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Author Topic: 35mm Digital Sound Playback Preference? Marin Zorica Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 671 From: Biograd na Moru, Croatia Registered: May 2003 posted 04-29-2010 02:50 AM                     I do have one open air here, we are using only left and right channel, first because they have only two speaker, and second because they need to take them in and out for every show. As I do have sony DFP-3000 I use monitor output, and there I can mix whatever channels I want to hear, so for LEFT speaker mixer are Left, Left Surround, Center and Sub, and for RIGHT there are Right, Right Surround, Center and Sub, it's good trick to have that inside mixed in processor, so saving some money for mixer and space in rack  |  IP: Logged Bill Duelly Film Handler Posts: 92 From: Roselle Park, NJ Registered: Feb 2006 posted 04-29-2010 08:23 AM                     I have been very impressed with the dynamic range of the SDDS 3000 I have recently setup, but the sporadic drops are really getting annoying. I'm trying to find out any rhyme or reason to that activity. I run a print that has quite a bit of wear from 2001 and it plays flawlessly, but some gently used prints from 1997 seem to drop at will ( what seems consistant is when it gets near a lab splice, it starts to get weird. That I attribute to light leak problems in printing). Also, I run off of reels, not a platter if that helps in figuring out.. Were there a lot of problems with SDDS tracks in the late 1990's? I keep hearing that the 3000 system was the best one. Maybe I am missing something in setup?  |  IP: Logged Marin Zorica Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 671 From: Biograd na Moru, Croatia Registered: May 2003 posted 04-29-2010 12:01 PM                     Bill, first you need to check are reader is clean and so, but you probably did that....second as you run changeover, is film tension is constant or is woofeling near rader? I bet you know all that, now it would be good to calibrate reader CCD gain, it's simple by connecting reader to PC (RS232 is behind cover near reader cable). I have one print from 2004, print is very damaged since I did use it to set my spool system while developing some things, it has many splices, tearing and so....but SDDS don't drop at all on it. If you need advice how to align reader let us know, or search because I think I wrote that somewhere here already.  |  IP: Logged Warren Dewey Film Handler Posts: 28 From: monterey ca usa Registered: Jan 2006 posted 04-29-2010 12:08 PM                        Back when I used to mix movies, we a-b-c-d-e'd SR vs SRD vs SDDS vs DTS vs the original 96Khz 24 bit surround mixes on an independent show that I thought sounded pretty good. I heard it in a theater recently and it still sounds good. This was all on the same mix stage, and about 6 people pretty much agreed on this ranking. Print problems like wear and dropouts were not considered of course: 1. Original mix 2. DTS - very "open" and clean, close to original 3. SDDS - slightly squashed and nonlinear dynamics 4. SRD - very compressed and oddly close to optical in character 5. optical (SR)- expected limited bandwidth and crosstalk issues  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 04-29-2010 12:14 PM                     Did you do it blind or did you know what you were listening to? Steve  |  IP: Logged Sean McKinnon Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1712 From: Peabody Massachusetts Registered: Sep 2000 posted 04-29-2010 04:01 PM                        I guess my question was how would you tap off the Ac-3 bit stream from a da-20, cp500, or cp650?  |  IP: Logged Warren Dewey Film Handler Posts: 28 From: monterey ca usa Registered: Jan 2006 posted 04-30-2010 12:17 AM                        It wasn't totally blind. Two of us spent quite a while matching levels. This is really important. Even tiny differences in level can be perceived as qualitative differences. Then one person would start rotating through the different outputs, and take notes on the comments. We took turns being the switcher. After a while we all started to zero in on commonly perceived differences. It wasn't that hard to differentiate. It should be noted these were all professional sound people, accustomed to listening critically.  |  IP: Logged Marin Zorica Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 671 From: Biograd na Moru, Croatia Registered: May 2003 posted 05-03-2010 10:55 AM                     quote: Warren Dewey It wasn't totally blind. Two of us spent quite a while matching levels. This is really important. Even tiny differences in level can be perceived as qualitative differences. This is totally true, I also do have back in broadcast field, the more "powerful" sound is, eq the more average level is raised, so that is "louder" the more people will like it, also there were some reasearch from Orban (they make broadcast processors) when people did search between station, they stay on most lauder. Another thing considering SDDS drops out, if we use down mix to say 4 channel SDDS which is available under preset option, should we have less drops on bad print, as less channel, less information from film is needed for decode?  