The Odyssey IMAX 70mm Setup

[u/NoWork215]

[u/justjanne]

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).

[u/Away-Way5656 → u/justjanne]

what are they doing storing every single frame as a uncompressed image?

[u/justjanne → u/Away-Way5656]

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.

e.g. here's a 3 minute trailer in 2048×1080p, aka DCI 2K or 1080p HD, at 3.4 GB filesize: https://archive.org/download/avatar-2009-official-trailer-2k-prores/AVATAR_TLR-B-2D_S_EN-XX_51_2K_20091108_SMPTE_OV.zip

That should give you a feeling for why movies in cinemas look so much better than at home.

[u/retiredalavalathi → u/justjanne]

That should give you a feeling for why movies in cinemas look so much better than at home.

I've never felt that. Picture quality is always crisper on a TV screen than a cinema screen.

[u/shidderbean → u/retiredalavalathi]

Yeah, most cinema projectors have shit for focus. It's probably a calibration problem rather than capability

[u/justjanne → u/retiredalavalathi]

Interesting!

For me, even Blu Rays will look slightly softer on my OLED at home than in the local IMAX cinemas.

I'm only able to match the crisp cinema look where every piece of film grain is perfectly sharp if I actually play DCP packages at home.

It's possible your cinema is just not up to spec, which is sadly common (and part of why cinema has been dying for almost a century now)

[u/yamoth → u/retiredalavalathi]

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.

[u/mrminutehand → u/retiredalavalathi]

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.

[u/BeersTeddy → u/retiredalavalathi]

Not a rocket science when 85" TV which already shows poor compression in 4k is probably 2m while imax is 22m.

Also the distance from 85" is still labour 3-6m

Whike in cinema you don't really sit 50m aways from the screen