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IMAX
IMAX is a proprietary system of high-resolution cameras, film formats, film projectors, and theaters originally known for having very large screens with a tall aspect ratio (about 1.43:1) and steep stadium seating. More recently the aspect ratio has mostly become 1.90:1 (slightly wider than the 35 mm American and British widescreen standard for theatrical film of 1.85:1), with the 1.43:1 ratio format being available only in selected locations.
Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw were the co-founders of what would be named the IMAX Corporation (founded in September 1967 as Multiscreen Corporation, Ltd.), and they developed the first IMAX theatre projection standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada.
IMAX GT is the premium large format. The digital format uses dual laser projectors, which can show 1.43 digital content when combined with a 1.43 screen. The film format uses very large screens of 18 by 24 metres (59 by 79 feet) and, unlike most conventional film projectors, the film runs horizontally so that the image width can be greater than the width of the film stock. It is called the 15/70 format. They can be purpose-built theaters and dome theaters, and many installations of this type limit themselves to a projection of high quality, short documentaries.
The dedicated buildings and projectors required high construction and maintenance costs, necessitating several compromises in the following years. To reduce costs, the IMAX SR and MPX systems were introduced in 1998 and 2004, respectively, to make IMAX available to multiplex and existing theaters. The SR system featured slightly smaller screens than GT theatres, though still in purpose-built auditoriums with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio. The MPX projectors were solely used to retrofit existing multiplex auditoriums, losing much of the quality of the GT experience.
Later came the introduction of the IMAX Digital 2K and IMAX with Laser 4K in 2008 and 2014, still limited in respect to the 70 megapixels of equivalent resolution of the original 15/70 film. Both technologies are purely digital and suitable to retrofit existing theaters. Since 2018, the Laser system has been employed to retrofit full dome installations, with limited results due to the large area of a dome screen.
The single-projector/single-camera system they eventually settled upon was designed and built by Shaw based upon a novel "Rolling Loop" film-transport technology purchased from Peter Ronald Wright Jones, a machine shop worker from Brisbane, Australia. Film projectors do not continuously flow the film in front of the bulb, but instead "stutter" the film travel so that each frame can be illuminated in a momentarily-paused still image. This requires a mechanical apparatus to buffer the jerky travel of the film strip. The older technology of running 70 mm film vertically through the projector used only five sprocket perforations on the sides of each frame; however, the IMAX method used fifteen perforations per frame. The previous mechanism was inadequate to handle this intermittent mechanical movement that was three times longer, and so Jones's invention was necessary for the novel IMAX projector method with its horizontal film feed. As it became clear that a single, large-screen image had more impact than multiple smaller ones and was a more viable product direction, Multiscreen changed its name to IMAX. Co-founder Graeme Ferguson explained how the name IMAX originated:
... the incorporation date [of the company was] September 1967. ... [The name change] came a year or two later. We first called the company Multiscreen Corporation because that, in fact, was what people knew us as. ... After about a year, our attorney informed us that we could never copyright or trademark Multivision. It was too generic. It was a descriptive word. The words that you can copyright are words like Kleenex or Xerox or Coca-Cola. If the name is descriptive, you can't trademark it so you have to make up a word. So we were sitting at lunch one day in a Hungarian restaurant in Montreal and we worked out a name on a placemat on which we wrote all the possible names we could think of. We kept working with the idea of the maximum image. We turned it around and came up with IMAX.
The name change actually happened more than two years later, because a key patent filed on January 16, 1970, was assigned under the original name Multiscreen Corporation, Limited. IMAX Chief Administration Officer Mary Ruby was quoted as saying, "Although many people may think 'IMAX' is an acronym, it is, in fact, a made-up word."
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IMAX
IMAX is a proprietary system of high-resolution cameras, film formats, film projectors, and theaters originally known for having very large screens with a tall aspect ratio (about 1.43:1) and steep stadium seating. More recently the aspect ratio has mostly become 1.90:1 (slightly wider than the 35 mm American and British widescreen standard for theatrical film of 1.85:1), with the 1.43:1 ratio format being available only in selected locations.
Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw were the co-founders of what would be named the IMAX Corporation (founded in September 1967 as Multiscreen Corporation, Ltd.), and they developed the first IMAX theatre projection standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada.
IMAX GT is the premium large format. The digital format uses dual laser projectors, which can show 1.43 digital content when combined with a 1.43 screen. The film format uses very large screens of 18 by 24 metres (59 by 79 feet) and, unlike most conventional film projectors, the film runs horizontally so that the image width can be greater than the width of the film stock. It is called the 15/70 format. They can be purpose-built theaters and dome theaters, and many installations of this type limit themselves to a projection of high quality, short documentaries.
The dedicated buildings and projectors required high construction and maintenance costs, necessitating several compromises in the following years. To reduce costs, the IMAX SR and MPX systems were introduced in 1998 and 2004, respectively, to make IMAX available to multiplex and existing theaters. The SR system featured slightly smaller screens than GT theatres, though still in purpose-built auditoriums with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio. The MPX projectors were solely used to retrofit existing multiplex auditoriums, losing much of the quality of the GT experience.
Later came the introduction of the IMAX Digital 2K and IMAX with Laser 4K in 2008 and 2014, still limited in respect to the 70 megapixels of equivalent resolution of the original 15/70 film. Both technologies are purely digital and suitable to retrofit existing theaters. Since 2018, the Laser system has been employed to retrofit full dome installations, with limited results due to the large area of a dome screen.
The single-projector/single-camera system they eventually settled upon was designed and built by Shaw based upon a novel "Rolling Loop" film-transport technology purchased from Peter Ronald Wright Jones, a machine shop worker from Brisbane, Australia. Film projectors do not continuously flow the film in front of the bulb, but instead "stutter" the film travel so that each frame can be illuminated in a momentarily-paused still image. This requires a mechanical apparatus to buffer the jerky travel of the film strip. The older technology of running 70 mm film vertically through the projector used only five sprocket perforations on the sides of each frame; however, the IMAX method used fifteen perforations per frame. The previous mechanism was inadequate to handle this intermittent mechanical movement that was three times longer, and so Jones's invention was necessary for the novel IMAX projector method with its horizontal film feed. As it became clear that a single, large-screen image had more impact than multiple smaller ones and was a more viable product direction, Multiscreen changed its name to IMAX. Co-founder Graeme Ferguson explained how the name IMAX originated:
... the incorporation date [of the company was] September 1967. ... [The name change] came a year or two later. We first called the company Multiscreen Corporation because that, in fact, was what people knew us as. ... After about a year, our attorney informed us that we could never copyright or trademark Multivision. It was too generic. It was a descriptive word. The words that you can copyright are words like Kleenex or Xerox or Coca-Cola. If the name is descriptive, you can't trademark it so you have to make up a word. So we were sitting at lunch one day in a Hungarian restaurant in Montreal and we worked out a name on a placemat on which we wrote all the possible names we could think of. We kept working with the idea of the maximum image. We turned it around and came up with IMAX.
The name change actually happened more than two years later, because a key patent filed on January 16, 1970, was assigned under the original name Multiscreen Corporation, Limited. IMAX Chief Administration Officer Mary Ruby was quoted as saying, "Although many people may think 'IMAX' is an acronym, it is, in fact, a made-up word."