Cinesphere - Toronto, Canada
IMAX is a Canadian company, so it makes sense that their first permanent installation, built in 1971, would be in the New York City of the north, Toronto. The Cinesphere is a 752-seat theater boasting an 86-foot wide, 60-foot tall screen, and built in the shape of a Disney-esque dome. It's located at Ontario Place, an amusement park on the shore of Lake Ontario.

L'Hemisferic - Valencia, Spain
If you've only seen straightforward designs for movie theaters, even a (yawn) sphere, Valencia's L'Hemisferic theater will blow you away. It's constructed in the shape of a giant eye, with the theater in the "pupil," and doubles as Europe's largest planetarium. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, it was completed in 1998 and serves as the centerpiece of Valencia's "City of Arts and Sciences."

Darling Harbour - Sydney, Australia
The 540-seat Darling Harbour IMAX, in one of Sydney's most scenic areas, is the largest IMAX screen in the world at 117.2 feet wide and 96.5 feet high. Its projector requires not one, but two 15,000-watt bulbs, and requires an insane cooling system that "pumps 1,600 cubic metres of air and 36 litres of distilled water through the lamp housing every minute." The sound system is similarly massive: A 15,000-watt digital surround sound system. A note to Aziz Ansari: If you're trying to see Star Trek on a real IMAX, we might suggest a trip to Australia.

Futuroscope - Poitiers, France
Housed in the Parc du Futuroscope, an all-around awesome-sounding French theme park based on multimedia and technology, the Kinescope theater is the only one in the world to house every single type of IMAX: Normal, dome, 3D, dome 3D and flying-carpet-style. The "flying carpet" type screen features a second screen on the floor, giving the sensation of a mushroom trip weightless or floating experience.

The Golden Snail - Jakarta, Indonesia
Possibly the most gorgeous, organic IMAX theater in the world, the Golden Snail Theater (also know as the Keong Emas IMAX) in East Jakarta, Indonesia is meant to resemble the golden apple snail, a national symbol of Indonesia. It was the largest screen in the world from 1985 to 1991, and the 930-seat theater (quite possibly the largest-capacity IMAX theater in the world) is now mostly used for tourist films on the natural beauty of Indonesia. Interestingly, the Golden Snail Theater has never shown a film about the golden apple snail.

Science Museum of Minnesota - Saint Paul, USA
We could have gone with the oppressively garish "Broadway at Myrtle Beach" IMAX for the sole American entry, or even the world's largest IMAX dome (though not the largest screen) in the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. But for us, the Science Museum of Minnesota's crazy convertible dual-screen system takes the cake in the States. It was the pioneer of the convertible screen, which features both a flat screen and a dome that can be rotated to show made-for-domes IMAX movies known as Omnifilms. It also boasts the "largest permanently installed electronic cinema projector in the world," but the massive mechanical structure is what placed this theater on our list: The exterior of the theater actually had to be built around the screen's mechanism!

Prasads IMAX - Hyderabad, India
After the former World's Largest Screen (Adlabs IMAX in Mumbai) was torn down, the Prasads IMAX in Hyderabad stepped up to the plate. Prasads IMAX may not be the largest screen or even the largest dome in the world, but it is the single most popular theater in the world. Its 72-foot high, 95-foot wide screen is accompanied by 635 seats and a 12,000-watt sound system. The Prasads IMAX made its name by being the most attended screen in the world for major blockbusters like the Harry Potter and Spiderman movies.

(Left, 35mm reel. Right, IMAX reel.)

Before we move on, let's explain IMAX film. Technically, it's a 70mm standard that—unlike the 70mm that was popular back in the day with big movies like Lawrence of Arabia —has been turned sideways on the celluloid. So while typical 70mm motion picture film runs vertically and takes up 5 perforations on the film strip, IMAX runs horizontally and takes up 15 perforations. Yes, that means that the IMAX 70mm standard is three times bigger than normal 70mm and nine times bigger than 35mm.

Now do you know why we've been making such a big deal about it?

