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Author Topic: Which sound format to use during screening Antonio Marcheselli Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1260 From: Florence, Italy Registered: Mar 2000 posted 01-01-2004 08:21 PM                        Brad, I completely disagree with you!!! How can consider a dts unit a "backup"? It is a "plus" of our biggest houses, the customers will be happy to see the movie with better quality! All of our houses are biamped using DCA amps, our biggest house uses a lot of power and we have three way speakers in all screens. I believe that a difference between the format can be heard, eventually it is just a "marketing" strategy where customer identify the great sound of our theater (with all respects few... none of city little theater can handle our, my presentation!) as DTS sound. I would also consider my, and my staff, personal satisfaction running another piece of technology!!! My questions about sound format are made since I'm still cabling the unit and I want to compare my ideas with others, no problem at all running dts movies! I sincerely do not understand your suggestion! So at my old one-screen theatre eqipped with a JP dts plus DD I should have run all feature in DD and use dts as backup? Bye A  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 01-01-2004 09:01 PM                        Here again, is a no-win discussion. There are people here who insist that a properly tuned rack/auditorium combo will be transparent to whatever digital process is used. Others insist they can tell the difference. I happen to be in the first group. My preference of one system over another (and it's a very small preference at that) has nothing to do with subjective quality, and more to do with practical operation. In any case, minds will not be changed as regards this subject, so it's best left to the individual to decide what's best.  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-01-2004 11:18 PM                     I have say that it's best to screen in analog. Even if you have digital sound in all of your houses you can never tell when you may need to fall back to analog. You need to know that your print will be minimally playable in the unlikely event the digital sound fails. Most of the theaters I worked in didn't have digital sound in all houses. If the print is screened in digital only you could put yourself in the situation where the print runs great for the first two weeks of its engagement but, then, it gets moved to a house and the sound goes bad. If you had known (or should have known) that the analog track is bad you would have replaced the offending reel(s). Now you will have to explain to everybody what went wrong. If your digital sound stops working for some reason you can still let it run in analog while you figure out what went wrong. If your analog sound is bad you have nothing to save you. Prints are supposed to be screened to be sure that they'll run without problems. If a reel needs to be replaced, you're going to need to know it before it gets put into a house where there is no fallback.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 01-02-2004 12:53 AM                     Antonio, read Jack's post carefully, then bear in mind my firm stance that anyone who claims there is a noticeable difference in quality is hearing things, or is brainwashed into believing it. SCENARIO 1: 8 plex with 8 SRD and 1 DTS = run everything in SRD and use the DTS as a backup format. (Screen prints in SRD as well) SCENARIO 2: 8 plex with 8 DTS and 1 SRD - run everything in DTS and use the SRD as a backup format. (Screen prints in DTS as well) I don't know how to make it any more clear to you. Don't mix and match formats.  |  IP: Logged Antonio Marcheselli Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1260 From: Florence, Italy Registered: Mar 2000 posted 01-02-2004 06:56 AM                        Brad, You don't have to make it more clear, I fully understand your point of view perfectly. But I do not agree with it! I understand and I agree that the differences between DTS and DD are minimal and that people has to be brainwashed to say "yeah, this feature is in DTS and sounds BETTER!". But I believe that is part of our job! Place the sound plaque outside of the theater, place the dts trailer and let the people think that the sound is so good because "there is DTS playing". When the same customer will come to another theater without DTS and hear a crappy sound he/she will say "here is worst because they don't have dts". Beside this marketing stuff the feature in DTS will sound better than DD (for few people)! And I believe that my (and my staff) work load will not increase so much. I fully agree instead with your practical and logistic consideration! Left the dts unit as a backup system will be easier and solve a lot of problems. But it is not accepted in my idea of "make film right"! However this doesn't mean that me and you must have the same ideas on how to use the equipments! Randy, Since 8 months of opening I showed 2 SR movie because, for my fault, the digital sountrack was damaged. I ask for replacement reel for bad DD sountrack at least 20 times. I will show it in DD! Agree with Brad that DTS is so reliable (when reader and player in good condition) that it doesn't need screening. Bye A  |  IP: Logged John Hawkinson Film God Posts: 2273 From: Cambridge, MA, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 01-02-2004 09:23 AM                     The ideal thing would be to run in all formats, and let the digital formats do their own QC. Unfortunately this is not realistic for most people, I think. For instance, DTS keeps track of the number of faults it encounters, and can output that information via VGA (at least on the 6D) or RS-232 (mumble TTL conversion). I can't speak to Dolby Digital or SDDS, but I'm sure they collect that information. Getting it out is the problem. If it was easy to do that, then you could let human ears listen to the analog, and let the digital boxes evaluate the digital. (Another problem here is that most theatres aren't set up to let the digital decoders run live while still playing the analog audio...). Wishful thinking... --jhawk  |  IP: Logged Elena N. Solovyova Film Handler Posts: 44 From: Voronezh, Russia Registered: Feb 2003 posted 01-02-2004 01:04 PM                     Brad, our 2-plex is equipped with movable DTS rack for one good reason: when receiving some mega-blockbuster from Gemini (our major distributor) with an obligation to, say, 150 runs in first three weeks, we always request for DTS disks because we know that SR-D will be dropping 2-3 times per reel after first 100 showings. Unfortunately, Gemini uses an older mega-high-volume printing facility at Mosfilm, and SR-D track wears out too quckly, no matter how good our handling is (this is a well-known issue with their prints). Scrapping a pristine-looking print because of faulty SR-D track print is a supposed solution, but we can save some money thanks to DTS.  |  IP: Logged Aaron Garman Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1470 From: Toledo, OH USA Registered: Mar 2003 posted 01-02-2004 01:33 PM                     I say screen in the format your customer is going to be seeing the film in. I understand why some would screen in analogue, but if your audience is there to see Return of the King in DTS, you should make sure that DTS is pristine. If you find something wrong with the DTS, then use analogue. For the most part, I have never seen an SR track that was so faulty it could not be played. It's the digital systems that always tend to be more prone to problems. I do agree with you Brad that mixing and matching stinks. For awhile, we had 8 DTS, 2 SRD, 1 SDDS, and 3 analogue. It stunk because say a film works great in SRD and then two weeks later it has DTS dropouts that we didn't know about. Also, say you build a film with a DTS trailer and they move the print to an SRD house for whatever reason. I'd like to have DTS on all screens (just because in my experience it sounds better and plays more reliably) and have a few SRD houses for backup or those independent films with SRD only. Sure, mixing and matching had to been done way back when studios supported only one format but now, we don't have to do that. Poor AMC...all that SDDS and it's dying out. I'm just thankfull our sole SDDS house got replaced with SRD (yet the tech did not reset speaker levels or do an EQ and left a nice hum going through the system). Ahh, isn't life grand?! AJG  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 01-02-2004 02:30 PM                     Antonio, you amaze me. First off you want to brainwash people into thinking that the reason why your sound is better is because you have dts. That's stupid! You should be teaching people that the reason is because you have better speakers, acoustics and proper calibration. With your current scheme, once another theater installs dts your whole plan doesn't hold water. Plus all of your customers that you foolishly brainwash into thinking dts is better sound will feel jipped when the movie they want to see is in one of your non-dts auditoriums. Then you think your staff's workload will decrease because you have that ONE screen to have to deal with loading discs and moving the system around. Are you nuts? Do you really not see how dts adds to the projectionist's workload? And no, I do not agree that "dts is so reliable that it doesn't need screening". WAY too many times I have received defective discs and faulty timecode tracks in the last year and in fact I can firmly report that I have had roughly twice the amount of problems with playing in dts that I have had with SRD. This did not used to be the case, but it certainly is now. My point was that if you have all SRD in a complex and the print plays through fine in SRD, you are set for the whole complex and there is no need to mess with another format (whether it is dts or sdds or whatever). A smart projectionist would save the "different/backup" system for a print that doesn't play in the "primary" (in your case SRD) sound format. Elena, buy yourself a bottle of FilmGuard as a demo for yourself and use it on one designated print that you know you will be playing for a long time. Your SRD tracks will not wear. In fact, they will improve. This has been proven many, many times.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-02-2004 07:08 PM                     Ah Brad, Actually DTS does sound much better, especially on the high end. There is also NO acoustical masking used in DTS...a very poor artifact of SRD that does not occur in any DTS playback. Weather Antonio has good or bad speakers and good or bad system calibration is a whole other matter...and I assume from reading his past postings that he has pretty good stuff over there. Inspite of DTS's other obvious problems which in reality are no more of a problem than any of the other systems inherent problems I'll take DTS playback any day over any of the other digital systems. As for Elena's SRD problem, I also have to first wonder if the projection equipment she is using has some part of it that is unduly hard on the SRD track...such as some Cinemecaniccas are hard on Sonys tracks. FilmGuard may help out some but using it is no certainly guarantee of good life of print SRD playback. Mark  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 01-02-2004 07:25 PM                     Mark, wouldn't you agree that the Christie projectors are about the roughest machine around on SRD and SDDS tracks? Assuming you agree with that, then yes it is a guaranteed thing because I have ran prints through them for well over 1000 runs without a single dropout when using FilmGuard. When in the Dallas area, I challenge you to a listening test. If you can actually pick which of the 3 formats you are listening to properly, you will be the first person ever to do it.  |  IP: Logged Gordon McLeod Film God Posts: 9532 From: Toronto Ontario Canada Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-02-2004 07:32 PM                     Actualy DTS sound better in sideby side test Idid send a print an interlock between 3 identical screens and a test group walked between all three and the DTS was the prefered one Elena if you meopta projectors they may have issues with film guard on prints staying stable because of the design of the gate bands  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 01-02-2004 07:34 PM                     That's not a fair test Gordon. Even if you designed a complex with 10 screens all exactly identical in every way right down to the color of the carpet, each room would sound different. You must A/B/C between the formats live throughout the reel where all 3 sources are precisely level matched and all run through the exact same signal chain to be fair. I challenge you to the same test next time you are in these parts. Maybe Joe will come down for it and we will roll 2 cameras simultaneously (one in the booth on the sound rack showing the switching and one in the auditorium on your reactions) and offer the results to the world.  |  IP: Logged Gordon McLeod Film God Posts: 9532 From: Toronto Ontario Canada Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-02-2004 07:53 PM                     Brad been there and done that DTS has always been the hands down winner The only one sounded better was the original mags which we also ran on a dubber  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 01-02-2004 08:07 PM                     Ok Gordon fine, but your example above was NOT a fair test.  |  IP: Logged

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