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?
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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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