Kodak estimates their 35mm film stock to run at an equivalent of 6K digital resolution—that's 2K better than the famous 4K Red One camera. As Kodak makes IMAX film out of the same ink/material that they make 35mm film, to scale, you can argue that IMAX reaches a theoretical equivalent of 18K digital, or 252 megapixels. In real application, even an expert we talked to within IMAX doubted if the viewer can see 18K projected, estimating that 12K might be a more accurate guess.

IMAX film is—unquestionably—far more impressive than any other standard on the block, analog or digital. So how the heck can IMAX claim they can take a normal 35mm film, like Star Trek, and play it on IMAX screens?

(Left, 35mm reel. Right, IMAX reel.)

To be fair, this insanely high resolution 70mm film format is only used in the huge free-standing IMAX theaters found in museums and parks throughout the world. As you might recall from our previous story on IMAX "retrofitting" in multiplexes, IMAX's digital projection system used in those theaters is a mere 3K or 4K in resolution. There's definitely a double standard, and though it's still an impressive theater experience, it's not the same and you have the right to feel a bit ripped off if you're expecting a 70mm print.

But regardless of the film's destination, it is carried through roughly the same process known as DMR (which, enigmatically, stands for "digital re-mastering"), which starts with a digital encoding of a standard 35mm Hollywood film, and ends with a remastered, (usually) higher-resolution digital format for multiplexes, and a bunch of reels of remastered crazy-high-resolution 70mm film for the true IMAX theaters.

During my day at IMAX HQ, I kept referring to the process as "uprezzing"—the same mundane miracle that allows DVDs to play on HDTVs. But every time I used this term, it was met with a shiver from production personnel. After seeing their process, I still think "uprezzing" fits, but blowing up a film's resolution requires a lot of tweaking and artistry, so I can appreciate their reaction a bit more.

When IMAX converted Apollo 13, the first 35mm movie to be converted to IMAX, the whole process took three months. Now, a team of about 20 digital artists can convert a movie in three weeks with the help of a powerful render farm.

Source film generally arrives at IMAX pre-digitized in either 2K (2048×1080) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution. In the case of the Dark Knight, some footage reached 5.6K and even 8K. It leaves IMAX at anywhere from 4K to 8K resolution, sharpened with film grain reduced.

The staff views the movie while analyzing general trends like lighting and coloring in a film. Each movie has a certain overall look, and then each scene (exterior night, interior day, spaceship orbiting planet, etc.) has a certain particular lighting and coloring of its own, so they note all of the overarching trends—the keys to each scene type—and then they tailor uprezzing (or just polishing) algorithms to take them into account. The algorithms are unique to the film but the result, after all the painstaking customization, is a fairly automated hit-the-render-button-get-an-IMAX-movie video-scaling process.

Well, almost. About 80% of the film's frames come out of the automated process looking great. It's the remaining 20% that's the real bitch. Sometimes the process arranges pixels in ways that bring forth unforeseen oddities in the image. These tainted frames are either sent back through the render farm again with tweaked settings, or they are fixed by hand.

I watched a member of the IMAX team screen a clip from Night at the Museum 2 in which Owen Wilson is green screened in front of a pile of sand. He had just a few frames of the film looped on his monitor, less than a second of real material, and they looked fine by my account. (Our apologies for a lack of pictures, but acquiring studio rights to images has proven difficult.)

Of course, this was a 20-inch display, and the film would play on a screen…a bit larger than that.

So the film analyst urged me to look closer, at which point I noticed an aura of softness around Wilson's figure, killing the texture of the sand. With a keypress, the screen snapped to the same frames in the 35mm, which looked fine. The automated uprez process had highlighted some of the intentionally hidden seams of the special effects.

That footage was sent back to the artists to fix by hand, as are a lot of the 10,000 to 20,000 frames of film IMAX processes during a day of DMR work.

That's just the artistic side, which happens for both the multiplex digital IMAX and the 70mm film IMAX —there's also the delicate matter of assembling all this film properly back into one big strip for the the true IMAX theaters and their film projectors.

IMAX reels and 35mm reels don't line up in a convenient 1-to-1 ratio. Because the film is physically bigger, there are almost five IMAX reels for every reel of 35mm. Not only do they have to make sure every single cut from one reel to the next is smooth, they have to make sure everything stays in the right order, a huge pain, especially when just a few frames are being fixed at a time.

