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Author
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Topic: CDS-Equipped Theatres
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Darryl Spicer
Film God
Posts: 3250
From: Lexington, KY, USA
Registered: Dec 2000
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posted 08-05-2003 06:07 PM
1940 - Nov. 13 premier of Walt Disney's Fantasia in New York's Broadway Theater with a multichannel soundtrack produced by Leopold Stokowski who recorded an optical track for each section of the orchestra, resulting in 9 separate soundtracks.
These were mixed by Stokowski into 4 master optical tracks that were played in synchronization on special equipment made by RCA for a multiple-loudspeaker theater installation called "Fantasound"; behind the screen were three horns and placed around the other walls of the theater were 65 smaller speakers. The separation and directionality of sounds was impressive. However, the system was not practical because of the $85,000 cost to equip each theater, opposition by unions, and a demand by the government that RCA stop manufacturing the necessary sound components because of defense priorities. After the 2nd full installation of equipment at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, it was not installed in any other theaters. Instead, eight "Fantasia Road Show" versions were assembled, each with 15,000 pounds of equipment but without the full surround sound loudspeaker system. Fantasound ended in 1941 and would not be heard again until a remastered version in Dolby Stereo was recorded in 1982 with Irwin Kostal conducting the Stokowski arrangements. In 1990 Disney re-released the film in magnetic 6-channel "Fantasound '90" at the Cinerama Dome Theater in Los Angeles with a similar arrangement of surround sound equipment as was used in the 1940 Carthay Circle Theater showing, but all other theaters in America would show it in standard Dolby 70mm magnetic 4-track matrix stereo sound. See the articles on Fantasound at the American WideScreen Museum.
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Darryl Spicer
Film God
Posts: 3250
From: Lexington, KY, USA
Registered: Dec 2000
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posted 08-05-2003 06:23 PM
I was wondering that myself. I think the person who wrote that info may have ment 35MM 4 track but not for sure.
1990 - Dick Tracy released June 15 as the first 35mm feature film distributed with a digital soundtrack by Cinema Digital Sound (CDS), developed by Eastman Kodak and Optical Radiation Corp. "The system was set up in the typical Left, Center, Right, Right Surround, Left Surround, LFE channel format. CDS encoded 16-bit PCM audio in a compression process called Delta Modulation. The process is very similar to normal PCM coding, but with one major difference. PCM coding records the intensity of every sample to a zero db level. That requires 16-bits for each sample. Delta Modulation records the intensity differences of successive samples, and that doesn't require nearly as much data. The compression level of CDS ran approximately 4:1." However, the system replaced the optical analog soundtrack without allowing any backup track for theaters not equipped with the $20,000 digital playback system. Also, theaters preferred to wait for the Dolby digital system that was compatible with an analog track.
Fantasound
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-06-2003 12:38 AM
quote:
Wasn't Fantasia recorded in 1754 or whenever the movie was made? All I know is that it is horribly old. How did they record digitally back then? Or did they just rescore everything in 1982? No matter how great the sound is, I still hate that movie with a passion.
Yes, they just had an orchestra play the same score "synched" as best they could, because it would be NEW AND IMPROVED!
The original animation was made to bar sheets & the recorded track, & edited after shooting. It was tight, like sound & image are with classic Disney & WB cartoons. The new score was done the other way around, like Fleischer (Popeye) cartoons, trying to stay synched to the picture. Not only was the orchestral performance pretty mediocre, but the sync was mostly off, sometimes way off. It was no longer a cool theatrical experience of musical & visual unity.
I saw it, it stank. Real bad.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 08-06-2003 01:44 AM
quote:
I was wondering that myself. I think the person who wrote that info may have ment 35MM 4 track but not for sure.
The 1990 release of "Fantasia" (for the film's 50th anniversary) did indeed have 70mm prints. I watched the 70mm showing of it at the City Cinemas Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street near School of Visual Arts. I remember chuckling at the comments made by one audience member in protest of the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. "we should have went to the Ziegfeld where they have that Panavision stuff." ![[uhoh]](graemlins/uhoh.gif)
Regarding the 70mm sound mix for "Fantasia," it had discrete directional qualities typical of a true mag print. But I don't remember the show having much of any bass to it. So perhaps the .2 LFE channels in format 42 went unused on that one, which could make it a 70mm L,C,R,S mix --but that is just a guess.
quote:
Delta Modulation records the intensity differences of successive samples, and that doesn't require nearly as much data. The compression level of CDS ran approximately 4:1
That's a quote I wrote several years ago for an article about CDS for Perry Sun's Movie Sound Page, which quoted from someone else in now what seems like an obvious guess. With the CDS bitrate running near 6 million bits per second, it does not seem like the system had any data compression whatsoever when compared to the bandwidth LPCM 5.1 would require.
Delta Modulation coding is a more efficient audio coding system than Linear PCM. And that could dredge up a whole DVD-A versus Super Audio CD argument (MLP losslessly compresses a much larger bandwidth LPCM format whereas SACD's Direct Stream Digital is a Delta Sigma Modulation coder). I'm just wondering what the actual bandwidth savings was for CDS in choosing Delta Modulation over LPCM or going with a more aggressive yet lossy data compression system.
5.8 million bits per second is very staggering in size for a 1990 sound on film process. LC Digital and Dolby Digital both ran to the opposite extremes using 320kb/s coders. But even the 2.2 Mb/s total data rate of SDDS seems small compared to CDS. Only systems like IMAX DDP and the LPCM 5.1 tracks for DLP shows can compare in bandwidth to CDS. Hell, considering how primitive CCDs were in 1990, I'm kind of amazed CDS worked at all!
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 08-06-2003 08:05 PM
I saw Dick Tracy in 70mm CDS at the Loew's 84th St in NYC and while the sound did not drop out, it had all of the worse characteristics associated with digital sound: it was brittle and harsh sounding, although I don't know how much of that was due to the B-chain in use at the time.
As I remember it, there was a massive failure of a CDS film, probably Dick Tracy, on its premier showing that gave the system a lot of bad press. Also, theatre owners at the time were fighting the advent of digital sound as they did not want (as usual) to make an investment in hardware and those that were open to digital wanted a compatible, single print system. I remember being at a SMPTE convention in which CDS was demonstrated at the Ziegfeld and several projectionists and/or theatre managers in the audience criticized the system for not being backwards compatible.
But after the equipment failure and because of the other reasons mentioned above, CDS soon disappeared. It was probably just released a bit too soon. Personally, I was surprised by the success of DTS, since it was double-system based, even though it maintained the analog optical track.
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