top. Their reason for doing this is that normally the focal point of action in IMAX happens below the center of the screen. With the lights out, it's sometimes difficult to pick out the top of the screen if nothing but black is being projected onto it. Like I said, I mean no offense here, but since the actual physical film itself is letterboxed I'm just trying to figure out why some are reporting the fullscreen effect.

 

[Sean Laughter]

Yeah, it's definately not OAR, but it most surely is letterboxed on the print itself.
I just ran the show for the first time on our dome. This thing is crazy. Laying aside the horrid curvature for a moment the thing is just big! Granted, the image doesn't take up the whole area a regular IMAX film does, but the nature of the composition and action makes it seem MUCH bigger than a regular IMAX film. I actually think the dome makes it much worse for the "panning the head" than even a flat IMAX screen because the image literally is beside you so you have no choice but to pan your head alot -- I had to pan my head to read the opening scrawl text, and I sit as far back from the screen as anyone can get in our theater at the computer console.
Out in the parking lot people were saying it was awesome, but that they had a really hard time following the action, especially during the lightsaber scenes. This one guy in the parking lot said, "I kept turning to Stacey [or whoever he said] every five minutes and asking, 'What just happened?' ". So they liked the size, and I didn't really hear anyone comment about the curvature and the black spot at the bottom of the image, maybe I'm just too anal about that.
I had to look away during some of the lightsaber battles merely because I was getting a headache -- and there certainly aren't rainbows on IMAX
The sound is AMAZING though, quite a bit bass heavy though, maybe too much, definately won't be hearing that through my little Sony subwoofer at home
Oh, and about the film. The combined weight of the film and the platter is nearly 500lbs, and unfortunately our schedule means we'll have to rotating that platter off and on the reel unit during the day!!! Ugh!!

 

[George See]

I'm checking it out just for the sound...should be stunning. Also theres a certain novelty aspect, when IMAX first came out my dream was to see Star Wars in an IMAX theater...of course that's way before i knew what a pile of poo it would look like on that screen. To those people who haven't seen an IMAX film I highly recommend going back after clones to see one of their documentaries preferably one of their 3d ones. I'd highly recommend Everest, Space station 3d...and The Living Sea.

 

[Jason Seaver]

If there's any movie that merited an IMAX edition in recent years, it's Attack Of The Clones. Unlike the releases of every other Star Wars movie before it, AOTC wasn't an event - it was treated almost like just another summer adventure movie, filling a slot between Spider-Man and Minority Report. The biggest buzz on it was the complete digital nature of the filming and exhibition, which I quite frankly found to be less than impressive.
Not the case last night - the Aquarium had employees dressed up as stormtroopers, Vader, Jedi, Tuskens, Boba Fett, passsing out programs. The place was packed, with the same sort of enthusiasm I remember from the premiere of The Phantom Menace. Cheers went up when the Fox Fanfare started.
And then, three minutes into the feature, someone in the booth finally realized that the picture was misframed (the extreme right portion of the image was on the left; IMAX projects horizontally), and everything was shut down for half an hour while the projectionist tried to fix it.
That's Attack Of The Clones: The IMAX Experience in a nutshell. Technology letting down a grand and glorious idea.
It's interesting to see people say Episode II "needed" cutting more than Apollo 13 - because, truthfully, the opposite is true. Ron Howard streamlined Apollo 13 marvelously to fit into the mandated 2-hour runtime, losing a little atmosphere but not any story. AOTC loses most of Palpatine and Dooku's political machinations, and key scenes depicting the Jedi's arrogance and Dark Side-induced blindness to the Force. It also loses some of the Ani/Ami romance, but apparently there was less fat to cut than was believed. With these cuts, AOTC becomes a lesser movie, existing almost entirely on its eye/ear candy.
It's in the eye candy department that the film takes its biggest technological hit. I'm not sure how much resolution the 24fps digital cameras Lucas used had, but recall that he threw 24% of that away to get a 2.35:1 image from a 1.78:1 source. Unlike Apollo 13, there were few opportunities to open the mattes up, since nearly every shot has digital effects that would have had to be re-rendered. And then, even letterboxed to 1.66, 29.5% of that picture was cropped out.
So: The IMAX DMR people were starting with 53.5% of the pixels from an image with less resolution than 35mm film and trying to extrapolate a lot of detail. That they were able to get something which mostly looked decent blown up to the size of my apartment building is amazing - but, in certain scenes, clearly not good enough. There's at least one scene toward the end when Amidala is standing sort of in the background, but close enough to be in focus, where her face is a pixilated mess. Also, by cropping to 1.66, some of the chase scenes feature things moving too quickly across too large a space to follow. To comapre with Apollo 13 again, where Howard's movie could survive not being OAR because of its relatively stationary foreground objects and the opportunity to open-matte versus P&S, Clones is in deep trouble cropped.
This is not to say I did not enjoy myself. Attack Of The Clones is still a fantastic ride, and its final half-hour-plus is perhaps the grandest action sequence in movie history. If the DMR guys do have to pick and choose where they spend their effort, it clearly went into this part of the movie - and boy, was it worth it. The presentation uses its large format to emphasize the staggering scale of Lucas's movie, and this is one of several places where I was slack-jawed. So, as much as the process may have hurt the movie in many ways, it certainly delivered a visceral kick.
I can't whole-heartedly recommend Attack Of The Clones: The IMAX Experience, at least not for everyone. It's a stark demonstration of the different strengths and weaknesses of digital vs IMAX, and as a compromise will only really please die-hard Star Wars fans like myself, and then it's still somewhat of a curiousity.
On the other hand... George, if you've got nothing better to do than read internet message boards about your movies - please consider ditching the digital cameras for Episode 3 (or Indy #4) and shooting it natively in IMAX. Sure, it's incovenient and expensive, but it's also spectacular enough to make these movies the major events they deserve to be.

 

[Sean Laughter]

IMAX film stock is so expensive there is no way you'll be seeing Episode 3 filmed using it.

In terms of image quality, I really felt it was lacking. The brighter scenes on Coruscant (the whole beginning) and Tatooine look really washed out to me and very soft. And many times it seems almost as if some kind of blurring effect was used to try and hide pixels. I don't really notice many pixel-looking artifacts (I do see some on sharp edges and on alot of the digital backdrops) but it's quite obvious the thing was sourced from something not even up to par with 35mm films. Fantasia 2000 and Beauty and the Beast were much cleaner and richer colorwise.

It also loses some of the Ani/Ami romance, but apparently there was less fat to cut than was believed. With these cuts, AOTC becomes a lesser movie, existing almost entirely on its eye/ear candy.

As if it didn't before? I don't know. If the film deserved to be an "experience" from the get-go it would have earned it in initial release. It wouldn't take blowing it up to twice the original size to get people excited enough to cheer for it if the movie was worth a damn. The show I ran last night seemed pretty interesting to me. They cheered the Star Wars logo and the "Long time ago . . ." text and the initial music hit and Star Wars logo, but then were utterly silent the rest of the film up until Yoda made his entrance to fight Dooku and then they cheered again. It was like a cue sheet, there isn't enough holding the film together to make people excited for it except for the places it's SUPPOSED to be cool -- Yoda and the opening.

The fireplace scene is still flinch inducing nonetheless. The should have cut that out and added some of the Palpatine stuff back in.

 

[Jason Seaver]

IMAX film stock is so expensive there is no way you'll be seeing Episode 3 filmed using it.

And Lucas really seems to think digital is good enough. But if there's any filmmaker out there who could afford to shoot IMAX-native (or even 65mm-native) if he really wanted to knock our socks off...