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The Master - 65mm Film and Aspect Ratio.


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Hey everyone, I was reading up on The Master and it was shot for the majority on 65mm, about 80% and the rest being shot on 35mm. It's distributed aspect ratio was 1.85, so that the 65mm would match the 35mm footage. I guess I just want to be confirmed on something. The aspect ratio of 65mm is about 2.20 if I am correct ? Does this mean that when the 65mm footage was cropped to 1.85 was it cropped on both the vertical and horizontal ?

 

Thanks everyone.

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There's no reason to crop the 65mm vertically, they just cropped the sides of the 65mm from 2.20 to 1.85. I saw it in 70mm and it was shown in 1.85, which made me wonder if they made contact prints (the 35mm footage being blown-up and cut into the 65mm negative) and if or how they got a 1.85 matte on the 70mm print. One website says that P.T. Anderson had new 1.85 projector gates cut to mask the image during 70mm projection.

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There's no reason to crop the 65mm vertically, they just cropped the sides of the 65mm from 2.20 to 1.85. I saw it in 70mm and it was shown in 1.85, which made me wonder if they made contact prints (the 35mm footage being blown-up and cut into the 65mm negative) and if or how they got a 1.85 matte on the 70mm print. One website says that P.T. Anderson had new 1.85 projector gates cut to mask the image during 70mm projection.

 

Right ok. So my next question would be, do you roughly know how much , in percentage, you are losing when you crop a 65mm to 1.85 ? Could it be argued if there is even a point in shooting in 65mm if it will be cropped to that ?

Edited by Eric Soto
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There's no reason to crop the 65mm vertically, they just cropped the sides of the 65mm from 2.20 to 1.85. I saw it in 70mm and it was shown in 1.85, which made me wonder if they made contact prints (the 35mm footage being blown-up and cut into the 65mm negative) and if or how they got a 1.85 matte on the 70mm print. One website says that P.T. Anderson had new 1.85 projector gates cut to mask the image during 70mm projection.

Burnt-in matte on a C-roll? We had it done on 16mm. years ago to get a 1.66 answer print, iirc it cost us an extra 6 pence per foot.

 

 

Right ok. So my next question would be, do you roughly know how much , in percentage, you are losing when you crop a 65mm to 1.85 ? Could it be argued if there is even a point in shooting in 65mm if it will be cropped to that ?

2.2 to 1.85 is just a matter of arithmetic. It's still a far bigger neg area than 35mm. and of course sharper than blowing up from 35.

 

Edited by Mark Dunn
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1.85 ÷ 2.20 = .84 -- so 1.85 is 84% of 2.20, meaning you'd lost 16% cropping 2.20 to 1.85 if my math is correct.

 

35mm 1.85 projection area is 20.96mm x 11.33mm = 237.48 sq. mm area

 

70mm 2.20 projection area is 48.56mm x 22.10mm, so again using some math, that would mean that a 1.85 area would be 40.86mm x 22.10mm = 903.01 sq. mm area.

 

Which works out that 1.85 70mm is 3.8X larger in area than 1.85 35mm. So that's a significant increase.

 

Also, cropping 2.20 70mm projection on the sides to 1.85 doesn't really create any loss of resolution since it's the same degree of enlargement on the screen, it's just that the sides are closer together -- grain and sharpness are the same just as if you shot a scene in 2.20 70mm and framed a shot between two black edges of a silhouette doorframe, for example -- you aren't "blowing up" the image at that point.

 

Billy Wilder once said something like "no one ever bought a ticket for a movie because it came in on budget" -- you could also say that few people will only see something shot on film only if it uses maximum negative area.

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1.85 ÷ 2.20 = .84 -- so 1.85 is 84% of 2.20, meaning you'd lost 16% cropping 2.20 to 1.85 if my math is correct.

 

35mm 1.85 projection area is 20.96mm x 11.33mm = 237.48 sq. mm area

 

70mm 2.20 projection area is 48.56mm x 22.10mm, so again using some math, that would mean that a 1.85 area would be 40.86mm x 22.10mm = 903.01 sq. mm area.

 

Which works out that 1.85 70mm is 3.8X larger in area than 1.85 35mm. So that's a significant increase.

 

Also, cropping 2.20 70mm projection on the sides to 1.85 doesn't really create any loss of resolution since it's the same degree of enlargement on the screen, it's just that the sides are closer together -- grain and sharpness are the same just as if you shot a scene in 2.20 70mm and framed a shot between two black edges of a silhouette doorframe, for example -- you aren't "blowing up" the image at that point.