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 05-03-2010 12:52 PM                     Interesting. Thus far (and it has been a while), your findings have not mirrored mine in several "shoot outs" with different material. In my case, the people listening did not know which format was playing. And, regardless of venue, the results tend to be consistent. That is, for those that could hear a difference and MANY did not notice any difference. These are not critically trained folks, by the most part...but a range from installers to just patrons. There is one digital format that I can normally pick off pretty quickly and it was ranked pretty high on your list. I would not call its high-end very natural at all. Steve  |  IP: Logged System Notices Forum Watchdog / Soup Nazi Posts: 215 Registered: Apr 2004 posted 11-27-2011 02:04 PM                 It has been 573 days since the last post.  |  IP: Logged Aaron Garman Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1470 From: Toledo, OH USA Registered: Mar 2003 posted 11-27-2011 02:04 PM                     Could a lot of these differences between the formats simply be due to the person encoding a given track? I mean, who does the encoding for a given print? Is is Dolby, DTS (datasat), or Sony? Or is it done at the lab by the printer? The same arguments came up a lot with home audio Dolby Digital and DTS back in laserdisc days, and it was hard to do a fair comparison since different people were doing each respective encode. Having said that, I would imagine that DTS (APT-X100) is the most capable because it compresses the least from an original master. Dolby is extraordinarily efficient, but are there encoders for film prints as convoluted as their professional home ones that offers compression, mix down metadata, etc.? I know very little about SDDS other than when I saw Titanic presented in it, it blew me away. AJG  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 11-27-2011 08:14 PM                     SDDS's compression was inbetween DTS and SR-D .. about 8x compression. SDDS was an odd duck of sorts in it's digital playback methods. Processor was self contained-completely bypassed the other processor in the rack. If the digital failed out, it would revert to it's own mono output since there were no pulse from the SDDS processor to tell the default processor to pick up the stereo optical sound if SDDS failed out. Processor itself had a slight funky volume control where the output display was in dB, not simple graduates like the Dolby and others were we use "7" as default for sound tests and required volume settings. Thus "0.0" was the default setting so where you ran your movies at a -"2.0" for a comfortable listening. What I liked on the processor is that the front display opens up and you can see the individual frames and it would also display it's own error messages since the trackss were on the film that wore the most - you were good to have good SDDS sound for a couple of week before dropouts occur. Reader had two pickups-the soundtrack side was the main one and the backup track on non-soundtrack side of the film. Soundtrack side was 26 frames ahead of the optical and the opposite side was 26 frames behind the optical track. The main sprocket in the middle had a driver behind it that would pulse the LED so the pixel infomation read by the readers was a steady image. True though, the SDDS system had the opportunity to do eight channels. Yes, when it worked, it really worked well. But after a couple of weeks running, there were so many dropouts from digital to mono that operators would soon bypass that reader (the earlier 2000 reader) to run the other digital readers in the film path string.  |  IP: Logged Aaron Garman Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1470 From: Toledo, OH USA Registered: Mar 2003 posted 11-27-2011 08:26 PM                     We had one SDDS house when I was still projecting, and the only unreliable thing about it was prints not having a SDDS track. I did always feel that the EQ was conservative and that most films, even loud ones, were not as loud as the other houses with digital sound. It was eventually replaced by a DA20 and boy did they do a good EQ this time. Up until the digital cinema conversion, it was probably the best sounding house in that complex. AJG  |  IP: Logged

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