Mixed Up Sound

[Terry Monohan]

This past week we have been attending the 25th Santa Cruz Film Festival held in the beach city of Santa Cruz CA. The event has not been held in the last few years but It is back now playing in 5 theatre type venues around the Santa Cruz area

We have been enjoying the various movies this year in the lineup. Some great choices to see that will probably never play again in the limited movie theatre market area of Santa Cruz .

My favorite film this year was the shot on 16mm scope then to DCP 'F CK TOYS' It was shown opening night at Theatre DelMar. For shot in 16mm It looked crisp and clear and the stereo surround was great. This movie is having problems finding a distributer in the USA because of the title name. It has been selling out at all the film festivals in the last few months.

My big problem has been the films shown in DCP at the '418 Project' the former UA Riverfront Twin Cinema. This former movie theatre is now a performing cuture type event center. Mainly used for dance, various comedy and live stage shows. The cinema space have nice size screens. They still have digital projectors in the two projection booths left over from the UA days and stereo surround speakers on the side walls.

All the movies I have seen at the '418 Project' space in this years presentaions the sound track is all mixed up. The sound from what would have been the three stage speakers is now coming on the surround speaker channel. You here voices/music on the wall speakers all during the film. While It is in stereo sound the voice channel is mainly the center of the 3 stage speakers in most behind the screen speaker set ups.

Each time we visitied the '418 Project Theatre' the soundtrack was not coming from the correct speakers. .I complained to the event person also the tech guys at 418. This must be a simple fix I thought. You only have the source of the movie Blu Ray ,computer ect , projector and a stereo multi channel amp. Must be a simple sound plug in the wrong place or were the movies injested wrong onto the computer lineup. No one seemed to care or take care of the sound problem each night.

I felt sorry for the producers/directors who traveled to watch their work and do a QA on stage and have the sound screwed all up like this. The audience I don't think had any idea that the sound was coming from the wrong speakers at the '418 Project Theatre'. They just sat and watched the movies. Only of few us complained and nothing ever got fixed night after night.


I was going to ask for a refund but as the tickets were only $12 per movie I just sat in my seat and enjoyed the films and tried to forget about the sound problems. Next time they do the Santa Cruz Film Festival and book some events at the '418' someone needs to bring in a movie tech type person to make sure the stereo sound is set up correctly.

All the other theatres used like Theatre DelMar, Syufy's West Wind Santa Cruz 9 (in theatre #7) and the ColliganTheatre were spot on with the sound. Hope next year this won't be a problem.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I would have insisted they play the 5.1 surround test DCPs.

Assuming all channels are audible, fixing a mapping issue is easy on the server even if you don’t take the time to find a root cause.

Though I’ve definitely seen festival DCPs arrive with the wrong mapping authored into them, same fix there but have to listen more attentively to catch it, or solo them in a booth monitor, and remember to revert after the weird feature.

Sound like the room/fest could benefit from a Dolby tech or at least one film high profile enough to have a studio hired tech.

[Tj Hopland]

It would be interesting to find out what was actually going on there. I'm not clear on the setup, this was a multiplex but some rooms have been converted to live? And some remain as they were in cinema days? Or even converted the cinema bits are still as the were? The basically built a stage in front of the fixed screens so presumably fixed cinema speakers still back there? You throw movable stuff and live into the mix and all bets are off.

You get things like did a cinema person label the stage speakers and or associated wiring or patch panels as stage left and so on? As in stage as the location but then a stage hand went and connected the speakers thinking the word stage meant the reference point as in stage left or house left? And for those that don't have to deal with this house left is to the left if you were in the audience viewing the stage and if you stick stage before left that would be your left if you were on the stage viewing the audience. So house left is stage right and stage left is house right. No chance for confusion there...... When I'm in that sort of venue I will usually use the word screen for those speakers. Thinking about it now it does seem strange that the term stage speaker ever really caught on in cinema. Even venues that had a stage which quickly became a minority after sound would have had a screen so why wasn't the term always screen speaker or screen channel?

The other big variable is the house sound people. Most of the live venues I have had to interact with (or been in the audience) the house person wants to treat every movie as if its a live show and 'mix' it. Some movies and venues that are just bad maybe that helps a little but I have seen it many time where the venue is decent and its a great mix from a major studio and they insist on mixing it their way which isn't anything like it was supposed to be. I have also been in venues where movies are not important enough to bring the lead sound person in so the intern team just has to patch into what ever was last set up and do their best. Also common in those venues is either because of upcoming live shows or laziness they don't want to re configure anything which could just mean patching or could mean physically moving things like speakers.

I have been in live venues where they are all into and listen to what in theory is the ideal system should be and work to get the most of what they have on hand. I had one where they stuck stage monitors around as surrounds and 'flew' a center speaker behind the screen. Had to use their usual clusters for L and R but that one actually sounded pretty good compared to most but that is kinda the exception. Multi use often means movies are at the bottom of every list from design to scheduling to staffing so the results tend to be poor so if people do come to those events they don't come back so no people no resources to improve things and pretty soon no movie program at all.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Yeah our small room is one of those heavily compromised live combo systems when we don’t have a festival rental rig installed. L+R go through the live console to the hanging clusters, ideally at unity gain.

