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Topic: Jurassic Park: Mixed for Dolby Digital??

Aaron Garman
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: Toledo, OH USA
Registered: Mar 2003

posted 11-15-2011 10:15 PM

So how far ahead of the release date did that happen?

AJG

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 11-15-2011 10:34 PM

quote: Louis Bornwasser
btw: Jurassic was supposed to be Dolby Digital, but Dolby wasn't ready. dts was developed suddenly over a weekend; damn good job, all things considered. Louis

Dolby Digital was made available to commercial theaters a year before the release of Jurassic Park. SR•D debuted with Batman Returns in June of 1992. The format was first announced in March of 1991, a full year before any units were made available for sale. CDS' 35mm system was being formally introduced, with The Doors being the first advertised CDS 35mm release. Dolby Digital vaporware and the spotty reliability problems of CDS killed the CDS format, even with all the visibility that came from the Terminator 2 release.

If anything, the sheer lack of Dolby Digital installations at the time helped Universal back DTS. Universal and Amblin wanted a lot of movie theaters playing Jurassic Park with digital sound. That wasn't going to happen with SR•D. Dolby Digital DA-10 systems originally cost $20,000 a pop. IIRC, CDS was just as expensive. Dolby made the early mistake of seeing Dolby Digital as a replacement only for 70mm mag prints in flagship class theaters and priced the system that way. Rumor, legend or whatever has it that Steven Spielberg experimented with CDS during the post production of Hook and was completely turned off by sound on film systems because of it. DTS had a different take on movie sound and Spielberg bought into it. DTS systems cost much less and the concept was more reliable.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 11-15-2011 11:48 PM

DTS was made over a weekend? I thought it was developed from idea to finished product the night before Jurassic Park came out. [Smile]

quote: Manny Knowles
Was the 2.0 intended to be decoded to LCRS?

Yes, it hooked into the solar cell inputs of your sound processor and was decoded there.

quote: Jesse Skeen
I thought the 2-channel DTS still had a discrete LFE?

No form of cinema DTS has a discrete subwoofer.

quote: Bobby Henderson
I thought the existence of DTS-S was common knowledge, at least among anyone who cared at all about movie theater sound.

No kidding, right? I knew about this even when I was an usher and our theater didn't even get Jurassic Park. But I knew which theaters had full DTS and which ones were DTS stereo. I think I managed to grab some DTS-S discs and still have them somewhere. Not Jurassic Park, but some other movie(s).

quote: Aaron Garman
Was it some form of LPCM, or was it still the proprietary DTS compression format?

Still compressed via the ATX or whatever they called their compression scheme.

quote: Aaron Garman
I'm still guessing that while not 6 track, it sounded better than optical Dolby A.

Of course, but the sound systems it was hooked to usually were not designed to handle it as they had wimpy speakers and the such. I remember hearing reports of blown subs and high frequency drivers. I remember my sister telling me that it sounded like it was raining during the entire movie where she saw it (a DTS-S house).

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Brad Miller
Administrator

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

posted 11-16-2011 03:09 AM

I ran both systems (6 track and stereo). Joe's info above is correct.

I was told by someone (can't remember who) that the entire reason dts released the "stereo" version was because there was a shortage of then-scarce cd-rom drives. This way they only needed 1 per system. I can't help but think even if that was true, just as much of the reason was people with systems not capable of handling 4+ channels of discrete audio inputs.

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Aaron Garman
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: Toledo, OH USA
Registered: Mar 2003

posted 11-16-2011 03:27 AM

I'd love to see a list of the first DTS installs in 1993...in Michael Coate fashion. Would DTS (well Datasat) still have that information?

AJG

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Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler

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

posted 11-16-2011 07:11 PM

It turns out we do have a first-installations list (I love having a few employees here who have been around from the very beginning!) It unfortunately does not differentiate between 5.1 channel and 2 channel sites though. My impression on the short-lived 2 channel experiment was that had nothing to do with a shortage of CD drives or APT-X chips, but a simple miscalculation as to market demand. Remember Dolby had been beating the drum for some kind that full discrete digital sound was for premiere houses only (essentially to replace 70mm) - DTS mistakenly thought there would be high demand for 2 channel digital sound (Lt/RT, decoded on playback to LCRS).

Anyway - Brad, once I get this cleared to post, is there a place I can upload a PDF of the site list, since people seem interested?

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Darryl Spicer
Film God

Posts: 3250
From: Lexington, KY, USA
Registered: Dec 2000

posted 11-16-2011 09:46 PM

I can tell you first hand that the install for Jurassic Park at the then Cinemark Man O' War Movies 8 was a 5.1 install and it was the only one in the Lexington market at the time. I remember the clips from Backdraft, Far & Away and Born on the 4th of July we ran testing the system. I kept that same unit running with some upgrades and a couple of CD rom drive changes for about 15 years. I moved it from that location to another location we had were it finally died a few years ago.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 11-16-2011 09:49 PM

I would have found it hard to believe there was a shortage of CD-ROM drives, even though the original DTS units used pretty expensive SCSI-based Toshiba units with CD caddies.

I'd like to see a list of the original DTS sites. With some research it might not be too difficult to figure out which venues had DTS-6 systems and which ones had DTS-S.

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Brad Miller
Administrator

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

posted 11-16-2011 10:10 PM

Email the list to me and I will add it to this thread.

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Jesse Skeen
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1517
From: Sacramento, CA
Registered: Aug 2000

posted 11-17-2011 01:56 AM

Here's a video I shot in 1994 of the now-gone Cinema 2 theater (single-screen) in Davis, CA. It had the matrixed DTS system hooked to a 1981 Dolby CP50 when Jurassic Park came out, the last movie it ran that supported it was "Crooklyn" a few months later. You can see the sound rack at about 2:14.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3VeYSCfDSA

After Crooklyn played the DTS unit was sent out to be converted to 6-channel with a 2nd CD-ROM drive since there weren't going to be any more releases that used the 2-channel system. When this video was shot the DTS system was installed but with mono surrounds since that was all the CP50 could do. A CP65 was installed a couple months later, but until then I chose to bypass the timecode reader and run the analog sound track. I know some people are gonna disagree with me for that, but I felt it was better to play the analog track uncompromised than to play the DTS track with the surrounds downmixed to mono.

Funny thing was shortly after the CP65 was installed, there was a slight buzzing when the DTS came on. The main projectionist claimed he couldn't hear it; he did replace a part in the DTS unit that fixed it for a while but it came back, but by then the theater was slated to be closed anyways. Read my video description for more useless info about this theater.

quote: Bobby Henderson
Rumor, legend or whatever has it that Steven Spielberg experimented with CDS during the post production of Hook and was completely turned off by sound on film systems because of it. DTS had a different take on movie sound and Spielberg bought into it. DTS systems cost much less and the concept was more reliable.

Of course it was only reliable if the discs were included- there were MANY times when someone 'forgot' to include the discs. I even got into trouble with someone at DTS for ranting about it on an old Usenet group- their attitude was "how DARE you criticize our system!" I had a list of movies about a page long which we had to play at least once in analog because the discs weren't included, for a couple I had to do some extensive calling around to get them and for some I just waited to see if they would ever show up (they didn't) or if any customers would complain about the sound not being in digital (they didn't). When the system shown in this video was installed in another theater, even THEN they often didn't get DTS discs, and this was around 2007!

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