Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Nice 35mm Dolby SR sound Pre. SRD/DTS/SDDS

my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

»	Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE » Operations » Film Handlers' Forum » Nice 35mm Dolby SR sound Pre. SRD/DTS/SDDS (Page 2)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3

Author

Topic: Nice 35mm Dolby SR sound Pre. SRD/DTS/SDDS

Sam D. Chavez
Film God

Posts: 2153
From: Martinez, CA USA
Registered: Aug 2003

posted 06-07-2018 03:23 PM

Xanadu was dual inventory Academy Mono on some prints as well as Dolby Stereo . This was normal with Universal back in those days.

| IP: Logged

Benjamin Bakija
Film Handler

Posts: 4
From: Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Registered: Apr 2018

posted 06-07-2018 04:59 PM

I saw Platoon last summer and I was amazed by the sound quality.

However, I haven't seen much 35mm films that had analog soundtracks only, but I remember that voices sounded very real, especially when there were short breaks in dialogue resulting in a very clean, realistic silence. Low frequencies were strong, but not too powerful. Adagio for Strings theme sounded beautiful, with right amount of bass. I'm not sure that it was Dolby SR, but I remember that the surround channel was active during shooting scenes.

| IP: Logged

Jason Metcalfe
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 134
From: Austin, TX, U.S.
Registered: May 2010

posted 06-07-2018 06:46 PM

The mag track DAYS OF THUNDER print we screened a few years ago had one of the best sounding, most dynamic mixes I've ever heard, and was definitely not lacking in the low end, really gave the impression you were right there at the track watching the races.

| IP: Logged

Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 06-08-2018 12:48 AM

If I remember correctly Days of Thunder footage was among the pieces of demo material to sell digital audio formats to movie theaters in the early 1990's.

quote: Stephan Shelley
There were 70mm prints of Day of Thunder that had the early ORC/Kodak digital system. The Cinema in Corte Medera CA got a week run out of it before the sound died. They decided it was time to run the print through the film cleaner and that was the end to the digital sound. The print was sent back and stripped with mag sound.

That's the first time I've heard failures of the Cinema Digital Sound format on 70mm prints of Days of Thunder blamed on film cleaners. I was under the impression the folks at Kodak and ORC just put too much faith in how much film printing equipment could do back in 1990. The bit rate of Cinema Digital Sound was pretty insane. They used a mild form of audio data compression called delta modulation. It was a forerunner of the ATRAC compression codec used on SDDS. But the end result was still roughly 6 million bits per second worth of bitmap data printed on 35mm or 70mm film. That divides down to 250,000 bits of digital data to cram in the margin of each film frame. Pretty tall order there.

The SDDS system had a total bit rate around 2.2 million bits per second. But that was divided between the primary digital track and redundant digital back up track. Dolby Digital had data spots easier to see with the naked eye. The entire digital track, including error correction data was around 550,000 bits per second, but the actual audio track was only 320 kilobits per second.

quote: Victor Liorentas
I have a lab fresh Dolby SR 35mm print of Remains Of The Day which sounds very smooth and dynamic.
Interesting thing is the Dolby Digital track on it reads great but is silent.No audio at all. Must have been when they were testing the system.

That was a Columbia Pictures title in 1993, after they had debuted the SDDS format. Prior to that the only movie Sony (under the Columbia/Tri-Star brand) had released in Dolby Digital was Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. They tried CDS before that with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Hudson Hawk (35mm only) and Flatliners in Los Angeles only (70mm prints in New York and elsewhere were 70mm mag only IIRC).