Surrounds are the only permanent film cabinets. C and LFE are rolled out and sit behind the transparent bottom masking below the roll down screen.

[Jim Cassedy]

Without knowing what equipment they have and how it's set up, it's hard to pinpoint the
cause of the problem. That being said, I've done shows at 'performing arts centers' and
I never know what I'm going to find. I used to do occasional advance movie premiers
(in 35mm) over at SF State University, and every time I went I'd have to re-patch or
sometimes literally re-configure their audio system.

The other issue is that the sound may have been wrong on the content, although you
say it's an ongoing problem, so I'm guessing it's more in however they have their system
configured. But, at film-festivals, especially at the 'local' level, and not the big ones like
Sundance or Telluride, it's not unusual to get one or more DCP's with the sound rendered
wrong. In the past month, I've received two 'home-made' DCP's, with the audio channels
rendered incorrectly. The last one had a mono sound track, which had been rendered
AT FULL VOLUME, on all 5 DCP channels. It was especially disconcerting if you were
sitting near the rear of the auditorium, because the screen dialogue was coming from
behind you. Fortunately, I had found this out several days before the DCP was due to
go on screen, and I got the film-maker to re-render the DCP at a lower level, and with
mono sound on the L & R screen channels.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I’ve got Jim beat, told this story in another thread, but an upstart young filmmakers festival delivered a DCP with the non-paid trail watermarking from EasyDCP on it!!! To make a DCP and not even attempt to preview it is quite a thing.

Luckily I also had their pro-res and made them a playable DCP overnight before their screening.

[Leo Enticknap]

This movie is having problems finding a distributer in the USA because of the title name.

At one of the university campus theaters I service, I walked into the booth a few months ago to find a flyer for the upcoming screening of a (presumably student-made) movie called Anal Sex with an Aardvark. That would certainly have generated attention on a main street theater marquee!

As others have noted, fundamentally, the problem was almost certainly that the channels in the source media (DCP, BD, file, or whatever), went to the wrong power amp channels in the room. This could have been an error in the content mastering (as Ryan points out, this happens all the time with "Kid with a Mac" homebrew DCPs), wiring in the rack, channel routing configuration in the DCP server, or a combination thereof. But unless I'm seriously missing something, any half way competent cinema tech could have figured out what was going on very quickly, and likely corrected it on the spot (if the cause was a mispinned RJ45 to DB25 adapter on the back of the audio processor, that would have taken a little longer if the tech didn't have another with him or her, that would have been diagnosable on the spot, but maybe not correctable).

[Frank Cox]

any half way competent cinema tech could have figured out what was going on very quickly, and likely corrected it on the spot

Even the aardvark could do it!

[Jim Cassedy]

My favorite film this year was the shot on 16mm scope then to
DCP 'F CK TOYS' It was shown opening night at Theatre DelMar
- - - This movie is having problems finding a distributer in the
USA because of the title name.

In early November, I've got a flick here called "F- -k My Son", which is
apparently another film festival favorite. (am I seeing a titling trend here??)

[Leo Enticknap]

There is an infamous photo floating about on the net (annoyingly, I can't find it when looking just now) of the marquee of a main street 3-plex in the 90s. The titles of the movies playing are arranged vertically, as so:

ERIN BROCKOVICH
SCREWED
MY DOG SKIP

[Frank Cox]

346A455D00000578-3600680-image-a-28_1463741575603.jpg
346A45A800000578-3600680-image-a-9_1463740937261.jpg
346A457D00000578-3600680-image-a-7_1463740653730.jpg

I suspect some or all of those were deliberately arranged in that order. But they are pretty good.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

This channel mixup would have been no problem for me at the university screening room I ran... there was a full analog patchbay in the main rack were, with some patch cables, I could re-assign the channels in a few minutes... then unplug the cables to revert to normal (The patchbay's I/O's were all electrically "normalled" when no cables were inserted.) At one point when I had the rack for my (future, never happened) home screening room, I did the same so I could swap things around if needed.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Unfortunately it ultimately depends on how qualified or knowledgeable anyone on site was to do something about such a problem. You can often tell them it’s wrong till you are blue in the face if they don’t know the first thing about how to do anything about it.

That “first thing” need not be mucking with anything, it might just be a phone call. I would hope anyone hosting a DCP festival has some kind entry in their Rolodex for cinema technical support.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I’ve got Jim beat, told this story in another thread, but an upstart young filmmakers festival delivered a DCP with the non-paid trail watermarking from EasyDCP on it!!! To make a DCP and not even attempt to preview it is quite a thing.

Luckily I also had their pro-res and made them a playable DCP overnight before their screening.

Those young filmmakers probably don't have access to a professional screening room with some real DCI equipment in it. So, they use the "export as DCP" function in their favorite editing program and are done with it... Maybe there are a few more competent students that will try to preview their DCP using something like the DCP-o-Matic DCP player. It still doesn't guarantee playability on all servers out there, but gives an indication. The thing is though, you can't really test-drive audio-channel mapping on your local MacBook...

Also, while screening movies like "Anal Sex with an Aardvark."... is it really up to you to decide if everything is euhm... mapped correctly? Maybe, it's the entire purpose that something what looks like it comes out from the front sounds like it's coming out of the back and vice versa?

[Gordon McLeod]

It has been known for gdc servers to majorly mess up channel maping