70mm : "One Battle After Another"

[Jim Cassedy]

I got word last week that we'll be running the new Paul Thomas Anderson flick:
"One Battle After Another" in 70mm here when it gets released in late September.
It's another production that was shot in 35mm VistaVision ™️. V-V blows up very
nicely to 70mm, as long as they don't play games with the aspect ratio, as they
did with The Brutalist. When done right it looks great. Llike the beautiful 70mm
blow-up of VERTIGO we ran here last year.

[Bobby Henderson]

I wonder if the movie will have an all-film work flow or if it will be funneled through the usual 4K digital intermediate stage.

I'm not totally against the use of digital intermediates on large format film imagery in post production. However, if a movie is filmed in a large format process like VistaVision or 5/65mm that large format DNA is mostly lost when the imagery is pushed through a lower resolution 4K post production step. Blowing the results back up to 5/70mm is mostly pointless. The film-sourced imagery might look a little more "organic" but it's not going to be any better in overall quality than something shot with a modern d-cinema camera. This is like someone taking a high resolution D-SLR image, shrinking it to half its size in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then trying to artificially up-rez the image back to its former size. That crap doesn't work, not even if they have the magic CSI: Miami "enhance that image" super duper image processor.


4K is a good standard for 4/35mm source imagery. Productions shooting in 5/65mm or 8/35mm and then pushing the imagery through digital intermediate work really need to do better than plain 4K. It has been over 20 years since the first movie post-produced with a 4K DI was released (Spiderman 2). So many advancements in computer technology have taken place since the early 2000's that it should now be easier for a movie production to generate a 8K DI than it was to render that first 4K DI. Of course there are no digital projectors that go beyond 4K, but a DI in 8K or higher will make a difference when output to 70mm.

If these movie productions want to keep it up with the 70mm hype and not do it right they're going to be pushing their luck. The general public will get wise to what's happening and start abandoning these kinds of screenings.