It wouldn't surprise me if the studio had a dummy SR•D track on Remains of the Day to compare the consistency of the printed digital audio track. I remember seeing 35mm trailers from the Disney studios for movies like Nixon that had DTS time code; this was before they started releasing movies with DTS audio (starting with Con Air). I specifically remember the release of The Edge (Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Bart the scary as f*** giant ass bear) in 1997. That 35mm print had Dolby Digital audio and DTS time code, but as far as I can tell no DTS discs were ever made for it.

| IP: Logged

Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 06-08-2018 01:22 AM

The theater with the failed CDS print most likely used a dry film cleaner on a dirty print (meaning the dirt accumulates and then scratches the print as the dirt becomes abrasive). In total fairness though, the CDS system as Bobby pointed out tried to cram too damn much data in the allotted space and if there was enough dirt on the print to cause a scratch, then the show wouldn't have ran but for another day or two anyway before failing due to too much dirt obscuring the data blocks.

Film prints must not be permitted to become dirty. If you can see dirt accumulating on screen or you find your projector isn't completely clean after the show, your print is dirty. Regular preventive cleaning (preferably wet) is mandatory for the print to stay in lab new condition during the run.

| IP: Logged

Stephan Shelley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 854
From: castro valley, CA, usa
Registered: Nov 2014

posted 06-08-2018 01:40 AM

It was definitely a dry media cleaner. From what I heard back then they ran there digital print longer than most of the other theatres.

I also heard that most of the engineers on the Cinema Digital Sound project went to work for Sony on the SDDS project.

As I remember the CDS track replaced one the outboard inner mag track on 70mm. It was wider than the mag track and you had to use a modified gate pad on a JJ.

| IP: Logged

Florian Kuik
Film Handler

Posts: 39
From: meppel, drenthe, nederland
Registered: Feb 2016

posted 06-08-2018 06:02 AM

Brad,

My 2 prints are on polyester stock and SR. They are UK prints, AGFA stock if I remember right. One of it has strangely red parts in it. Someone mentioned maybe it sticked in the development lab or something (the print is otherwise looking new)

The leader mentions Sprectral Recording.

| IP: Logged

Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 06-08-2018 09:05 AM

All Agfa fades. Not like pre-82 Eastman, but all Agfa (and Fuji) lowfade does experience color shifting. Agfa is worse though.

Very interesting it's on polyester. The first Agfa polyester we experienced here in the US was on prints of The Fugitive, and virtually all of them have red discoloration randomly taking over the image as time goes on. It's absolutely horrible stock.

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-08-2018 02:43 PM

NOt pre-digital but True Lies is abn absolute knock out. I had just installed my first really big THX system and the guy fomr THX that came in to certify it sugested we listen to the analog tracks because someone in the THX office said they were a lot better than the SRDF track. So we did listen and we ended up running that movie in SR the entire time it played. It was THAT spectacular.

Mark

| IP: Logged

Jerry Axelsson
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 107
From: Stockholm, Sweden
Registered: May 2005

posted 06-08-2018 03:25 PM

Hello Mark,

I also have a very nice memory and impression of the 35mm prints of TRUE LIES. The image was a knock-out in sharpness, and the SR track was nice. But we had a CP50 at the time and an average sound system with Dolby A only, so technical aspects where held back to a large extent...

| IP: Logged

Tony Bandiera Jr
Film God

Posts: 3067
From: Moreland Idaho
Registered: Apr 2004

posted 06-10-2018 01:04 PM

I have a print of Mortal Combat (the first one). Both the SR and DTS tracks are pretty dynamic, with good deep bass and very active and full surrounds. Too bad the movie itself is so inane.

On my test reel (consists of trailers of all sound formats in varying condition, plus some Dolby Digital snipes and the Ultra*Stereo snipe) there is a trailer for the film "Beautiful Thing"...a great test for dialog intelligibility. If you can understand the very UK accents in the dialog, your EQ is, as Gordon Ramsey would say, "spot-on." It also has some old Mama Cass music which tests both midrange EQ and quality (Will sound very "honky" if the horns are not crossed over correctly or midrange EQ is too hot) but also wow and flutter.

The only drawback to that trailer (which IIRC was a red band) is the subject matter (gay teens fall in love), so depending on the client, I had to advise them that my test reel contains content they may find offensive.

