I’m happy to see that Christo­pher Nolan’s Incep­tion is com­ing out on IMAX next month. Any­one who has seen The Dark Knight on IMAX should know what Nolan and Pfis­ter are capa­ble of.

Still, one ques­tion remains, will it be a 35mm con­ver­sion (like 99% of com­mer­cial IMAX releases) or did they actu­ally shoot some scenes using IMAX cam­eras (like they did with The Dark Knight). The answer lies some­where in between.

Unfor­tu­nately, no IMAX cam­eras were used dur­ing the film­ing of Incep­tion. Instead, key scenes were shot in 65mm. What is 65mm? Allow me to explain.

Most movies are shot on stan­dard 35mm film. Some­times they are blown up in post pro­duc­tion to fit on IMAX screens, like with Harry Pot­ter or Trans­form­ers.

65mm is a large for­mat film, which offers a higher res­o­lu­tion than stan­dard 35mm. Each frame of a 65mm print has a height of 5 per­fo­ra­tions. But when you take the same film and run it through a cam­era hor­i­zon­tally, so that each frame has a width of 15 per­fo­ra­tions, you get IMAX, the high­est res­o­lu­tion of any film. This is how all those Dark Knight scenes were filmed.

So, no, Incep­tion did not shoot any scenes with 15-perf IMAX, but they did shoot with 5-perf 65mm, the next best thing. The dia­gram below shows the rel­a­tive sizes of 35mm, 65mm, and IMAX.

Check out this inter­view for more info on Incep­tion [Col­lider]