Isn’t there any way to make them smaller? They’ve been around forever at this point? Is there something about the way they work that requires the camera and reel being huge?
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For the 70mm IMAX format, each frame on the film is 2.74″ x1.913″. (A little over 2.5 times the area of the more conventional film formats).
That, times 24 frames per second for 3 hours is about a quarter million frames that size, which takes up a lot of physical space.
Because the film is bigger. Bigger film, more quality. There isn’t such a thing as a smaller film that retains the same quality when it comes to printed media. The medium is the limiting factor.
IMAX film is the size that it is. If you change the size of the film, it’s not IMAX anymore. So there’s just the physical limitation of the film itself that can’t be changed.
If you make the reel itself smaller, you’re getting less film per reel, and a certain point, the reel will become too small to hold all the film necessary. IMAX projectors necessarily use only 1 reel, they don’t switch like old 35mm projectors that have multiple reels.
So you can’t make the film smaller and you can’t split the reel into multiple smaller reels, meaning there’s just no way to reduce the size at all.
IMAX is IMAX, if they innovated the technology it wouldn’t be IMAX anymore, it’s be renamed to something like “IMAX+” or something
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