How will you know which ones are shot with the new IMAX camera?
Fastcompany.com says, “They’ll likely be the most vivid, most thrilling, most awesome 30 minutes of the movie.”
IMAX has been prototyping the camera about four years, and now, finally, it’s rolling it out at Hollywood scale. The camera itself–the company’s first digital offering–is a big step forward for IMAX. But bigger still is what it will mean for consumers: more movies with better image quality, and a whole new reason to go to the movie theater.
Shooting in 3D only compounds a director’s problems. In that case, they’re dealing with two film reels, two lenses, and a gigantic camera housing. The IMAX 3D Film Camera weighs over 200 pounds, and is “difficult to get into tight spaces or swing on a crane,” says Murray. Doubling the amount of hardware also doubles the noise.
With the 3D Digital Camera, IMAX has solved all of these problems. Switching to digital dulls the camera noise to a subtle “whirrrr.” Engineers built a unique assembly that snaps both lenses onto the camera body at once, cutting the time typically needed to mount and align pairs of lenses for 3D shooting. And the image sensors, which are the same as those in the state-of-the-art high-speed Phantom camera from Vision Research, capture ultra-high-resolution 4K images–as close to the resolution of a piece of IMAX film as is currently possible.
Thanks to its unique build, the 3D Digital Camera weighs about 30 pounds, less than half the weight of any other digital 3D camera setup on the market. Cinematographers will be able to mount the camera on a crane or dolly and move it easily through scenes, squeeze it into tight spaces, and get much closer to the action than they could with a larger rig.
Read more at Fastcompany.com