People are entranced with the big picture. In the early 1800s, Robert Fulton amazed audiences with his Cyclorama, a 16-metre high by 130-metre long painting that ran on rollers. The Lumiere brothers, not content with their pioneering 35mm film efforts, even managed to screen movies shot on 75mm film.
The 3-strip 65mm Cinerama process emerged in 1963, quickly
followed by CinemaScope, VistaVision, Circa-rama, Technirama, Todd-AO and so on. Then came IMAX, a process that side-stepped the perception that audiences just wanted a big, wide picture.
Instead, the Canadian developers of the IMAX process headed for
a screen picture that was just huge... very enveloping, very sharp and almost grainless, swamping the eye's peripheral vision; the field of vision is 50° vertical and 130° horizontal.
The IMAX camera uses 65mm negative film (from which 70mm
projection prints are made). An IMAX film frame measures 48.5mm high by 69.6mm wide - a total area of 3375.6mm2, over 10 times the frame area of conventional 35mm film.
Each IMAX film frame has fifteen perforations; a single frame
races past the camera's aperture in 6 milliseconds; each second, 1.7m of film rips past; each minute exposes an expensive 102.6 metres of Mr Kodak's famous product.
