Film IMAX was full 1.44:1 the entire sequence. I’m not sure how they cropped those shots, but they looked just fine.
Are you sure this sequence was 1.44:1 in the IMAX version in the theater? I thought it looked more like 16:9 when I saw it. I don’t remember the height difference being so drastic.
I saw it on 15 perf 70mm film, which was 1.44:1. The digital “IMAX” screens are 1.9:1, which is what most people saw it in. And the entire Falcon Escape sequence filled the entire screen. Either the shots Ady points out are mistakes made in the STARZ conversion and weren’t cropped in theaters or they cropped it into the sequence and did enough digital trickery that people didn’t notice a drastic drop in quality in those shots.
However, when I saw it like that, the rest of the 35mm footage was noticeably worse than the IMAX, like even that something went wrong in the conversion.
You have to wonder if the IMAX scenes were cropped from 4:3 to 16:9 in height like the non-IMAX scenes were cropped down to 16:9 in width. That means some is still missing. From a completist point of view, this is fascinating, but with this being the 7th installment and all the others not being shot in this format, not to mention that the entire movie wasn’t shot in this format, it isn’t something I am going to worry about.
The IMAX scenes on the STARZ stream are cropped vertically from 1.44:1 to 1.78:1, while the rest of the movie is cropped horizontally from 2.39:1 to 1.78:1. We are indeed still missing visual information, but this comes CLOSE to recreating the 1.9:1 of the Digital IMAX presentation.
For more information: http://www.slashfilm.com/qa-imax-theatre-real-imax-liemax/