Didja catch Star Trek last weekend? Some people did ’cause the movie brought in an estimated $72.5 million. Anyway, one of Joel Johnson’s friends just so happens to be an IMAX engineer and offers up an explanation on why the new Star Trek isn’t a real IMAX film dispite being shown on IMAX screens. She goes into a bit more detail than “it isn’t IMAX ’cause it’s not film on IMAX.”
Just for future reference, ST was not shot in IMAX, and therefore is not a true imax film. imax is 65mm, 15-perf film, with an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 and a MASSIVE amount of image area, approximately 4x the size of VistaVision (VV is also the same format 35mm still cameras shoot, imagine a negative almost four times the surface area of one that was shot in your still camera.)
Â
Star Trek was shot in cinemascope, an anamorphic format that squeezes the image on the film, but projects it through lenses that stretch it back out horizontally to its 1:2.35 aspect ratio. C-scope is run through a normal movie camera vertically, (90 degrees to a still camera) and exposes a frame taking up four perfs of film – about half the film area of a 35mm still camera.
Â
Read the whole thing over on Boing Boing Gadgets.