Word on the street is that the older 70mm film format for movies is superior to the 35mm; Ebert mentions the larger format as one of the reasons “Lawrence of Arabia” was so incredible.
Yet it has disappeared – why did the studios drop the 70mm format if it provides a better quality picture? I know to save money was a key concern, but hasn’t the trend of movies been to increase features in order to compete with home video? 3d, bigger budgets, IMAX, stadium seating, etc. Why cheap out on the film?
You have to get 70mm cameras. You have to get 70mm film. It’s already unusual, and you’ll need twice the length for a given amount of time. Then your distributor needs miles of the stuff to make 70mm prints to send to everyone. Finally, you have to convince enough movie theaters to buy 70mm projectors. And forget those convenient 35mm platter systems – an assembled two-hour movie on 35mm can fit on a platter reel a few feet across. A 70mm film requires a projectionist to manually change reels between two projectors. What is this, the dark ages?
Given that everything in the industry has been standardized on 35mm formats for many decades, there simply wasn’t enough return on investment to make 70mm worthwhile for ordinary releases, or even the occasional blockbuster.
It wouldn’t just be that the film is more expensive, but all the equipment using it would be too. I’m not a cinematographer, but I’d guess that a 70mm camera costs about 4 times as much as a 35mm camera, and you’d have to have special processing equipment and more expensive projectors too – in every cinema showing those movies. So they judged that the extra quality wasn’t worth the extra cost.
70 mm film (actually 65 mm in the camera) is great for projection – if you have a big screen. I can’t remember the last time I was at a cinema with a big enough screen for 70 mm to really make a difference. (Ironically, there’s a Cinerama theatre literally just around the corner from my office.) I think with the advent of multiplexes screens have shrunk to the point where you could almost show 16 mm and no one would notice. And I’d guess that more movies are seen on DVD than on the big screen. No need for 70 mm there.
In order to make a 70 mm film, you need a 70 mm camera. You can buy a 35 mm camera for between $10,000 for a '70s-vintage Arriflex BL1 to a quarter-million dollars or so for the latest and greatest. There are tons of them out there. 70 mm, not so much. They’re more expensive and not as easy to come by. (Incidentally, Panavision only rents their cameras and lenses.) The film stock is more expensive than 35 mm, as is processing and printing. Then you have to have a theatre that can project it. Most can’t.
So basically, 70 mm is a ‘specialty’ format. It’s what you want if you want to make a film specifically for IMAX, but not if you want wide distribution.
EDIT: I’ve got to type faster.
One other factor is that it’s physically more difficult to film in 70 mm. You need better and different lighting conditions, and you have to relearn how to shoot everything. This affects everything else from makeup to sound.
And how much difference does it actually make in the long run? Have you gone to a movie recently and thought about how awful the picture quality was? 35 mm movies are excellent already. In addition, even at the time people made fun of wide-screen movies because to get the full effect scenes had to be shot panoramically. So you had “intimate” scenes with people standing at opposite ends of a field.
Yet another problem is that these movies look terrible on television, even the newer wider screens. To get the whole picture on screen you need to shrink it down and leave bands on the top and bottom, which most people hate. So you hurt the entire aftermarket of DVD, pay-per-view, and cable, the very things that are carrying the industry.
If you want wide screens and 65 mm film, go to IMax. But you can’t do the entire industry that way. It’s not the format for a small love story.
The industry can handle only one innovation at a time. The current one is digital, and that’s already so expensive and difficult a conversion that it’s taking years. There’s no purpose behind wide-screen that would give it an advantage.
I’m not sure what you mean by widescreen, Expano. Matted 35mm presentations are already widescreen (about 1.85:1 aspect) and if you use an anamorphic lens you get up to 2.35:1, which is still wider than a widescreen TV.
These formats present all the same aspect ratio problems for distribution on DVD and television.
Lawrence, FWIW was filmed in the Super Panavision 70 format, with an aspect ratio of 2.2:1, actually slightly narrower than today’s 35mm anamorphic prints.
Well, that’s comparing digital CCD sensors, not film formats. A more apt comparison would be between a 35mm SLR and a medium format one that shoots on 120 or 220 film (both are about 60mm wide.)
You can get a good 35mm film SLR including a natural lens for $300. My favorite medium format camera, the Mamiya 645, costs around $4000 new just for the body.
Yes, I should have said “at least four times”. Partly it’s a matter of economy of scale of production. If the camera manufacturer is going to sell about 100 of a camera, then the development costs per camera will be a lot more than if it’s going to sell 10,000 of a camera; and 70mm cameras and projectors are always going to be a small niche market.
There comes a trade off for everything. For instance, HDTV is widely advertised, but what use is it? I mean is Seinfeld any funnier if you can see Jerry’s pores? Is the news reporting any better? On a screen less than 30" HDTV isn’t even perceptable to people.
