posted 03-26-2007 08:39 PM                    

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I can't stand the AMC Century City 14. I can't believe that so many people (in hollywood!) would want to wacth a movie in such small thatres with tiny screens, awfull sound, and projectionists who cant seem to focus for ****. AMC should bulldoze that sucker and rebuild a nice theatre in its place.

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posted 03-27-2007 01:05 AM                    

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I'd like to use this opportunity to point out that on page 1 of this thread I said:

quote: Mike Olpin

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I can't stand the AMC Century City 14. I can't believe that so many people (in hollywood!) would want to wacth a movie in such small thatres with tiny screens, awfull sound, and projectionists who cant seem to focus for ****. AMC should bulldoze that sucker and rebuild a nice theatre in its place.

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HA! Called it!

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posted 03-27-2007 01:37 PM                       

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And Along Comes Digital Audio

In 1990, the Optical Radiation Corporation in collaboration with the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the world’s first digital audio format for film. Called Cinema Digital Sound, or CDS, it was first introduced to the public with the 70mm release of Dick Tracy. Unfortunately, it only enjoyed a handful of releases before ORC pulled the format from the marketplace. CDS was a highly engineered technology, incorporating an error detection and correction scheme in the printed bit map to ensure robustness of the digital signal. The bit map itself was impressive. Thanks to the support of Eastman Kodak and specially developed film stock, the format boasted a very tiny pixel size, giving the format lots of digital bandwidth on the film. Audio was recorded without data compression, but instead of the commonly used 16-bit linear PCM scale, it used a custom 12-bit logarithmic scale that produced excellent sound with a 90 dB dynamic range. Despite its clever engineering, CDS suffered from a major shortcoming, that being that the actual recorded digital sound track for 35mm films was placed where the stereo optical track normally resides. In other words, there wasn’t a stereo optical track that could be used as a backup. CDS also suffered from playback equipment problems, which, combined with the absence of a backup track, turned the major filmmakers away from the format.

Optical Radiation’s CDS format should be remembered as the pioneer for today’s digital film sound formats. They were the first to introduce digital audio to the theatre, and the first to implement a discrete version of today’s popular 5.1 technique in a major exhibition format. The impact of the 5.1 format has been tremendous. From an artistic point-of-view, discrete digital sound has been a real boon, as it frees the mixers from the limitations and hassle of mixing audio for the matrix. Full range and discrete surround channels have given the mixers the ability to use these channels much more freely. If one were to listen to the mixes of today and those of 10 years ago, the degree of artistic freedom that the digital formats offer will be obvious.

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The first commercially available digital sound-on-film system for theatrical motion pictures, CDS is gone now. Today we have DTS-Digital, Dolby Digital, and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound. In fact SDDS was designed by some of those who pioneered CDS.

What went wrong? Well opinions here vary. Some would say that the choice to use minimal data reduction and the resulting very small bit (pixel) size made the system much more susceptible to every type of problem including print wear, film lab errors etc. Others will point out the fact that the lack of a backup analog track (In 35mm CDS sound was printed in the same area were the analog optical track would normally go) would forever make CDS a premium process, requiring dual print inventories, not to mention making the occasional breakdown catastrophic and reputation destroying. Some have said the electronics simply wasn't reliable enough for hot projection booths. But everyone agreed on this: When it worked and it really DID work quite well the vast majority of the time, IT SOUNDED GREAT!

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posted 03-27-2007 02:24 PM                    

quote: Stephen Furley

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Was there a 35mm only version of the reader, or did you have to buy the dual-guage version, even if you only ever ran 35?

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posted 03-27-2007 03:32 PM                    

quote: Stephen Furley

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I'm not even sure if it ever had any public shows over here. The reader looked quite nicely engineered.

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