This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Whether budgets or body counts, director Michael Bay isknown for going supersize -- Hollywood even coined the term "Bayhem" for his bombastic, slow-mo-and-explosions style. So for his new film Transformers: Age of Extinction he turned, naturally, to the biggest -- and noisiest -- format possible. "An IMAX frame is captured on 65mm negative running vertically rather than horizontally," says Hugh Murray, seniorvice president of film production at IMAX. "A thousand feet of film goes through the camera in three minutes. It captures spectacular images in film, but it creates noise." Shooting film in 3D doubles the problem -- so much so that Hollywood directors tend to avoid IMAX cameras as they are too loud to record dialogue.
So for Transformers, Murray's team developed its first digital 3D camera. To replicate the format's huge film size, IMAX fitted it with two 52.1mm x 30.5mm Phantom CMOS sensors, mounted side by side. "They're the largest sensors out there," says Murray. Rather than use a mirror rig like many 3D cameras, the sensors are mounted behind a pair of custom Zeiss lenses, based on those for the Hasselblad camera, which can be swapped quickly between scenes. The result: a device that, at 13kg and measuring 48cm by 30cm, is light, quiet and can shoot native 4K 3D at high speed. Perfect, in other words, for nailing the moment Optimus Prime takes on a hulking Dinobot in super-slow motion. "For a film like this, it's already proved its worth," says Murray. And Bay himself is full of praise for the results. "We're going to do the showcase scenes [in IMAX]," he announced at CinemaCon in 2013. "It's going to be awesome." And huge. And loud.
Transformers: Age of Extinction was released on July 5.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