 

Billy Wilder once said something like "no one ever bought a ticket for a movie because it came in on budget" -- you could also say that few people will only see something shot on film only if it uses maximum negative area.

Great. Thank you for the thorough reply.

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Funny enough, The Master prints have black bars on the sides, but didn't go through an optical process. Makes me wonder if Panavision modified the camera aperture pate.

 

This is a photo of the 65mm negative (from here), which shows it was exposed full width, with no in-camera matting.

 

Screen-shot-2012-05-16-at-12.01.04-PM.pn

Edited by Ravi Kiran
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Hey guys quick tangent while on the subject of 70mm. On a previous post I was told that using anamorphic lenses on open gate on a Alexa would be a waste of space on the sensor. Does this also apply to using anamorphic lenses on 65mm film ?

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Just think about it. 5-perf 65mm is one-perf taller than 4-perf 35mm anamorphic but twice as wide more or less.

 

IF you want a 2.40 : 1 image and your anamorphic lenses have a 2X horizontal squeeze, then you are using a 1.20 : 1 area of the negative to achieve your 2.40 : 1 image. Keep reminding yourself of this fact every time you think about 2X anamorphic photography.

 

This is the shape of a 1.20 : 1 area, whether or not it is on film or on a digital sensor, it's an aspect ratio:

2000px-Cinemascope_4_perf_35_mm_film.svg

 

If the 5-perf 65mm negative is 52.63 x 23.01mm then a 1.20 : 1 area is 27.61mm x 23.01mm -- that's almost cropping the negative in half horizontally.

 

To put it another way, the 5-perf 65mm negative is already nearly 2.40 : 1 at 2.20 : 1 with normal lenses so you don't need anamorphic lenses to achieve a 2.40 : 1 image.

 

And another way to look at it is that 4-perf 35mm is 17.5mm tall so you are basically only gaining the increase that a 23.01mm tall 65mm negative will give you (i.e. one more perf vertically). So that's a 1.3X larger negative but you had to crop your 65mm negative almost in half to get a 2.40 : 1 frame, so you managed to pay twice as much for film more or less and then throw almost half of it away again.

 

Now if you wanted to achieve an even wider aspect ratio, then anamorphic lenses might make sense. With a 2X anamorphic lens, 65mm becomes a 4.40 : 1 aspect ratio, pretty wide!

 

This is why the 65mm Ultra Panavision format used a mild 1.25X squeeze to fit a 2.7 : 1 image onto the negative. This was originally for making 3-panel Cinerama prints, which is a 2.66 : 1 format. "Star Wars: Rogue One" used those old 1.25X lenses on an Alexa 65 digital camera but cropped the image back to a 2.40 : 1 frame. See:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingup1.htm

 

There was a large film format that used 2X CinemaScope lenses designed to cover the larger film area -- it was called CinemaScope 55 but in this case, the negative was nearly square-shaped because it used anamorphic lenses. See:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingcs6.htm

 

Most 2X anamorphic lenses won't cover a larger negative since they were designed for 4-perf 35mm.

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Where anamorphic might make sense with 1.55 : 1 Alexa Open Gate is if you used the 1.3X Hawk anamorphics. That would give you a 2.02 : 1 image unsqueezed that could be cropped a little top & bottom to 2.40 : 1.

 

It would be similar to the old Technirama format which used 1.5X anamorphic lenses on a 1.50 : 1 8-perf VistaVision negative.

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Great David thank you again. I understand you've responded to a few of my recent posts about anamorphic lenses and aspect ratios in general. So I appreciate the thorough responses you give. I think the main problem that I had wrapping my head around this ( mainly fully understand aspect ratio ) was that I was coming at this from a point a view that I think many DSLR videographers tend to have when they are starting. I see a lot of youtube videos shot on DSLR's that for the most part are made with the knowledge that it will not be displayed on wide screen monitors nor on a scope theatre screen, yet these letterboxes are added because its gives videos a cinematic look , because they are used to watching films with wide aspect ratios on 16x9 monitors, tvs, tablets and phones nowadays. I know that I have had conversations with fellow video makers and even when simply adding letterboxing on the top and bottom to achieve a 2.35 aspect ratio on a 16x9 display, the average viewer of films, music videos, will automatically feel the sense that it is cinematic and will want to see that letterboxing as if it were part of the actual frames in the video, if that makes sense. Whereas the ideal situation is that you never see any letterboxing at all. And I think you could argue that the average viewer, especially in younger generations such as myself, would on some subconscious level, prefer to have the letterboxing, even over having a wide screen monitors that would eliminate the letterboxing, since like I've said, films are generally being watched on 16x9 monitors. But I might be totally wrong on that.

 

Thanks everyone.

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