When did dual inventory (Mono/Dolby A Stereo) prints cease to be a thing.

[Gordon McLeod]

In that era there was the proposal by the national film board of canada to use a ccd camera to read multiple optical tracks that just the outer edge of the modulation was recorded with a UV dye superimpossed over a regular VA track. Also at that time they with RCA was propossing the dual language print

[Michael Coate]

Raiders never got a Vistasonic release, it was abandoned last-minute, because Paramount abandoned the format, apparently after quite rampant reliability issues with the equipment during the run of Popeye.

Paramount abandoned Vistasonic after using it on “Dragonslayer,” which was released two weeks after “Raiders.”

https://www.in70mm.com/library/engag...ayer/index.htm

DRAGONSLAYER: THE 70MM-DOLBY AND 35MM-VISTASONIC PRESENTATIONS

Compiled by Michael Coate

The following is a list of the 70mm first-run engagements of “Dragonslayer” in North America. These were full-frame (2.20:1) blow-ups sourced from anamorphic 35mm photography. The audio was Six-Track Dolby Stereo (“A” encoded, split-surround). The Disney/Paramount co-production was released on June 26th, 1981.

CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles — GCC’s Avco Center
Los Angeles — Mann’s Hollywood

NEW YORK
New York — Walter Reade’s Bay

--------------------

The following is a list of the 35mm VistaSonic Sound presentations of “Dragonslayer” in North America. This was one of two films released in the short-lived VistaSonic process (“Popeye” was the other). The audio was discrete optical (as opposed to matrixed optical which is what the standard Dolby Stereo process of the era entailed).

CALIFORNIA
San Diego — Pacific’s Cinerama
San Francisco — Blumenfeld’s Regency II

MASSACHUSETTS
Boston — Sack’s Cheri Triplex

NEW YORK
New York — Walter Reade’s Baronet

PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia — SamEric’s Mark I

This information has been principally referenced from film industry trade publications and regional newspaper promotion. Any move-over, subsequent-run, re-release, and international engagements have not been accounted for in this article.

7DB4E083-708D-4F3A-AF27-6BC414902B90.jpeg

[Steve Guttag]

CAT566 was awesome! I used it a LOT with reverse scan readers to set LED position (Component Engineering allowed great flexibility in getting things dialed in).

[Sam Chavez]

I'll have to reach out to a friend who worked on this project and a little later came to Dolby Labs for a couple of years. I'm thinking there was some sort of companding and this is where DBX might have come in. As to the recording camera, Westrex 1231 had 8 ribbons that could be modulated individually. The Dolby illumination uniformity test film, Cat. No. 566? was shot this way on octave centers and when read by an RTA produced pillars that started LF on the left side and ended up at 2Khz on the right side. These pillars were to be within 1 dB, one to the other. Usually, the ribbons were modulated in pairs to produce 4 bi-lateral, variable area soundtracks.l

[Marcel Birgelen]

I believe Vistasonic and Parasound were the same. They experimented at Regency 2 and Northpoint in SF. There are 8 ribbons on the Westrex camera and it's possible to do 8 channels but can't recall number of actual elements on the solar cell. Could swear it was 8 wires coming out of the cell but could be wrong. Dolby was their competitor so they didn't let us see much even though even though we were present at the installation to put things back to normal when they got done. I recall Popeye but not Raiders. Anyway, gone in a flash and left lots of great speakers and amps behind, including a cube of nine subs. AB Systems amps.

Raiders never got a Vistasonic release, it was abandoned last-minute, because Paramount abandoned the format, apparently after quite rampant reliability issues with the equipment during the run of Popeye.

AFAIK, the prints that were released only featured four optical channels on the print, maybe they envisioned a later upgrade to 8 tracks? But apparently the noise level was already high and it's somehow hard to imagine 8 discrete optical channels fitting in the space of the existing optical audio tracks. Maybe they used two readers per track with some analog delay circuitry to compensate for the noise caused by read-errors?

Also, there were apparently stereo surrounds, but they were matrix-encoded into the left and right front channel.

The next thing I've heard about is very sketchy and I can't really find anything about it on-line, but apparently, the center channel could be panned around the three front-channels using some kind of control commands, probably audio cues on one or more channels outside of the audible spectrum. This would've allowed to pan the dialog around, but would've essentially limited the dialog to one person speaking at any time when the effect was used.