The film part of the process culminates in a scene-by-scene analysis of the 70mm dailies—172,800 frames for a 2-hour movie—viewed on a lightbox with the 35mm film right beside the IMAX uprez. If the in-and-out points are the same, things are generally fine. If not…it's gonna be a long night.

But even with all this earnest work of artists and video wizards, will that original 35mm content look better when either upscaled or just cleaned? I'm going to say yes, not because I've had the opportunity to analyze a pre- and post-DMR film with my own eyes, but because a staggering amount of the staff's efforts are simply to eliminate film grain. And while, to me, that's a sin to do for archival film restoration or 1080p Blu-ray transfers, I can understand the necessary evil when a movie is expanded to epic proportions and the audience is forced to sit in ridiculously close proximity to the screen. Nobody pays to see blackheads the size of a house, especially on Ben Stiller.

Besides, regular IMAX movies shot on IMAX 70mm film are always going to look better. Anyone who's ever used Photoshop knows there's no way that digitally enlarging an image will ever look as good as an already-large image in its native resolution. Parts of The Dark Knight were shot for IMAX, and I've seen that footage on true 70mm IMAX projection. I've also seen plenty of 35mm movies (like Star Trek) up on the IMAX screen, projected from a 70mm film print, after DMR. There is absolutely no comparison. Star Trek is fun to watch on a big screen. The Dark Knight is so ridiculously detailed that your brain can barely process it.

As much as I can admire IMAX's DMR process and the truly staggering amount of effort going into digital enhancement, this does beg one question of Hollywood: You've got hundreds of millions for talent and marketing, but you don't have enough cash to buy a truckload of 70mm film and deal with tricky cameras? I find that hard to believe.

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This 3D underwater housing is rated to shoot in depths up to 125 feet of seawater. But despite having hundreds of pounds of camera equipment tucked inside (the mini submarine is loaded with the gargantuan Solido camera), the complete waterproof package is neutrally buoyant. In other words, when completely submerged, you could balance the entire load on one finger.

A different, more compact 3D camera shot additional Hubble footage in space (the 3D-30). What's the biggest difficulty of shooting in zero G according to IMAX engineers? Focus shifts. [Photo credit: NASA]

UPDATE: PopSci just ran an interesting piece on shooting IMAX in space. More on that here.

The camera workshop is an homage to IMAX's most appealing attributes, their mechanical, analog craftsmanship. In short, it's a pigsty filled with solder and screws and clamps and lots of random components that seem lost without their context in a complex machine. It was a comforting place to hang out, as Mike Hendriks, camera artisan, casually spun millions of dollars in equipment around for my perusal.

The bodies are constructed of magnesium (sometimes aluminum, but it tends to be too fragile). The lenses are Carl Zeiss, but IMAX rips the glass from the lens body to build their own optics from semi-scratch.

MKII LW
This is IMAX's "lightweight" camera as well as one of their longest standing designs. Here it's loaded with a magazine that holds but 500 feet of film (or about one and a half minutes of shooting). Believe it or not, in this 46 pound configuration, the MKII made it to the top of Mount Everest. That poor, poor Sherpa.

MSM 9802
The MSM is a general purpose 2D camera. It's a larger evolution of the MKII design (loaded with a 1000 foot magazine here), with a more elegant internal design and upgraded electronics like video output. You may know it as the camera that shot the famous Dark Knight Tumbler sequence...before it was destroyed by a stunt vehicle. Mike Hendriks had to repair the system as it's but one of four such cameras in the world. (I overheard that while it's insured for $500,000, repairs came in at well under half that.)

3D-15 Solido
Now this was my favorite camera. Walking up to the beast for the first time, I foolishly assumed that the two eye-like pieces of glass comprised a very comfortable viewfinder. I felt a bit foolish when I learned that the Solido is a two-lensed 3D camera. The reason I felt like sticking my eyes in there was that the spread between the lenses intentionally mimics the human perspective. Two luxuriously fluid shutters spin on the inside, allowing for precise exposure of not one but two simultaneous reels of film. I was able to rotate the camera around for shots on the table, but there's no way I was lifting the thing. It weighs in at 215 pounds when loaded with just 1000 feet of film, and 329 pounds when loaded with 2500.

