Post
by Ben » November 9th, 2021, 3:46 am
Actually, for Imax, everything usually goes back to the old open matte techniques that have been in effect since TV came along in the 1950s.
So you’d take an Academy 1.37 frame (which was closest to TV's 1.33) but frame for a theatrical 1.85 within that frame, essentially creating "dead space" top and bottom, but then not having to crop anything off the sides when transferring to TV.
Practically ALL 1.85 "flat" films were composed and shot this way well into the 1980s if not even the 1990s.
Remember when people used to say they caught a boom in top of a shot? Or that bike gag in Pee Wee's Big Adventure when he chains his bike and it’s clear the chain is just being pulled up from under the bike? This is because the top of the frame was never meant to be seen, thus cropping out a stray boom, and the bottom of the frame was never meant to be seen, thus cropping out the bottom of Pee Wee's bike and *then* making it look like he had a never ending chain in his little bike storage box.
For true widescreen films, from CinemaScope into Panavision, and 70mm negative ratios, there was no getting around it: these films were fixed width frames, and so had to be "pan and scanned" to fit 1.33 screens, cropping off half for 4:3 sets and then, much later, around a third for 16:9.
With 1.43 Imax (not far off original Academy 1.37, remember), when you sit in an Imax room, your attention is actually still drawn to the "golden rectangle", or "golden ratio", in the centre of the screen, with the top and bottom of the frame still being "dead space". It has the effect of a much bigger image, and obviously of more actual "picture", but sitting that close to a screen that big, one can’t actually take that all in, so your brain still focuses on the centre of the frame, with top and bottom just "there" to fill the vision but not actually giving you any extra, or important, image information, just as the open mattes did on television.
Usually…the way to frame Imax knowing that a 2.39 widescreen DI is also needed, is to frame for the 2.39, or at least allowing for it, and letting the top and bottom just "be there". Then, just as in The Dark Knight films, or Tron Legacy, the 2.39 just crops off that dead space for a widescreen frame in theatres and on TV.
On newer discs, some of these titles open up those mattes again for those sequences, but notice that they still don’t give you anything extra than screen space, and it’s all just "image air", that can still be cropped off and, honestly, was allowed for but never intendedly framed for. It’s always about protecting the 2.39 frame, if that is the ultimately intended ratio. Unfortunately for Dune, they just framed for Imax and then didn’t have the picture information for the sides of 2.39, which is — dare I say it — actually kind of dumb!
So they’ve ended up spending a lot of time and VFX budget on expanding shots. Okay, so they say they’re largely CG shots anyway, so not so much of a big deal, but then one could argue that the Imax is, if fact, going back to cropping those edges off to fit the Imax frame. Thus this has led to two versions, instead of a consistent image that can be adjusted to each presentation display.
Trust me on this! I was Thames Television's widescreen guru when 16:9 broadcasting came in here in the UK in the late 90s and early 2000s, and gave many talks on framing, ratios and how to adapt older 4:3 images to 16:9, since you wouldn’t believe how many people — and technical people at this — didn’t get that you couldn’t and shouldn’t just stretch a frame, or just crop off top and bottom if it wasn’t open matte. It was after seeing so many "fat" people and people with their heads cut off that I went to our production office and suggested that we set up a seminar to explain this stuff, and how we should either present 4:3 stuff with "pillarbox" borders each side, or if it had to be cropped, to mainly use the top two thirds (or, actually the top three fifths, minus the top fifth, if that makes any sense) so as to get a fairly balanced framing.
For the record, I’m not actually too much of a fan of alternating aspect ratios during a presentation, so for those Imax films that open up their frames for certain sequences, i actually apply widescreen mattes via my projector, so that everything stays the same widescreen frame. Since the dead space is just that, nothing important is cropped out, since the framing would have taken this into account for the fixed theatrical showings.
In fact, I find that, despite a bigger canvas, opening up to 1.85 or 1.78 often feels like the screen has gotten "smaller", and then when we return to 2.35/39 it’s a much more noticeable switch that then takes away from the "wider" framing of those ratios. It’s also the same reason I choose to watch Snyder's Justice League blown up to 1.85 on my projector, since comparisons to Josstice League shows that it was typically framed for 1.85, with the theatrical cut clearly just cropping off the dead space top and bottom, as intended, and the Snyder cut just opening up those mattes and giving us all that dead space in a smaller screen size, ironically, which kind of takes away from the whole idea of Imax in the first place!
My fear with these Marvel films, is that we are still not getting a consistent image, since VFX are still only largely rendered to a final DI frame, in this case 2.39. So while the flat non-CG scenes may show more dead space top and bottom, the plentiful VFX shots will inevitably be cropped for, 2.39 to 16:9, chopping off a third or more image information left or right to make everything fit. Again, it’s not consistent, and *not* the widescreen theatre framing that the filmmakers intended…
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