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The extra pixels on the Arri Alexa 65 sensor work as "bleed" to guarantee full coverage of any 5/65mm cinema camera lens, be it a vintage Super Panavision 70 system lens, a lens for the Arri 765 or one of the new lenses made specifically for the Alexa 65. If you take the size of a 5/65mm film frame it will fit slightly inside the size of the Alexa 65 sensor with a tiny yet even amount of room to spare on all four sides of the frame. That's how you end up with a 2.11 "open gate" aspect ratio for the Alexa 65 sensor.
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According to the Panavision format chart, 65mm film has an native aperture of 52.63 x 23.01 mm, that equals an AR of 2.28.
Their sensor has a size of 54.12 x 25.58 mm. So, that's 1.49 mm of combined bleed (left and right) horizontally and 2.57 mm of combined bleed (top and bottom) vertically. So, there is more vertical "wiggle room" than horizontal "wiggle room". The AR of the actual sensor still doesn't really make any sense to me, simply based on the idea of compensating for overshooting optics, but ARRI surely had some reason to come up with this particular aspect ratio...
Edit: Anamorphic lenses will have the tendency to "overshoot" horizontally, which would make some sense to have more spare room horizontally, but alas, that's not the case either.Last edited by Marcel Birgelen; 12-20-2020, 04:10 PM.Comment
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Just looked at Another Round. Scope 2.0. So, because we have to mask down for scope, we end up with an even smaller picture.
I don't know if it was the Samuel Goldwyn company or the fun loving loons at Zentropa who decided to put a 2.0 picture in a scope container, but it really is annoying.Comment
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Anamorphic or spherical lenses are not going to project any larger circle of light than the prime lens in the system can do. And the anamorphic elements are always in front of the prime. So what ever the anamorphic may be able to do, it going to get chopped off by the prime.,Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen View PostComment
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That's true, but we don't know how much the prime lens "overshoots" the sensor already. ARRI probably has their reasons for their design choices, but they exceed my limited logic on this topic.Comment
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This was a really cool show, James Bond helped run the show here in Austin and may have also helped source or supply the projectors - pretty much just a 35mm head turned 90-degrees with some other custom pieces for the payout & takeup - the thing I remember most is that he used these really unique blue lenses that were some of the best I've ever seen, I believe they may have been ISCOOriginally posted by Sascha Roll View PostComment
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Apparently, in China it's pretty common to shoot commercials in 9:16 AR (as in vertically oriented) nowadays, as their primary target is distribution on stuff like WeChat and TikTok...
It left me wonder how long it will take until the first Chinese will start to rotate their TVs 90 degrees and when the first big budget release, entirely filmed on mobile phones will be released (maybe it already was and I just missed it). If this becomes a trend, then what's next? Cinemas with their screens mounted vertically?Comment
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That would offer ways to increase auditorium numbers even more. Divide the auditoriums vertically. You could easily make three vertical screens from a single horizontal one. 4 from a scope screen.Comment
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Ha. Reminded me of the original Star computer systems that Xerox was developing in the early 1980s. This was the very same system that Steve Job saw which enamored him with the graphical user interface. Yeah, I used a mouse and clicked on icons with Xerox long before Apple or Windows had such things. We had turned the standard CRT 90 degrees to the vertical orientation to better fit the letter size document. Um, was like CGA quality though. I was more impressed with the Tiki bar at the nearby marina. Go figure...Comment
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If I remember correctly that was the Xerox Alto. Actually, for stuff like word processing and publishing software a portrait-mode screen would've made sense as both the Letter and A4 format are in a portrait aspect ratio. I've used a 16:10 screen in portrait mode for e-mails for several years. I turned it around 90 degrees, because that was the only way it could fit on my desktop and I kind of liked it, until Outlook started to mess around with their layout.
Didn't the Germans come up with a word for this kind of cinema? Schachtelkino? A term from the 1970s, when every "viable" room inside existing cinema complexes was turned into a "theater". Maybe we can give this the distinctive name "Vertikalschachtelkino"...Originally posted by Carsten Kurz View Post
Edit: I found one of those Chinese advertisements, starring a pretty familiar face (apparently, the Chinese call those people "white monkeys"):
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It's beyond me why they mess with the format? Clearly the decision makers are oblivious to the impact. I have heard it said that "There is one thing nice about Standards... There are so many to choose from."
Um... I think "Star" might have been the internal Xerox code name for that project. It is all very fuzzy now. And... I hate the inability to edit when you discover too late that you've made a typo. Apologies to Steve Jobs who likely at the moment no longer cares.
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This industry always had new formats coming and going 2:1 was the original SuperScope format from RKO that got adapted later to 2.35 With the advent of magopt Cinemascope went from a ~2.6:1 to 2.35 with the safe area of the projector plate changing several timesComment
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It's targeted at the millions of Chinese that watch movies on their smartphones and share this stuff via WeChat and TikTok... Most people nowadays don't experience the Internet via normal browsers on normal screens, but exclusively via their smart phone. Many Chinese probably don't even own a traditional computer...Originally posted by Bruce Cloutier View Post
The Star was an actual workstation you could buy, which they released in the mid 80s. I still remember the distinctive user interface, which also appeared on the control terminals of their digital printing presses until the late 1990s. But it was the Alto, which was a product of the 1970s, which BOTH Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had seen, which inspired Jobs to create both the Lisa and the Mac...Originally posted by Bruce Cloutier View Post
When Jobs confronted Gates about stealing his ideas, Gates famously answered: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
For some throwback history about the creation of the Mac, if you didn't know it already, check out Folklore.org... it really is a virtual page-turner, at least for me it was.Comment
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Just finished showing Limbo, which is in 1.37, except for the last 5 minutes or so (10 if you count the credits) which are in 1.85. I was packing up the drive to return when I saw the info sheet that has a notice to theatres with adjustable masking to leave the masking in full 1.85 (and use the regular flat channel, presumably) so as to accommodate the final scene.
I know I am shouting in the darkness here, but NO. I know there are very few theatres out there who have adjustable masking and will even give a rat's ass about the aspect ratio, but we got the masking and I showed it in actual 1.37 with proper masking. The movie is beautifully composed and framed. Having dead space on either side of the picture would be a major distraction. It would have been nice to make a seamless switch to 1.85 for the end, but I didn't read the info sheet before I made up the film.
I don't know if this was the filmmaker's instructions or the studio's, but it is just wrong.
And have another 1.37 movie (The Killing of Two Lovers) starting Friday.Comment
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Here is a recent theatre we did and they have 2-way masking (top/bottom as well as sides)...so how is that supposed to work for them? Show 4x3 small? Crop 4x3? Do an ugly lens zoom/screen file change mid-movie? Dumb. As it is, we went out of our way to keep Left/Right speakers unobstructed (and it is acoustically transparent masking) but 4x3 was rationalized to have the least chance of a stereo track of the other possibilities. The masking cord (it is supported top and bottom) is just past the center of the horn for 4x3 but not by much. All other supported formats have no horn obstruction.
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