Hendricks was kind enough to fire up the Solido, chassis spread eagle, for me to film. It sounded like a sewing machine on PCP as the powerful motors kicked on exposing 24 frames of IMAX film a second, times the two reels of film in the system. Tragically, my $1000 HD camcorder malfunctioned and the footage didn't save, wasting hundreds in film stock. It was a low moment for me (and JVC).

3D-30
This second 3D camera looks less impressive on the outside, but technically, it's pulling off a pretty astounding trick. While the Solido shoots 3D on two reels of film, exposed simultaneously, the 3D-30 shoots 3D on one reel of film, with two side-by-side frames exposed simultaneously. So it moves film through its labyrinth of gears twice as quickly, burning through 1000 feet of celluloid in just a minute and a half. And the film comes out unwatchable, with the frames capturing a left-right-left-right-left-right perspective. So the film is digitized to reorganize the shots later. (It's easier than cutting out each frame and hand-parsing the images into two reels.)

The 3D-30, named after the 30 perforations of film exposed at once, was the same 3D camera taken into space to film the recent Hubble repairs. For that, IMAX provided NASA with a special 5000 foot reel container stored in the shuttle's cargo bay (about 7.5 minutes of film). Because there is no reloading IMAX film in space.

If you have any crazy questions about IMAX cameras, post em in the comments. I'll beg Mike Hendriks to show up and answer a few. If not, I'll forward them on through email.

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Earlier this month, I stepped off a plane in Toronto, Canada, to make my way to a large suburban sprawl outside of the city called Mississauga. I was on my way to IMAX's production headquarters, where they do everything from upscaling 35mm movies like Star Trek for IMAX release to meticulously rebuilding IMAX cameras, one part at a time.

So why did I take this trip?

Atonement. After a century of refining motion picture techniques—alchemists perfecting ink-stamped celluloid, stunt coordinators and CG artists bending believability and producers raising enough capital for their projects that they could instead fund small armies—we spat in the industry's face. We told them we didn't care about their perfectionist principles, the quest for the perfect close-up or explosion or landscape. And we adopted VHS, YouTube…even jiggly handheld pirated DivX bookended by some lame pirate's splash screen.

For all the flaws in the Hollywood system, they figured out how to give us the biggest, most beautiful pictures that money and ingenuity can render. We figured out how to compress this image to fit in a small space to play on a small screen.

While consumers scraped the barrel and Hollywood fell into a comfortable (but effective) rhythm with their 35mm industry standard, a big fat dark horse approached documentary filmmakers, museums and planetariums. It was a flavor of 70mm film called IMAX. And for the last 40 years, the format has survived despite being expensive, proprietary and ridiculously difficult to share with the public.

IMAX is the anti-YouTube, a quality-obsessed celebration of overstimulation. The screen is too big, the speakers are too loud. Yet in 2009, it's the quintessential antibody to all those viral videos that fill our days, rotting our taste. That's why it survived—it had the guts to stake its turf knowing that it could continually wow an audience.

We saw it in the '80s in outer space, in the '90s with Everest and maybe a Rolling Stones concert, and later still, deep under the sea, with monsters in 3D. Then, last year, for 20 glorious minutes of the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan captured cityscapes in a way never before seen on film, a move that drove the public to buy $64.8 million in Dark Knight IMAX tickets alone.

IMAX continues to send cameras into remote locales on earth and up into orbit, where they just captured the Hubble repair in 3D. But they've also grown more aggressive at convincing Hollywood of their importance, upscaling 35mm films like Star Trek, and signing James Cameron's upcoming film Avatar for a purported 3-month run.

The typical standalone IMAX screen spans nearly 4,000 square feet while the largest have reached triple that figure. The IMAX film frame itself is nine times larger than Academy 35mm, equating a digital resolution of about 18K. (You've never heard of 18K? After 1080P comes 2K, then 4K...you can figure out the rest from there.)

And we haven't even approached the subject of sound—6 channels of uncompressed audio, none of that Dolby Digital compressed crap you get on DVDs—or what the implications of this setup are for 3D (quite simple, bigger images can get closer to your face on a bigger screen that takes up more of your range of view).

