Any IMAX (70mm Film) Transfer to HD ?

[JimPullan]

Does anyone know if there have been any IMAX 70mm Film transfers to either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD yet? If anyone has seen a IMAX standard DVD knows exactly the quality I'm talking about.

In HD these would probably the pinnicle of experience for all of us (IMO)

Jim

[Blue]

With any luck soon. A number have been converted to HD WMV see the clips here
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...tshowcase.aspx
"http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx" (the above link seemed to corrupt so remove the quotes if the above doesn't work)
and those you in the US can purchase the disk in WMV to many of them.
So they are already in digital formats and even better they are obvisally happy to have their films digitized.
I know for a fact that although not credited as such Adrenaline Rush was IMAX but the transfer is really bad, very grainy washed out colours etc if you only want to download one or 2 Coral Reef is good as well as the Magic of Flight, although with my bias Adrenaline Rush wins hands down especailly the wooshing sound they make (not).

[phloyd]

Dish Network has been airing IMAX movies on their HD Pay Per View channel.

These are going out MPEG2 at 17.5 Mbps or so and should give a good indication of what is possible - conceptually BD or HD DVD should improve on these (unless Sony releases them )

[Psiweaver]

The latest sony releases have been of very very good quality its not necissarily sony thats messing up the movie more its the master and not using a very good one.

[phloyd]

I was more referring to the bitrate since it was revealed that some BDs are as low as 18 Mbps MPEG2 for the Sony Bluray titles.

These Imax films do look quite good - Dish Network PPV in general looks very good.

It is a shame that they have really bad movies on there for the most part these days - they used to have a lot of Dreamworks, but they seem to have stopped and now have Lions Gate and some other obscure stuff...

[JimPullan]

Earlier in the week I sent an email to IMAX corporate headquarters asking if and when they intend to make available to the public their library of productions onto Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD ?

The vice president responded back stating: "We are intricately aware of the demand for our productions on consumer Blu-Ray and HD-DVD's. We do not have any 'immediate' plans on releasing in either format. However, please check back in about six months. We should have a clearer indication what IMAX will be releasing in a High Definition format. Thank you for your interest and continued support of the IMAX experience."

I've already read between the lines on this generic statement. They certainly intend to, but . . . . . ? (finish the sentence!)


Jim