Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Dolby - Defective SRD Track?

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Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 07-25-2003, 11:30 AM:

I got a report here that says the sound for Terminator 3 totally cut out for "a long time." It was playing in SRD.

The movie was playing on the system that I just serviced; the system was getting 7-F-F error rates (totally defaulting to SR) and when I left it was getting rates in the 2-3-4 range. Mostly 3's.

For two days the system was tested with a movie that wasn't selling a lot of tickets just in case the problem returned. Everything went fine with that movie, so they switched to T3.

The manager told me on the phone, "come to think of it...this is the movie that was playing when we first started getting the dropouts."

I asked him to replay the T3 print today before opening. I'm curious if the dropout will happen again. I've also asked him to monitor the error rates periodically throughout the screening. If the dropout happens again, he will note the reel number and then run the movie once again tomorrow morning. I'm trying to see if the problem can be duplicated and, possibly, isolated to a particular portion of the movie.

Is it possible that there could be a reel with valid SRD data that doesn't actually translate into any audio? In other words, digital silence?

What strikes me as odd is that the system did not default to SR so I'm thinking that the processor was getting "good" data.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 07-25-2003, 11:38 AM:

Yes, it is possible, but it would affect all other prints as well.
There was a similar problem with a few SDDS prints in Germany The soundtrack contained silence in a few places. There had been a mistake during the encoding process. The encoder had been fed silence now and then, and due to sloppy QCing, they hadn`t noticed.

In this case, is it possible that you forgot to switch the processor back into normal mode? Usually when you service a Dolby Digital unit, you put it into non-reversion mode so that it doesn`t switch between digital and analog.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 07-25-2003, 01:06 PM:

Ah, yes. That's a possibility. I will call the manager and check that out right now. I'll let you know.