Even the modified IMAX-branded multiplex theaters we discussed last week get the benefit of a larger picture and better sound, and a guaranteed quality movie-going experience, even though it's not the same as the one you get in a freestanding IMAX.

So just what is IMAX? Is it film? Is it theaters? Is it a bold logo? A corporate spokesperson said: "IMAX takes you to places that you normally can't go. We do that by the quality of the image and the quality of the sound and the relationship between the audience and the screen...It's that perfect quality combined with our theater geometry that removes the clues that you are watching a movie."

Our definition is a bit different. IMAX is a proprietary combination of filming, post processing and upscaling, and theater tech—some digital, some film. We've already given you the background on IMAX theaters and digital projection—the in-seat experience, so to speak. Now the mission is to fill in the rest: Where does this experience come from? The answer involves huge film, gloriously complicated cameras, meticulous post-processing techniques—the science of making your jaw agape.

If you think Lawrence of Arabia looks just as good on your iPhone as it does on a 70mm print, stop reading now. This article, and the rest of this visit, weren't intended for you. But if you routinely pay too much to see a movie in a theater because you find the experience unmatched by streaming HD, fancy plasmas and even Blu-ray, then you'll appreciate our attempts to offer you the biggest, loudest glimpse into IMAX technologies that we know how.

Maybe Wally Pfister, the DP on The Dark Knight said it best when describing IMAX to Wired: "It's more of a visceral thing," he said. "You can see something way off on the horizon…a little glint of light, a reflection in Batman's eye."

Gizmodo Goes to IMAX is about celebrating that reflection. It's film's last stand in a digital world. And IMAX is putting up a serious fight.

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Did you guess IMAX technical headquarters in Canada? No? OK, well just so you know, that's where I went. I spent a very long and wonderful day poking at priceless cameras, studying proprietary post processing techniques and, generally, doing my best to kill any and all corporate efficiency. The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.(Note: I understand that my lens distorted the gigantor lens in the least impressive way. Just take another look at that lens cap!)

Read more from Gizmodo Goes to IMAX

The Biggest Lens Cap I'd Ever Seen Reveals an Exciting Secret
Our kick-off post about a really big lens cap

Why We Need IMAX: A Pilgrimage to the Mothership
Some people visit Israel. We took a trip to Mississauga.

Cineplexes Getting IMAX, But Is It IMAX or CONSPIRACY?
A scientific look at the controversial, smaller cineplex IMAX screen

A Rare Tour of IMAX Cameras
There are 26 IMAX cameras in the world. Here are four of them.

How Regular Movies Become "IMAX" Films
Wait...Star Trek wasn't shot in IMAX. So how is playing in IMAX?

Filming Hubble Repair Practice, Underwater
Astronauts get no privacy.

Just last night, comedian Aziz Ansari (from Parks and Recreation) published this piece describing the conspiracy of paying an extra $5 to see an "IMAX" movie that really wasn't much bigger than a normal screen.

I actually visited IMAX HQ a few weeks back, and a major point of discussion was the retrofitting process so lovingly described by Aziz. Basically, IMAX used to build their own massive theaters in their own buildings. But now, in order to expand, the company has made a deals with major theater chains like AMC in which they'll provide and install their proprietary mix of projectors, screens, speakers and hardware if the theater will foot the bill for the necessary structural renovations.

This plan, for better or worse, is IMAX's only current design for expansion in the US.
This conversion process, which has a patented geometry, includes installing a screen that's only slightly bigger (as little as 10 feet wider than before), but this screen is coupled with the removal of several rows of seats which allows it to be scooted roughly 30 feet closer to the audience, creating a sort of sitting too close the TV effect with a screen that, I was told, is perceived as 75 feet wider than before.

When the process was described to me, I thought it all sounded a bit hokey. But walking into IMAX's test multiplex, an otherwise typical AMC located in a Canada, I was shown a side-by-side of the same theater before and after the retrofitting process.

I will say, the new screen looked much bigger and far more imposing—"night and day" would make for a fair analogy. My mind wasn't mentally prepped for such a tangible difference, though I'd agree that it still fell short of, say, the unbelievable, multi-story beast of a screen that I watched Star Trek on several days later at a classic, standalone IMAX.

