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
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
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