The latest Batman movie is barely breaking out in theaters, yet The Dark Knight's director is already talking about the Blu-ray release. Some sequences of the movie were shot in the IMAX format. For the theatrical 35mm release, they did 35mm "extractions" from the IMAX negatives.
There will be some consequences since it's a different aspect ratio, but keep reading to see what director Christopher Nolan has to say.
“For home video, certainly the Blu-ray version will [involve] actually
changing the format size and actually using the IMAX footage,” Nolan
said. “You can see the difference on that high resolution.”
“On the standard 35mm version, we did 35mm extractions from the Imax
frame,” Nolan said. “The Imax negative is so clear and grain free that
there’s a great sharpness and clarity to them. Obviously, the
differences are nowhere near as dramatic as there is on the Imax
screen.”
Shooting with IMAX had its own drawbacks. “One of the big disadvantages of these big Imax cameras, particularly
in low-light photography, is that they don’t have very sophisticated
video hookups. You don’t actually get a very clear image on the monitor
at all. If anything, it was more of a case of watching with my eyes and
seeing what was really going on because the actual video feed that you
get from the Imax cameras is very dim and it’s very hard to see what’s
going on.”
Using the best available source to create masters for Blu-ray is only going to push more and more people towards Blu-ray. —Leslie Shapiro