But the change I didn't expect (and I can't pretend to have perceived this tidbit up on my own) was a remarkable difference from acoustic paneling. Clapping in the original theater revealed a very live environment with a frightening amount of echo. The retrofit, however, absorbed the sound in a pleasant way, reminiscent of more than one acoustically-planned stage I performed on back in my band days.

There are other improvements as well, including a specifically non-THX-certified sound system, reaching up to 14,000W, that offers 117db of uncompressed digital sound without distortion. Engineers claimed that in a normal theater, the sweet spot for audio is in the dead center, and technicians make no effort to tend to those sitting in the back. Meanwhile, IMAX's system promised the same surround experience anywhere in the theater.

I tested that theory during a screening of some Rolling Stones at the Max footage by moving from the center of the theater to the back right corner. And there's absolutely no doubt, I lost a good deal of the side channels while the rear channel (in this case, it was the lead guitar, I believe), dominated the audio spectrum. I wouldn't have expected IMAX to have achieved the impossible unless, you know, they claimed that they had.
The other chief part of this retrofitting process is the new digital IMAX projector. Since its debut in the 70s, the Xenon-lamp-powered projector has stayed mostly unchanged. But with film prints reaching around $40,000 apiece, IMAX has embraced the digital revolution in their theaters (the cameras are still film with no plans mentioned to change that).
With the digital installations, films arrive on a standard hard drive, encrypted with DRM provisions that state just when a theater is authorized to play a film…errr…video.
Their projector is actually two, 2K Christie projectors that spit out the same image at the same time. A camera is positioned in between the projector lenses, tracking screen brightness in real time. An integrated server aggregates this and other data, adjusting both projectors for thermal shift, making sure the images don't change as they play. There are also a slew of other, top secret proprietary imaging adjustments going on at all times.

I know what you're thinking: Why didn't IMAX just use a 4K projector and save the hassle, especially with AMC announcing that all of their theaters would be equipped with 4K Sony projectors by 2012? IMAX does believe their projector offers a sub-pixel accuracy that, when combined with some extra imaging processing, looks better than Sony's 4K.

You can see imperfections in their digital projection system just like any digital system. The screen door effect, while minimized, can be noticed in bright spots of the image—if you're looking as closely and skeptically as I was. And you only need to move back in the theater to realize that the picture does appear sharper as you step away from the screen. In other words, it's not hitting some theoretical maximum perceived resolution…or even the best of what IMAX film can show. (As IMAX archives their own film into 8K and 12K prints, you can assume that the company feels the resolution of their product is much higher that their digital projectors may show).

The good news is that IMAX's digital projection system is "projector agnostic," meaning if a more suitable base projector comes around (be it 2K, 4K or higher), the realtime syncing and adjustment system can scale accordingly. In other words, when every AMC is stocked with 4K projectors in a few years, hopefully IMAX will be upping the ante as necessary by dual wielding 4K+ projectors instead.

So is this new IMAX, with smaller screens, with digital projection, still IMAX? Honestly, there are probably only a small handful of technicians—who aren't exactly sharing proprietary knowledge and decisions—capable of answering that question with complete scientific earnestness. To my eyes and my gut, it's more IMAX Lite or Normal Theater Enhanced—which makes sense, given that IMAX film has been estimated at a theoretical 18K resolution.

Is a retrofitted theater worth your extra $5? For the movies most likely to make it to the screen (big budget action), I think so...though maybe not for a family of four.

The price probably shouldn't be the same as a standalone IMAX theater, but I think that the point Ansari misses is that cineplexes are already benefiting from a pricing structure that makes viewers pay the same amount no matter what screen they see a movie on (how many times do beautiful art films get shunned to a broom closet of a theater while summer blockbusters are played on a plex's largest screen?). At minimum, the $5 IMAX premium ensures you see a movie on a screen that's better than the best AMC or whoever has in their building.

Personally, I hate to know that we will probably never see another 12,700sqft foot IMAX screen built (like that found in Mumbai), and that 70mm film projection is being traded for digital before digital is undeniable image perfection. But if the compromise is that more people will be seeing movies in theaters with bigger pictures and tighter quality control, then maybe it's a compromise worth making.

Look for lots more on our IMAX visit in the coming weeks.