I was watching Oppenheimer in London today and I thought the film was fabulous!
After watching the film, I decided to watch the Science Museum’s [guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XqqylBW7M) on how they prepare the 70mm film tape for production, where they sync the audio disc and the film together.
This got me thinking: during filming, they would have had separate reels of film which would need to have been cut/spliced and stitched together (just like in Premiere Pro or iMovie) before they exported the final tape drum to all the screening theatres across the world.
I was wondering how did the editing studios achieve this? Do they first convert the film to digital, do the edits in Premiere Pro / Final Cut Pro and then match the frames in the tape to the exported video or is there a different process involved?
Also, how do they print the tens or hundreds of film drums for distribution to the various showing theatres across the world. They obviously went to Los Alamos and came back with one film tape that they then had to work with in the editing suite. How did they then print it a hundred times over to the high quality they needed to make it before sending it out for viewing in all the cinemas across the world?
In: 28
Well, this isn’t limited to film, but have you ever seen the ‘clapboards’ that they close before shooting a scene? They usually a have scene #, take #, etc? Usually it’s the last thing they do before calling ACTION!
Well that clapboard serves a purpose! It’s the point that editors use to sync the audio and visual for each scene.
When film is edited, all of the raw footage is developed and edited in big bays, on big, purpose built tables that have reels and a monitor. Once the editor identifies the sync point, all of the edits after that point should be synced.
The editing process is far more complex than I’m hinting at here, because there are layers of audio and visual elements that are added. Conceptually, I hope this makes sense though.
So once an edit is done, there’s a ‘master’ that is then replicated by studios, where the audio tracks are embedded ON the film before distribution. Those copies are sent out to theatres and they’re installed on giant spinning platters in the theatre.
I hope this answers your question.
Yes, for the last (edit: more like 20 for feature films) years the “standard” way of handling film prints is to scan each frame into a computer, along with the recorded audio. Then you edit it all digitally, do color correction, add CGI or digital special effects, author the surround sound audio, etc. Then you take the final digital cut and make all your physical prints from that. Or, for theaters doing digital projection you convert it to whatever format they want to use and send it to them.
Edit: I was off on my dates, this wasn’t done for complete feature films until the 1990s and wouldn’t have been common for them until the 2000s. But things like commercials were being done like this as far back as the 1980s. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate
In a former life, I was a large format IMAX projectionist.
At the time, we also had 35 mm. The sound track was integrated into the 35 mm film as it ran through the projector. It was read and played.
With 15-70 mm film (IMAX), the massive audio files are uploaded to a 1990s palm pilot.
Frame one of film is synced up directly with the palm pilot that has a counter for each frame that physically goes through the projector.
So the short answer is for IMAX 15-70, the video in the audio are completely separate and are manually synced. If you’re out by even one frame, you will notice when watching the movie even though it’s 24 frames per second.
They ‘conform’ the film. So typically they scan the film digitally, then edit in software where they know exactly which frame (from each film reel that physically went through the camera) sits where in the edit. Then it’s collated on a film print where it can be optically printed to a positive film stock.
You couldn’t do this directly with the original camera negatives as they are negatives (you can’t project it because it’s an inverted, orange looking image).
This is the traditional way to do it, but it’s likely there was a digital intermediate (DI) where the image is scanned in high resolution and worked on before being printed to a positive film stock for the final print.
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