Does Nolan’s The Odyssey rewrite the case for 8K TVs? It’s about more than just resolution – it's about true cinema
Could any home cinema setup truly deliver 'As Nolan Intended'?
The rapture around director Christopher Nolan's latest epic, The Odyssey, is unlike anything I've ever seen in cinema history. Audiences are travelling miles – some hundreds or even thousands – to watch it presented in its native IMAX 70mm format.
"As Nolan intended" has already become a prominent meme, driven by the fact that the majority of prospective audience members know they'll likely never see the film in IMAX 70mm – at least not soon, anyhow. I've resigned myself to a hypothetical showing many months from now, given the movie's plot isn't exactly secret.
But it got me thinking – such is the melting pot of technology and, indeed, technological crossover and nostalgic lean that we find ourselves in today – that when The Odyssey does release in physical and streaming formats, what'll be the best way to watch it?
Could it be that 8K resolution TVs – those four times the resolution of the current 4K standard – find their place in the market once more? Most brands – including LG, Sony and TCL – have given up the ghost when it comes to "Ultra-Ultra-HD", with Samsung the only notable remaining purveyor of the format.
Well, it's not as simple as that, because it's about so much more than just resolution. So let's dig into the 'whys', looking at how The Odyssey is being presented to audiences, the rarity of IMAX 70mm availability worldwide, and how the film's production process reaches beyond digital resolution and range.
What actually is IMAX 70mm?
But let's roll back a moment. For all this talk of 'IMAX 70mm', what exactly is the format? In short: it's a much taller aspect ratio than is typical of cinema, actually closer to the older 4:3 TV format that was predominant from the 1920s until around the turn of the century.
The Odyssey is the first feature film ever to be shot exclusively using IMAX 70mm film, as produced by Kodak. In this supposedly digital age, Nolan is an advocate of film for many reasons – despite its obvious challenges, which are well documented.
In the case of IMAX 70mm, an obvious challenge is the cameras required to expose such a negative, which is physically massive – each frame's usable area measuring 69.8 x 48.5mm, with 24 of those captured every second. Indeed, an IMAX 70mm film canister can only capture up to 150 seconds before it's exposed, meaning long takes during production are out of the question.
But while Nolan does scan the film for editing purposes, that's then used as reference, with the original film returned to and spliced by hand, the old-fashioned way. It's even colour-corrected on film, so the original and effectively limitless analogue format is never simplified by being digitised. Watch the 60 Minutes interview via the YouTube video embed above, which is a fascinating 15-minute watch.
Not all IMAX is the same
But here's the thing: not all IMAX presentations are equal. Indeed, only 40 copies of The Odyssey's film-to-film transfer in IMAX 70mm have ever been made. That's one for each of the 41 cinemas capable of presenting in such a format – that's how rare it is.
Just think about that for a moment: only 41 theatres in the world can present the movie this way. That's partly down to the old projection equipment requirements, not to mention expertise, plus the huge physical scale of the screen in its near-square format.
Plenty of other IMAX cinemas exist, of course, they just don't have the same projection equipment or screen size. The other IMAX-supported format is a 1.9:1 aspect ratio, which is far wider, yet a little taller than the more typical 2.20:1 aspect of most cinemas' digital projection standard.
I produced the infographic, above, to give a hypothetical visual indicator of those formats – IMAX 70mm film, IMAX's Laser / Xenon format at 1.9:1, and typical (non-IMAX) digital projection at 2.20:1 or 2.40:1 – and present what would be 'lost' on some systems.
How does IMAX display on TVs at home?
That same infographic provides an interesting snapshot in how most movies arrive to physical (4K Blu-ray, for example) or streaming formats. The portion between IMAX and typical digital projection becomes embedded black 'bars', as we all know so well, given modern TVs' 16:9 aspect ratio.
How will a TV display an IMAX 70mm image therefore? Well, we've seen it before. This isn't Nolan's first rodeo with the format – large portions of Oppenheimer were captured using 70mm film, for example, with even 2008's The Dark Knight having 28 minutes of its 152-minute runtime in the format.
When those scenes come on you know about it, though, as black borders appear to the left and right of – quite the jump from a widescreen image. Such is the nature of IMAX 70mm within a TV's 16:9 aspect ratio!
With The Odyssey that will be the perpetual vision in how it plays, unless Nolan elects to edit a different widescreen version of the movie for home viewing in addition to the original. And I think we all know: the chances of that are pretty much zero.
So, is 8K a good answer?
But back to that original thought: is an 8K TV the answer for would-be best at-home viewing? Would The Odyssey actually gain more from an 8K version? The answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, you would achieve a higher resolution than 4K, of course, but on the other hand it wouldn't be as high as the film stock's theoretical equivalent.
Kodak's low ISO 50 stock film has a grain that's somewhere in the 12K to 18K range. Not that a gridded digital capture of an organic, randomised pattern of crystals is ever going to fully realise that in the same way. The Odyssey also used some 'faster' film for low-light scenes – and the maximum ISO 500 is granier and will appear different in quality and aesthetic.
Besides, resolution isn't everything. Nolan's use of film, in his own repeated words, is to best equate to how the human eye sees. He wants his films to deliver grandeur in as realistic yet filmic a way as possible. It's not about cranking high dynamic range (HDR) to the maximum, pulling the highest yield from today's brightest TVs.
There's another devil in the detail, pun intended: to benefit from even 4K resolution at its fullest you need to be fairly close to the source (the THX-certified recommendation would be 6.5-feet at no more than 40-degrees off centre when viewing a 65-inch panel). For 8K that's even closer still: a 65-inch panel would need to be positioned about 3.5-feet away, which is unrealistci.
With IMAX screens so large – the biggest being in Melbourne, Australia – the equation is an entirely different prospect. So different that, arguably, the experience could never be transferred into a home environment. Which is exactly part of the point: to keep cinema as cinema. So let's cherish that, sing a song for the imminent death of 8K, and enjoy The Odyssey in whatever future formats it arrives in – however long that'll take.
