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Topic: Bummer, no DTS for Captain America 2

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-03-2014 03:32 PM

quote: Dustin Mitchell
DTS is (was?) used as a way to 'dub' a movie into another language without having to make all new prints.

That can be a curse as well as a blessing.

Apologies in advance for the R-rated language in the following anecdote, but it loses something with censorship.

I was working in a DTS-equipped house in the mid-90s, which showed a sneak preview of Men in Black about a month before the UK release date. It was a promotion run by a chain of supermarkets, with people who'd earned so many loyalty card points being entered into a draw for the tickets.

The print arrived only about an half an hour before showtime: I didn't even have time to inspect it properly. I was checking the heads and tails and lacing up each reel of the changeover show while the previous one was running. I had the monitor speaker on, but with the noise of the projectors and the ventilation fans, I couldn't really hear the dialogue from the workbench.

About two minutes after a changeover, the phone rang. Duty manager: "Leo, can you check the sound? I think there could be a problem." Customer's voice heard, faintly in background: "They're all talking in fookin' wop language ... yeah, the film's gone all eyetie!" So I cranked up the monitor volume, and sure enough, the dialogue was in Italian.

To cut a long story short, the DTS had failed because of a nasty scratch right down the timecode, and we found out the hard way that the stereo variable area track on the print was of the Italian dub. The scratch affected reels 4-6, and so a previous cinema running it on 6K reels with a single changeover must have had an accident. For the last hour of the movie, the dialogue kept swapping between English and Italian.

It turned out that the distributor had imported that print at the last minute for the promotional preview screenings, and had checked in advance that all the places it was going to had DTS. There was a sheet of paper in the can of reel 1 telling us to run it in DTS only, not Dolby or the analog track, and furthermore suggesting that we switched our Dolby digital head and analog exciter lamps off for the duration of the screening. It didn't say why, but I found that out the hard way!

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Dustin Mitchell
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1865
From: Mondovi, WI, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 04-03-2014 04:55 PM

Yeah, I forgot to mention in my post that when I first read/heard about that particular 'perk' of DTS my first thought was 'DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!'.

For the record I always liked the sound of DTS, it was my favorite digital format; but just like Dolby and SDDS it's reliability was still subject to print wear (albeit it was more robust than Dolby and far far more robust than SDDS).

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David E. Nedrow
Master Film Handler

Posts: 368
From: Columbus, OH, USA
Registered: Oct 2008

posted 04-04-2014 11:43 AM

As an FYI, we have print 568, so there are a lot out there.

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 04-10-2014 01:15 AM

Definitely shows that DCIP is doing their best to put the scare out there that film is on its way out, while the studios are still striking prints and not worrying about the end of film.

Prob, in a way, it's might have been more of a blessing for them to keep striking prints due to the lesser demand of prints that are needed.

Meanwhile, the digital owners are now facing a new kettle of problems related to a system that depends on a computer...and we all know how computers have their own mind at times.

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Sean Weitzel
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 619
From: Vacaville, CA (1790 miles west of Rockwall)
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 04-14-2014 10:33 AM

Sony used to operate a site www.sdds.com that only went offline late last year sometime. It maintained an active list of current and future titles that would have SDDS tracks. I remember looking at the list soon before the site finally died and it had titles listed going into 2014. The last snapshot of the title list at www.archive.org is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701055758/http://www.sdds.com/

Also NT audio in Santa Monica can still shoot sdds tracks (along with everything else) http://www.ntaudio.com/services/optical-soundtrack.php

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Steve Moore
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 211
From: Leeds, West Yorks, UK
Registered: Apr 2008

posted 04-14-2014 12:27 PM

35mm, what's that? I've not had one here since June '13 (though I do know a few in the UK which have had the odd thing!)

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