65mm and IMAX

A 65mm frame holds detail a viewer cannot exhaust. A crowd stays a crowd of people rather than a texture, and a desert keeps its far edge.

The scale is felt as much as seen. The frame is taller than a normal widescreen shot, so the audience sits inside the picture instead of looking through a slot at it.

The negative is 65 millimetres wide and the release print is 70, with the extra five millimetres carrying the sound. That is why the same format is called both.

IMAX runs the film sideways through the camera at fifteen perforations per frame, which gives a frame roughly ten times the area of a 35mm one and an aspect close to 1.43 to 1.

A larger frame needs a longer lens for the same field of view, so depth of field is thinner at the same stop. Large format is shallow whether you want it or not.

Use it for landscape, for spectacle, for a crowd and for any frame whose job is to be overwhelming.

Skip it for intimate rooms and small stories. The format promises scale, and a close two hander does not deliver on the promise.

35mm is a quarter of the area or less. It is grainier, flatter in colour and easier to light, and it does not carry the same sense of size.

The test is the far edge of the frame. Detail that holds all the way out, in a taller shape, is large format.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was shot on 65mm, and the desert in it keeps its horizon because the negative could hold one. Christopher Nolan went back to IMAX film for Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023), and printed 70mm releases for the cinemas that could still run them.

The model returns a widescreen frame with a lot of sharpening on it. Ask for the taller frame and for detail that holds to the edges.

The other failure is an empty subject. Name the landscape, the crowd or the structure the scale is for.