>To understand IMAX, it helps to know how movies are captured in the first place. Many are shot digitally, as it's cheaper and more convenient than using film. However, many filmmakers still want, well, film

The illogical part about this process is that they convert the shot film to digital, they add CGI and color correction and then they print back the digital version to....film.

So the whole point of shooting a Hollywood movie on film today is because some directors like....film. There is no practicality/cost/reasoning to it.

Shooting film is a different production process than digital. Shot times, color reproduction, dynamic range, the size of the equipment, etc. all impact how movies are shot. Even acting is impacted due to each take having tangible costs. Limitations on how many cameras you can use also changes how you go about shooting.

The beauty of analog production, whether cine, still, or audio, revolves around working with and around the limitations of the process. Yes, when all we had was film/tape we dreamed of being set free of the many limitations of the media. Restrictions do force decisions though and many artists feel more inspired working within limitations. All that’s to say that the choice to do things in the analog realm impact how things are made and therefore has an impact on the final product even if post and display are done digitally. Cinema as an art form is due in no small part to how you work with film.

Some directors like the appearance of film... Given that the spectacle is a large part of the reason we go to the cinema, the colour fidelity and (and in the case of IMAX) unique scale and aspect ratio are the point... Not sure why practicality or cost would override that?

As a director who doesn't shoot on film - I still see the appeal, there's a particular quality to skin tones - especially in response to older arc lights and the like - that digital still doesn't quite capture. Ditto motion cadence, halation and grain that are all emulated in digital post to greater or lesser degrees of fidelity.

I don't think it's as illogical as it sounds. The qualities of the signal you feed your digital pipeline are very important to the finished product. And i'm using the plural intentionally here : not quality as in "it's better" but qualities as in "it has specific characteristics".

I can more easily relate to music production which i have passing experience with. The analog would be : if you plug your guitar directly in a preamplified audio card, you'll get the cleanest possible signal, right ? Then you'd just have to post-process it through a virtual cabinet and a bunch of effects to get exactly the sound you want. Except in most cases you'll get better results by plugging a guitar on an amplifier and putting that amp in a room with a microphone pointing to it. All that hardware will natively give you a better sound than you could achieve with reasonable effort on a fully digital workflow. Not better quality (in fact you're probably losing definition on that signal at several points in the chain), but qualities that on average will make the sound more pleasing to the ear. You can still manipulate the sound with virtual effects all you want, it will still retain the "grain" of the original setup.

It's not illogical, because film behaves differently than CMOS/CCD image sensors. Film scanners can then digitize the film's nuances more very accurately, resulting in an digital image with better dynamic range etc.