A Journey to Space Captures the Majesty of IMAX in 4K

What’s 4K UHD? How much better is it than Blu-Ray? What kind of TV and device player do you need? Is it really that much better?

The world of high-definition home entertainment can seem confusing to people not invested in it; and a lot of these questions have subjective answers. Nevertheless, Ryan Mullins, head of Big Picture Digital Productions, answers them by bringing IMAX movies to the home screen. As Journey to Space, his first 4K transfer of an IMAX movie, hits shelves, Mullins tells The Creators Project about 4K and what it takes to bring huge movies to home cinemas.

So what does a 4K Ultra HD television do that’s so different from an HD television? According to Mullins, it’s all about pixels on the screen. An HD television that’s as suped up as it can get has a 1920x1080 resolution, for a total of a little over 2 billion pixels on the screen. 4K has a (brace yourselves) 3840x2160 resolution, cramming a little over 8 billion pixels onto the screen. But to get there, Mullins says it took quite the effort. “It was a complete ecosystem change on the technology side," he explains. "And it’s rare that this happens, that you have the original source format, you have a new disk created, a TV created, and that allowed an opportunity to change all the parameters. Not just to change the resolution.”

Mullins got his start in VHS and DVDs, but is amazed at the power 4K provides. He says this new technology allows for better sound and a much wider range of colors presented on the screen. HD television sets, he says, “could recreate roughly 35% of the visual spectrum that the human eye can conceive, which is actually kind of low. Which gives a lot of HD a little bit of a cartoonish look."

"When we made the change over to UHD," Mullins continues, "we increased the contrast levels to a much bigger range of light and dark, and there’s a wider color gamut where there’s more like 50 percent, maybe more, of the color spectrum. And it supports, though we’re not there yet, the possibility to capture up to 77% of the color spectrum.” The increase in colors presented with UHD, matched with a bolder difference between black and white, Mullins explains, means “more dimensionality to your image, whether it’s a canvas or a TV. So it’s quite a big change, and for packaged goods I think this is it.”

Now, Mullins is taking advantage of all that technology with the space-documentary Journey to Space, distributed by Shout! Factory. The IMAX documentary, narrated by Captain Jean-Luc Picard himself, a.k.a. actor (and knight) Sir Patrick Stewart, provides an overview of where we’ve come in space exploration and where we’re headed. It evokes a sort of Space Age nostalgia rarely seen in popular culture these days, and the visuals, naturally, are jaw-dropping.

When asked what compromises he had to make to bring this IMAX feature to UHD 4K, Mullins answers, “almost none. The first round of digital IMAX projectors were kind of 4K, they were using two projectors and a technology that used 2k projectors to make a 4K image. I’m putting out stuff that’s just slightly lower resolution. It’s been an interesting journey, we’ve met in the middle."

Click here to check out Journey to Space, now available in 4K (and Blu-Ray…but we’re not talking about that, are we?).

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