Synopsis:

The purpose of this restoration is to recreate the IMAX 1.43:1 presentation of The Dark Knight by combining the widescreen 2.39:1 footage from the Blu-ray and the IMAX 1.43:1 sequences from the Special Features of The Dark Knight Trilogy Blu-ray (Special Edition). That way, throughout the film, the IMAX scenes expand top and bottom showcasing the full IMAX 1.43:1 frame (instead of the cropped 1.78:1 IMAX frame) while maintaining constant width as it would on an IMAX GT 1.43:1 screen.

Intentions:

I love IMAX and I love Christopher Nolan's work. As we were blessed with most of the full 1.43:1 IMAX scenes for The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, I wanted to cut them into the movie. Seeing the individual 1.43:1 scenes on YouTube wasn't enough and I thought I could work on a high quality IMAX restoration to create an amazing immersive experience at home. This was also my first fanedit/restoration project and I treated it as a challenge to make no compromises at every step.

Change List:

All footage was sourced from ripped copies of my physical discs. The footage was then transcoded to DNxHR HQ using Shutter Encoder. Using DaVinci Resolve, the regular Blu-ray widescreen footage was combined with the Special Edition Blu-ray IMAX 1.43:1 footage. Then the final product was exported to DNxHR HQ from DaVinci Resolve and encoded in Handbrake with the bitrate of the Blu-ray disc. All audio and subtitle tracks were kept the same as on the disc. The workflow of this restoration is meant to preserve as much quality as possible at every step and the result is a virtually lossless re-encode of the source footage.

Additional Notes:

Given the active image of this restoration is 1550 x 1080 (1.43:1), it is best suited for projectors, tall screens/monitors closer to the 1.43:1 aspect ratio (MacBooks, iPads...) as well as VR headsets. For 16:9 screens, I recommend against my restoration and instead to watch the film on Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray (expanded IMAX scenes included on disc) as that will give you a more immersive experience in my opinion than seeing more image downscaled and pillarboxed. This restoration is available in 2 versions which differ very slightly (for more details with images see my forum post below): -The Dark Knight IMAX 1.43:1 Restoration 2AR (38 GB) -The Dark Knight IMAX 1.43:1 Restoration 3AR (38 GB) For compatibility reasons, the restoration is made available as a 1920 x 1080 (1.78:1) so it is Blu-ray compliant. For an optimal viewing experience on 4:3 projectors, MacBooks and VR, you may use VLC and crop exactly 185px left and 185px right to fit the active picture to the screen. If you have any question on how to best view my restoration on your setup, feel free to send me a message.

Other Sources:

The Dark Knight (2008) Fullscreen DVD (for version 2AR)

Special Thanks:

Thanks to u/Everan_Shepard from Reddit for pointing out 2 seconds of black frames in the first release version of my edit. Thank you to ArtisDead for guiding me through my first submission