IMAX theater gives viewers a new look
When the Tech Museum of Innovation opened its Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater in 1998, it was the first of its kind on the West Coast. Now, the four-story theater with a wraparound screen is getting ready to blaze a new trail.
The 280-seat, downtown San Jose theater has been closed since the beginning of July to undergo a $2.7 million, fourmonth renovation that will replace its giant 70mm-film projector with a state-of-the art 4K laser projection system. The Tech will have the first IMAX dome in the world to use the new technology.
“It’s going to be different, but it’s also going to be better,” said Michelle Duncan, the Tech’s director of IMAX theater operations. The theater is scheduled to be used during the Tech for Global Good program in November before re-opening to the general public with “Oceans: Our Blue Planet,” a new documentary narrated by “Titanic” star Kate Winslet.
The new projection will provide a sharper picture and deeper colors than the old sys-
tem, and that meant replacing the theater’s screen — made up of 469 individual coated aluminum panels — with a new one. This time the panels will be installed in a way that the seams and rivets holding them together don’t show.
Duncan says she knows some people will miss those seams in the same way they feel affection for a dent in the family car or a popping noise on a favorite LP. “I’m sure people will feel that for a moment, but we hope they’re just blown away by the image after that like in the old Memorex commercial,” she said. “It’ll pull you into the environment that much faster.”
The improvements have actually been on the drawing board at the Tech for years, but they had to wait for the technology to catch up, especially with the challenges a dome theater presents compared to a flat screen. IMAX had to re-engineer its regular dual-laser projection system to a single laser and developed a high-resolution “fish eye” lens and image-processing software for the dome’s geometry.
“It really is awesome because we’ve updated everything,” said Brian Bonnick, chief technology officer and executive vice president for IMAX. “We’ve created a radically different projector that doesn’t have the limitations of other systems. It produces brighter and sharper images with substantially higher contrasts. The images are much more in line with what the human eye was designed to see.”
To create that sharper image on the screen, a lot of chaos and change has to happen behind the scenes. Films used
to be brought in on massive reels that were placed on platters before being threaded through the 2,000-pound projector, which had to be lifted up by an elevator to the oblong projection booth — called “the doghouse” —
that jutted between seats in the theater. The film soundtrack was handled separately, synced up with the image and carefully monitored by a technician using a special console.
That’s going to be all gone. The reel platters
have been removed, and the digital projector — which weighs 3,000 pounds — won’t need to be lowered except for maintenance, and the soundtrack comes as part of the digital package and will be pumped into the new, six-channel sound system.
Duncan said the new format will open up a new
range of possibilities for programming since more and more IMAX movies are being released digitally and not on film. Ironically, though, it also means the Tech will lose some perennially popular movies, including “Everest,” the breathtaking MacGillivray Freeman documentary that both opened the theater in 1998 and was the last movie shown in June.
” ‘Everest’ has never been rendered digitally, so we won’t have access to that,” Duncan said. “And others, like ‘Lewis & Clark’ and ‘Forces of Nature’ are not available in a highenough digital capacity to run and look good.”
Unlike the Metreon in San Francisco, which has the capability to run IMAX programming both digitally and on 70mm film, there was just no room at the Tech for two projectors. That means special 70mm film presentations like “Dunkirk” or the upcoming re-release of “The Dark Knight” would have to pass San Jose by.
As a fan of film and the projection system she’s worked with for so long, Duncan says it was very emotional letting go. She took pictures as the last two film prints were shipped off, and she began to tear up as she introduced the very last film that would be run on the old projector. “It’s like your child is leaving home,” she said. “It’s the end of one era, and the beginning of a new one.”
But if there’s a silverscreen lining to the dark cloud, it’s that the Tech Museum’s IMAX projector will not be going to the trash heap. Just as the Tech was getting ready to say goodbye to film last month, huge storms battered Des Moines, Iowa, causing the roof to leak in the Iowa Science Center’s IMAX theater. Its projection equipment and all its movies were ruined, and the theater is closed for repair.
“All of our parts are packed up in our lobby with address labels ready to get that theater back up and running,” Duncan said. “I’m happy that Projector 156 can breathe life back into that theater.”