[Sam Chavez]

Looks familiar. Can't find anything to correct..

[Martin Brooks]

I wonder if Sam Chavez knows what movies actually were released in Dolby Mono. The era of the 364/E2 combination predate my cinema time.

I'm (obviously) not Sam, but this is from my notes, much of which comes from a history that Dolby used to publish and other items are probably sourced from Larry Blake's and other articles back in the day:

December 1971: Clockwork Orange 1st to use Dolby NR on all premixes & masters

February 1972: Model 364 Mono Cinema Processor
February 1972: A Quiet Revolution Dolby demo film
1972: Speed Merchants (racing documentary)

September 1973 : E2 Cinema EQ Processor

May 1974: Callan 1st Film w/ Dolby mono shown at Cannes
November 1974: Stardust (one-reel demo) Dolby mono + Demo Dolby Stereo at SMPTE, Toronto
November 1974: Little Prince (3 Tk Mag Dolby at Radio City?) Blake: 4tk mag

Other 1975: (Dolby list says '74) Flame, Alfie Darling, Rocky Horror (8/14/75 UK) (these were probably mono)
Feb1975: CP100 Dolby Stereo & Mag Installed for London presentation of Tommy
6/11/1975: Nashville 4tk mag Dolby
10/10/1975: Lisztomania First commercial Dolby Stereo film for general release.

Corrections welcomed.

[Martin Brooks]

Yes, Popeye was just 4 optical stripes. It sounded like crap on a Dolby CP-50 so we complained, Paramount told our booker that the print was sent by mistake, and they replaced it with a normal Dolby Stereo print. I saved a few frames of the Parasound print, but where the house they are now, decades later, I have no idea.

I could have sworn I saw Popeye at the old Beekman in NYC in Vistasonic sound but I just looked up the ad and it wasn't playing there, so I must have seen it at the Loews Orpheum I and I remember it sounding fantastic. I remember being very surprised. But the ad has no sound format indication. In Manhattan, it also played at the Loews State and the Bay Cinema.

[Martin Brooks]

And yet, I consider the 2001:ASO to be an outstanding soundtrack from Stanley Kubrick and it wasn't mono; quite the opposite. Wasn't "Clockwork Orange" Dolby-Mono or something like that?

According to my notes, Clockwork was the first film to use Dolby Noise Reduction on all premixes and masters, but it was never presented in Dolby. Clockwork was released in December of 1971. The Dolby 364 mono Cinema Processor wasn't released until February of 1972 and around the same time, a Dolby demo film called "A Quiet Revolution". "Callan" was the first Dolby mono film shown at Cannes and that wasn't until May of '74.

[Sam Chavez]

I believe Vistasonic and Parasound were the same. They experimented at Regency 2 and Northpoint in SF. There are 8 ribbons on the Westrex camera and it's possible to do 8 channels but can't recall number of actual elements on the solar cell. Could swear it was 8 wires coming out of the cell but could be wrong. Dolby was their competitor so they didn't let us see much even though even though we were present at the installation to put things back to normal when they got done. I recall Popeye but not Raiders. Anyway, gone in a flash and left lots of great speakers and amps behind, including a cube of nine subs. AB Systems amps.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Is Parasound the same thing as the infamous Vistasonic? That was the primary sound system envisioned for the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The information about that failed sound system available on-line is very spotty, maybe someone still remembers how it was supposed to work?

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Yes, Popeye was just 4 optical stripes. It sounded like crap on a Dolby CP-50 so we complained, Paramount told our booker that the print was sent by mistake, and they replaced it with a normal Dolby Stereo print. I saved a few frames of the Parasound print, but where the house they are now, decades later, I have no idea.

[Steve Guttag]

I recall Parasound was tried for Popeye. I thought it was just 4 optical stripes, not 8.

[Sam Chavez]

I don't recall any optical soundtrack prints with DBX encoding and certainly no way to play it back accurately. But I'm not in NYC, LA, or Toronto for that matter so a specific title with DBX encoding could easily get by me. Maybe a particular Title early in DTS could have experimented with DBX. Then there was that sound system built by Parasound? It had 8 individual optical sound tracks and an 8 channel solar cell. I believe that might have been done using DBX.

[Marcel Birgelen]

In my impression, outside of Sensurround, dbx was ever only used on mag-tracks, but there were actual (non-Sensurround) 35mm prints with the optical track encoded in dbx?