Consumer Reports long has reported consumers fail tests trying to even identifying HDTV, yet they’ll pay through the nose to get one, 'cause they THINK it’s better.
Also the clearer things are the harder it is. For standard TV it was quite easy to take fake plastic and make it look like real wood. But with HDTV this is impossible. You HAVE to use much better quality on the sets. That costs money.
Cell phones aren’t as clear as landlines. mp3s aren’t as clear as CDs but in both cases the difference isn’t great enough to offset the convenience of cell phones and mp3.
OTOH, sports are much better in HD. Auto racing, in particular, at displaying the glowing brake rotors and track debris and tire selection, etc.
Gaming is better in HD, everything is more crisp and clear.
I find even watching Lost or Supernatural or other weeklies more enjoyable in HD. I have a larger screen, which makes it easier to tell the difference, but there difference is there and it’s big. Like moving from a VHS tape to a DVD. Except more.
In my theater, we had all of the trimmings needed to change our largest theater over to 70mm, stashed in the back of some dusty cabinet. That included stuff like the double-wide gate, the different lenses, a fancy looking lens that went between the lamp house and the projector, and … a 70mm “brain” for the platters as well as 70mm pulleys. We had everything needed to change our Christie 35mm platter system over to 70mm.
I can’t say for certainty that the film would have run exactly the same from the platter, since in my tenure at that theater we never ran a 70mm film. Always wanted to run one though.
We even had the right sized splicer and other hardware needed for it, 70mm film cleaner device, 70mm reels, etc.
Unless the actual film was thicker, you could certainly wind ~2h of film on the same platter.
A datapoint on media cost: when I was in this field, 20 years ago, a 35mm print cost ~$2k, while a 70mm print cost ~$10k.
Cool beans. I’ve never seen a 70mm platter system.
Given that a frame of 70mm film is twice as long as a 35mm one, wouldn’t it take twice the length of film for a given amount of time? On 35mm, 1000 feet is about 11 minutes. So it seems to me that 11 minutes of 70mm film would be 2000 feet at least.
Not sure what the “standard” would be for 70mm. A quick search shows anything from 5 perferations/frame to 15p/frame. The former gives a short fat frame, kind of the opposite of 35mm 'Scope tall-skinny images. The latter is for Imax projectors.
If it’s 5p/frame, that’s 1 more than standard 35mm at 4p/frame. That would mean 5/4 of the length.
I never had a film so long that it was in danger of reaching the edge of a platter, and we showed a few films in the 2.5H length. So if the format is the 5p/frame version, it would likely fit on one platter.
Like you, I have always assumed that the standard was 8p/frame, (and I hadn’t considered that in my first post).
If this is the case, then there would be twice as much film length, and projection would be an interesting experience. There would have to be two of three platters always loaded with film, with the projectionist always hopping in at the middle of the movie to rethread. How un-smooth.
I doubt any modern multiplex would have two projectors for one theater, so it would have to be a brief intermission.
It wouldn’t need to be a long break, though. In my prime, I could splice a broken film, rethread, and restart the projector in < 30 seconds.
Standard 70 mm film is about twice as wide as 35 mm, but only about a third taller, so the same number of minutes of film isn’t twice as long, it’s only about 30% longer.
Wiki shows the following:
35 mm film:
16 frames per foot (0.748 in (19 mm) per frame (long pitch))
1,000 feet (300 m) is about 11 minutes
75 mm (65 in camera) film
12.8 frames per foot
1000 feet is about 9 minutes
I’ve seen a number of projectors that were dual 35/70mm equipped. They were running 35mm at the time, but all the sprockets and rollers and such had teeth/surfaces for both film types. Such a projector is obviously going to be more expensive to buy, but once you’ve got one, the ongoing cost would be similar.
Most feature films don’t come close to filling a platter in 35mm. I reckon that you’d fit at least two hours worth of 70mm on one. To state the obvious, the loop of film gets longer towards the outer edge of the plate. I don’t think the platter system is automatically a write off for 70mm.
Even assuming side by side projectors with change overs, you can use larger reels to minimise the activity required. The actual change over from one machine to the other can be automated so that the projectionist need not be present. They only have to come along at some point to change the reel and re-thread the machine. Admittedly, almost all cinemas built in the last 20 years or so will only have one projector per screen. (I did some work experience in high school at a local cinema. They had three screens, two with platters, but he largest of the auditoriums ran two machines on change over. The movie Beachescringe fit on three larger 35mm reels, so there were two changes per session. By the end of the week I was threading up, cueing the automation to start the show, changing and rewinding {a hassle with reels that you don’t have with platters} the reels. I still had plenty of time for other work.)
Apparently the worst aspect of 70mm operation, for the projectionist at least, is the noise. That big film makes quite a racket as it gets ratcheted through the gate.