How are movies produced on film e.g. 70mm tape stitched together and synced with the audio?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.