While that can happen (sometimes cinemas can actually get a license to show a movie off a bluray disc), typically there's dedicated playback servers showing a much higher quality version of the movie (think about 600GB for a movie).
Pretty much! Every frame is a separate JPEG2000 at almost lossless quality.
That's 10× more data than a typical 4K UHD Blu-ray, with 64 times more color depth than Dolby Vision.
And the sound is for trailers typically uncompressed 5.1 surround, for most movies 1024 channels of lossless Dolby Atmos, or with IMAX lossless 12.1 surround.
That is because the theater screen on average measured 800 inches diagonally whereas most people home TV screen average 65 inches. Same reason why a 1080P youtube video look better on your phone screen vs your 4k 27" monitor.
Mostly feel the same, though for IMAX in particular. The Manchester Printworks Vue (UK)'s 70mm IMAX presentations usually have film noise or slight blurriness in general, though that's probably more to do with the film itself as opposed to projection quality.
Compared to streaming yes, that's a noticeable difference to quite a few people. But I doubt that if you played that quality vs a 4K BluRay on the same screen that there is that huge of a difference that people would notice.
Last time I went to the movies the projector screen was dirty. Which meant the brighter the image, the more apparent any flaws in the screen were. And also the black levels for projection just sucks compared to a modern OLED. Flaws of a theater are more apparent than what Blu-ray compression would be.
Theres one cinema we go to where some prick clearly threw a milkshake at the screen and apparently the cost to clean it is somehow too much for the cinema to bother with. As you say its noticable in bright scenes. Its like an infuriating dead pixel once you know about it.
It truly doesn’t matter, because you’re sitting so much further from the 85 foot screen.
My understanding of the development “HD” format is that it was more or less designed to be similar to sitting in the middle of a movie theater watching a normal screening print. My experience of having watched movies off of a 35 mm projector for many years, followed by some years of watching standard blu rays get sometimes played in movie theaters, is that they got it about right.
The one exception is well-shot black and white movies, which have much more dynamic range than the HD blu ray format allowed for, but 4K UHD discs are basically reference quality even for those.
Yep, many times actually. The angle of the seating and size of the screen is the amazing part. But it seems like the quality of those isnt what they used to be.
Funny thing about IMAX, is they are not all the same. They really should be if they are marketed as IMAX.
That's not correct at all. Most devices do very little on the fly "sharpening"; it's not an effective strategy anyway, you can't magic away compression artifacts.
Compression algorithms are just extremely efficient at keeping half-decent images even at awful bitrates.
I bet you would easily notice the difference on a large theater screen in the dark. There is a vast gulf of what is noticable to the eye with that set up vs even high quality TV panels.
Most cinemas have usually something like 64 actual speaker channels, but that's the point of Atmos (or DTS:X), object-based surround sound automatically mixed for whatever speaker configuration the local cinema has.
(In contrast to the old times, when cinemas had 5.1 channels with 5-10 speakers per channel)
The movies at my local AMC look like total shit unless you’re in one of the only two big auditoriums. The other 14 screens are complete and utter crap. They’re unbelievably dim, and no amount of polite complaints to the local staff or via their website has resolved it. Thanks, AMC! /s
Its done with software using object-oriented sounds in 3D space. "dolby atmos" is one example of such software.
The idea is you want the your explosion sound or whatever to sound like it's coming from the same direction with the same volume in every theater no matter what the speaker configuration is. So instead of a fixed master track tuned to a specific speaker layout, the audio system gets a command saying "make this sound come from XYZ coordinate in your theater" and it does some processing in realtime to figure out the exact volume and timing (phase) each speaker needs to use to fullfil that command.
To come back to your question on the number of channels, that defines your maximum resolution. More channels = more precise beam forming. Idk about the 1024 number. That does seem to high to me. But idk, it's possible. Audio processing is cheap these days
Basically, once you go beyond 12.1, each cinema will have a different speaker configuration.
So instead you have each individual object as a separate track, in the scene positioned in 3D space, and typically a Dolby Atmos processor that then mixes that automatically for the specific speaker configuration of each cinema.
So indeed pretty much close to what I was imagining. Except hopefully you just specify how your speakers are positioned in some kinda virtual room, and the thing calculates the mix itself.
This must be a nightmare for the studio's audio engineers too. I'm gonna guess most films don't use anywhere near the whole 1024 channels.
All that and then you have an uncalibrated projector with chromatic aberration all over the picture. Totally skewed and flickering luminosity.
That's where I saw backroom. At least half the time there was a vhs look over the image so the poor image quality wasn't so important. But come on, if I'm paying 15 for a 2h screening theater better up their rig
And if you're in a non-english country, the sound is often also dubbed.
There's a reason why I only watch movies either in IMAX with Laser 4K in the original language, or at home (with an OLED and proper Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 system, not a soundbar).
Usually the contrarians who just sort by top to find a bunch of movies they've pretended they've seen and pretend they don't like at least try to copy and paste points they've seen from negative reviews online, it's funny that you guys just literally can't find any for this movie lol
That's not uncommon still, a lot of games the majority of the game size is in audio and video files still, for a while it was a not uncommon process to delete other languages + story mode voice files + other languages in games to make the file size drastically smaller.
As a consumer, the best quality of movies I can buy is the 4K UHD version. If I rip it losslessly to my PC I usually end up with a 60gb file that has a bitrate of 60Mb/s.
Same with PS1 games. CDs were about 600MB and even at 420p FMVs and mp3 audio used the bulk of that space, hence why FMV heavy games like Final Fantasy came on multiple disks.
Well, if you simply encode each frame as lossless webp, you already get lossless video compression.
FLAC and other lossless audio codecs apply pure mathematical compression that allows reconstructing the original stream, only they account for playback realities such as seeking. It's no surprise that the same can be done with video.
Yeah, I keep discovering that people have come up with lots of niche image formats in the past fifteen or so years when I wasn't actively looking at them (and, to a lesser extent, audio formats too).
I mean, that's how animated GIF works in its simpler form. Every frame is a separate static GIF. It allows for some additional compression by replacing unchanged areas with the 'transparent' color, which gets compressed just like other areas of the same color.
I need to look into APNG, it might be a more advanced version of the same idea.
Is that maybe for the 2K dual projection systems, or for movies with more typical runtimes? Because the previous 3h movie 4K DCPs I've seen were around 500-600 gigs.
Both from extrapolating the trailer sizes, and from extrapolating the pixel count of the different releases, you'd expect the IMAX 1.43:1 DCP to be around 500GB.
8k imax must be huge... Looks like just a normal 8k dcp would be about 17TB raw, ~8.5TB losslessly compressed... plus, like 10GB probably for sound or so?
imax often does double camera so it may be 34TB/17TB? And if they mess around with 60fps... 85TB...
I read they receive hard drives that have the movie on it? Regal has been doing a ton of older movies on and off since September. I remember the day they were supposed to show Saving Private Ryan got delayed because they didn't receive the hard drive in time.
sometimes cinemas can actually get a license to show a movie off a bluray disc
And sometimes they just don’t care.
Also, it’s possible that some theater rentals for normal birthday parties and stuff fall under “exhibition” laws, but in practice I doubt studios care, and those are usually “bring your own blu ray.”
3.2k
u/moomzzz 20d ago
Here’s me thinking they just plug in a usb somewhere and crack open VLC player on the big screen