6k and The Ten Commandments

The other night I saw the beautifully restored version of The Ten Commandments and equally at the classic Hollywood theater, The Egyptian. This was the first public showing of the fully restored roadshow version of the 1956 film. A little talk by the VP of restoration and the Heston family.

Then the movie started and we had an enthusiastic audience applauding right from the beginning. The titles were bright and clean with colors restored as well as dirt and scratches removed. It was beautiful from start to finish. I enjoyed the movie, the cake at intermission (theater’s 88th anniversary) and the whole event in general. It was a little long but it was the 3 hour 39 minute version.

You can skip to the next paragraph but for a technical details about the 6k restoration, I put a little research into it. This was filmed in a widescreen format called VistaVision. This was Paramount’s technology for widescreen instead of CinemaScope. Anamorphic processes such as CinemaScope and Panavision squeeze the image horizontally when photographed and then expand it when projected. This puts twice as wide an image on the same size negative as before. This technology is still used today. VistaVision cameras run the film sideways and then use the area of two normal frames for one frame. This gives only a slight widescreen but tremendous detail compared to the anamorphic process. Eventually the VistaVision source is turned and squeezed for the final print shown in theaters. Only a little over 30 movies were made in VistaVision as better film stock made it obsolete. The version I saw was scanned from the original VistaVision sources and digitally projected. The 6k refers to the horizontal number of pixels on the image as normally shown. A normal DVD would be a 2k scan (2048×1536 pixels) and HD and most modern motion picture production scan at 4k (4096×3072 pixels). A 6k VistaVision scan is two 4k scans turned sideways ( 6144×4096 pixels). Kinda an oversimplification but basically true.

In viewing this movie, a few things became clear to me. Yul Brenner and others in this movie could barely act. Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson could deliver their lines with believability and conviction. Both of these are obvious because of the somewhat dated and stilted dialog. Certainly there was a different method in screen acting 55 years ago. But even factoring in that and the heavy direction, it becomes pretty clear who were the great film actors and who were mediocre at best. It is even possible to differentiate the primarily film actors from classically trained theatrical actors.

An enjoyable experience. Probably going to be a Blu-Ray release soon.