Sunday, December 28, 2008

IMX/BLU-RAY BULLCRAP

Here’s a reality check for you dill-holes. Almost 100% of anything with Blu-ray and IMAX on it is utter bullcrap. They took your money and are now laughing at you, ass.
Think you’re hot-shit buying the Blu-ray version of all your old favorite movies? Wrong. Your poop is ice cold. Back when your old-ass’ favorite movies were coming out, cameras were recording at the quality of a retarded caveman drawing in the sand. So now it’ll look like a retarded caveman’s drawing in the sand in 1080p crystal clear quality. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Love Bug on Blu-ray weren't smart investments for you.
Even modern films aren’t much of an improvement. The next sentence is going to be full of funny sounding words and I’m sorry but I’m also going to have to lay some numerics on you. The following numbers are of modern state-of-the-art 35-mm film with processing, printing, and projection and are tested with Modulation Transfer Function (MTF), a test that evaluates the number of lines rather than the number of individual pixels. Simply said, large numbers are good.
HD/digital resolution has in theory 1080 visible lines. 35mm has 1400. These are perfect measurements in our imperfect world. The average theater-goer, you, only sees 750. And DVDs are 625. That means most people only see a small improvement over the theater’s quality compared to DVD’s quality. So there’s not too much of an difference for you to watch your favorite Michael Bay movie, Transformers, in the theater than at home on a crunchy old DVD player. The upper bound of people, who you think you are but aren’t, can see up to 875 lines. Still not much better.
“But Pariahpism, DVD movies don’t fit my new 65-inch HDTV screen like it should.” you grumble out your troglodytic mouth.
“Shut up”
Maybe you should price check an upscaling DVD player…or you should have before you dropped cash on your fancy Blu-Ray player when they first came out. Sure it’s not the leading edge of technology, but you save money and don’t look like a techno-elitist.
Of course not all movies are filmed on 35mm film to give these numbers. There are the rare few filmed on 70mm and they are definitely worth picking up on Blu-ray. (I personally recommend Baraka.)
IMAX is technically 70mm but here’s the problem with IMAX. If you’re not totally blown away, it wasn’t really IMAX. If you spent a minute wondering if it was, then it wasn’t. To get an idea of how good it should have looked, imagine if you had seven, 10-megapixle cameras grouped into one giant image taking twenty-four pictures a second. Check this list of real IMAX theaters to see if you were tricked. You might have just seen a regular movie with a slightly larger screen and IMAX digital sound (same as any other but louder). And also there are only a few major release movies that are actually IMAX quality. Here’s a list of them.
2002
* Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones: The IMAX Experience (2002) - 6.8/10
* Beauty and the Beast: Re-Release (January 1, 2002) - 8.0/10
* Apollo 13: The IMAX Experience (September 12, 2002) - 7.5/10
* Santa vs. the Snowman 3D (November 1, 2002) - 6.8/10
* The Lion King: Re-Release (December 25, 2002) - 8.1/10
2003
* The Matrix Reloaded: The IMAX Experience (June 6, 2003) - 7.0/10
* The Matrix Revolutions: The IMAX Experience (November 5, 2003) - 6.4/10
2004
* Spider-Man 2: The IMAX Experience (July 23, 2004) - 7.7/10
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The IMAX Experience (June 4, 2004) - 7.7/10
* The Polar Express: The IMAX 3D Experience (November 10, 2004) - 6.7/10
2005
* Robots: The IMAX Experience (March 11, 2005) - 6.4/10
* Batman Begins: The IMAX Experience (June 15, 2005) - 8.4/10
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The IMAX Experience (July 15, 2005) - 7.2/10
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The IMAX Experience (November 18, 2005) - 7.7/10
2006
* V for Vendetta: The IMAX Experience (March 17, 2006) - 8.2/10
* Poseidon: The IMAX Experience (May 12, 2006) - 5.6/10
* Superman Returns: The IMAX 3D Experience (partial 3D) (June 28, 2006) - 6.7/10
* The Ant Bully: The IMAX 3D Experience (July 28, 2006) - 6.2/10
* Open Season: The IMAX 3D Experience (September 29, 2006) - 6.1/10
* Happy Feet: The IMAX Experience (November 17, 2006) - 6.7/10
* Night at the Museum: The IMAX Experience (December 22, 2006) - 6.4/10
2007
* 300: The IMAX Experience (March 9, 2007) - 7.9/10
* Spider-Man 3: The IMAX Experience (May 4, 2007) - 6.5/10
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The IMAX 3D Experience (July 11, 2007) - 7.4/10
* Transformers: The IMAX Experience (September 21, 2007) - 7.5/10
* Beowulf: The IMAX 3D Experience (November 16, 2007) - 6.7/10
* I Am Legend: The IMAX Experience (December 14, 2007) - 7.1/10
2008
* Speed Racer: The IMAX Experience (May 9, 2008) - 6.5/10
* Kung Fu Panda: The IMAX Experience (June 6, 2008) - 7.8/10
* The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience (July 18, 2008) - 9.0/10
* Eagle Eye: The IMAX Experience (September 26, 2008) - 6.8/10
* Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: The IMAX Experience (November 7, 2008) - 7.2/10
* The Day the Earth Stood Still: The IMAX Experience (December 12, 2008) - 5.8/10
The numbers to the right are the user-review numbers from IMDB I added to show most of these movies suck. Hard. Any of the animated movies in this list should be ignored because there was no IMAX camera used to make it the super-duper delicious resolution (about 10000 x 7000 pixels). Also most of the non animated movies used CGI to reach IMAX quality without the cameras or just later re-mastered (re-bastard) on 35mm film to fit the IMAX screens. Here’s the list again of the movies that weren’t animated, completely or partially, or wasn't filmed without IMAX cameras.
2008
The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience (July 18, 2008) - 9.0/10
So unless you saw a movie that was at one of the 280 world wide IMAX theaters and was the Dark Knight, you got ripped off. That’s too bad for you.

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