The Palm Pilot certainly wasn’t the topic of the TikTok, but it seemed to be the only thing anyone noticed. Ahead of Oppenheimer’s release, the official IMAX TikTok account posted a video showing the staggering size of the 70mm film print and the orange extensions IMAX had to build just to hold the platter in place. To give you some context, Oppenheimer’s film reportedly weighs 600 pounds and the reel is a whopping 11 miles long. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that he believes he’s reached the “outer limit” of a roll of film.
Anyway, back to the Palm Pilot. Right there, in the foreground of the TikTok video, is a small blue and silver Palm device. (It’s not technically called the Palm Pilot – PalmPilot was the name of the company and devices long before the m130 came out – but everyone calls this class of devices Palm Pilots. We’ll do that too.) More specifically: an image of a Palm Pilot on a tablet mounted on a white pillar next to the machine holding the reels. It’s not just a Palm Pilot; It’s a Palm Pilot emulator running on another device, which seems so important for getting Oppenheimer on a screen near you.
The emulated device is a Palm m130, a device from 2002. It had a 2 inch display with 160 x 160 pixels, was powered by Motorola’s 33 MHz DragonBall VZ processor and ran the Palm OS 4.1. Palm said the battery would last a week between charges and you could even add Bluetooth via a card slot. People liked it, it got good reviews. You probably haven’t thought about it for almost two decades.
In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the Quick Turn Reel Unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years an unemulated m130 appeared to have been holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are the large horizontal shelves on which the many reels of a film are assembled, stored and then assembled are quickly flung to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves the film at a little less than 6 feet per second, so it’s very fast.
The m130 is apparently vital to keeping the thing running – “PALM PILOT MUST BE TURNED ON ALL THE TIME,” reads a note above a picture of another m130 that has since been circulated around the internet – but doesn’t need to be used often. “I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot,” says one person familiar with the technology. “It’s really just a status screen.” Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a constant speed and help keep the movie’s video in sync with the audio.
A (non-emulated) recording of the m130’s QTRU status menu. Picture: Tom Barber
If you zoom in on the image, as has of course been the case throughout the internet, four things appear. Our knowledgeable source explained each one:
- ProjL and ProjR: Refers to the sides of a 3D projector, where L and R mean left and right. “This is from the days of 45-minute 3D documentaries, when there was an imprint of the right and left eyes both going through the projector at the same time.”
- Capture: Defines which platter is ready to capture the film after it runs through the projector.
- Feed: Defines which plate feeds the film into the projector.
- Locked: “When this is highlighted, it means the disks are operational.”
The Palm-powered QTRU system is actually a relatively high-tech part of an otherwise highly manual process. Yves Leibowitz, a longtime projectionist, has made a number of popular YouTube videos documenting the process of loading a film. It involves setting up the huge spools in just the right place, feeding the film manually through a series of rollers and platters, and constantly checking and double-checking to make sure everything is in order and ready to use.
In most of his videos, you actually get a glimpse of a Palm device set up next to the QTRU, but Leibowitz never seems to have to touch it. However, in every case we’ve seen, it’s an actual physical device. The emulator appears to be a new phenomenon, and in fact, IMAX told Vice that it was designed specifically for Oppenheimer. “IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX projectionists,” the company said. The emulator if you’re curious seems to keep going a Winmate W10IB3S-PCH2AC-POE Panel PC, a 10.1-inch Windows tablet apparently designed for use outside of conference rooms, helping people control schedules and video conferences.
The obvious question here is: why on earth would IMAX still run its systems on a 21 year old machine? And given the need to update it, why would it just emulate the 21-year-old device on a crappy Windows tablet? Other QTRU systems have a controller built into the machine itself, which seems to be better in every way imaginable.
For IMAX, like so many other companies that rely on generations-old technology, the answer is simple: It works. And it’s not like it’s a booming industry in need of reinvention. There are only 30 theaters in the world that can even show a full 70mm film like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are now digital, as are most cinema experiences in general.
In fact, Nolan is one of the few filmmakers still making 70mm IMAX film at all, and if he’s pushed to the limits of the technology, even he might not be able to do it much longer. “If 70mm IMAX made a comeback, I would expect they would update the QTRU controllers,” says our source. “Until then, it’s best to keep riding until the wheels fall off.” Simple and stable, the Palm OS is easy to emulate (hell, you can run it in your browser now) and still does that particular job just fine.
Also, threading and playing an IMAX film is a complicated and detail-oriented task, and many of the projectionists involved have been doing it for years. Why change the process if you don’t need to? Sure, the emulator looks silly hanging on this machine, but the point is how it looks in the cinema. And this Palm m130 still does its wee job of making sure that 70mm IMAX Oppenheimer lens looks damn good.