One of the absolute worst feature films tracks was Stallone's "Cobra" ..they literally pushed the analog tracks so hard on the low end they clipped badly..you could actually see the tracks clipping if you pulled the aperture plate and projected it. That film generated many service calls for me.

And some years later, the "Addams Family Rap" trailer came out...and same thing, they clipped the analog track on all the bass hits. I think I still have that trailer but left it off the test reel.

| IP: Logged

Michael Brown
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1522
From: Bradford, England
Registered: May 2001

posted 06-18-2018 11:59 AM

70mm mag track of The Thing is pretty impressive. If it wern't for the background hiss i'd have thought it was DTS. - really good dynamic range.

35mm optical (not sure if A or SR) of Top Gun I saw a few years ago was sounding pretty good. Good quality and good surrounds.

Koyaanisqatsi in 35mm optical is pretty good for the phillip glass musical score.

I think some of it can be down to the acoustics of the theatre as well. This is going back a few years but an SR print of Mr Deeds at my local multiplex sounded like crap, later in the afternoon I ran Moulin Rouge in Dolby A at my university cinema and it sounded a lot better.

| IP: Logged

Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler

Posts: 387
From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 06-18-2018 12:43 PM

quote: Stephan Shelley
I also heard that most of the engineers on the Cinema Digital Sound project went to work for Sony on the SDDS project.

Some of those CDS veterans went to DTS as well. A big part of the DTS philosophy was applying the lessons learned from CDS, and making sure the DTS digital system could coexist with the optical track, and that there was an elegant fallback to analog in the event of digital failure.

| IP: Logged

Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 06-18-2018 01:54 PM

ALL Moulin Rouge prints had an SR track. Playing in A would have sounded terrible.

quote: Daniel Schulz
A big part of the DTS philosophy was applying the lessons learned from CDS, and making sure the DTS digital system could coexist with the optical track, and that there was an elegant fallback to analog in the event of digital failure.

The same statement applies to SRD and SDDS as well. (Kind of obvious really.)

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-18-2018 02:05 PM

quote: Jerry Axelsson
I also have a very nice memory and impression of the 35mm prints of TRUE LIES. The image was a knock-out in sharpness, and the SR track was nice.

I can also tell you the dailies (which I ran quite a bit of) looked like they were shot on 65mm instead of 35mm. The images we projected were just knock out quality. The lenses and film stocks used were quite common in the day of this film and I ahev listed them below. I can only say the lab did an extra good job and the lenses must have been hand selected. It's one of the very best Super 35 shows ever done IMHO.

2 hr 21 min (141 min)
Sound Mix 70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints) | Dolby Digital (35 mm prints) | DTS
Color Color
Aspect Ratio 1.78 : 1 (open matte)
2.20 : 1 (70mm)
2.39 : 1
Camera Arriflex 35 BL4, Zeiss Standard Speed, Super Speed and Cooke Varotal Lenses
Arriflex 35 IIC, Zeiss Standard Speed and Super Speed Lenses
Arriflex 35-III, Zeiss Standard Speed, Super Speed and Cooke Varotal Lenses
Beaumont VistaVision Camera
Bell & Howell Eyemo
Moviecam Compact, Zeiss Standard Speed and Super Speed Lenses
Laboratory Continental Film Laboratories, Miami (FL), USA (additional film processing)
DeLuxe, Hollywood (CA), USA (prints)
Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), Hollywood (CA), USA
DuArt Film Laboratories Inc., New York, USA (additional film processing)
Film Length 3,855 m (Sweden)
Negative Format 35 mm (also horizontal) (Eastman EXR 50D 5245, EXR 200T 5293, EXR 500T 5296)
Cinematographic Process Super 35 (common-top)
VistaVision (special effects)
Printed Film Format 35 mm (anamorphic)
70 mm (blow-up)

| IP: Logged

All times are Central (GMT -6:00)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3

Printer-friendly view of this topic

The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.