Theater Beat

Ever do this? Sit down on a Friday night, rich with anticipation for a wide screen fantasy. Find the perfect seat in the stereo center. Pull your shoes out of the flypaper on the floor and settle down in your favorite position, knees up on the seat in front of you. House lights down, music up. You’re flying high in escapist heaven when there’s this terrible thumping in the side wall. You remember they’re running another picture next door! You wouldn’t be caught dead seeing it, but you can’t stop hearing it through the paper walls. Now you’re completely obsessed with another movie. Or there’s this rasping distortion in one speaker that blows your suspension of disbelief. You forget for a while, but it comes back like a toothache for ninety minutes. Does this bother you more than a Diet Coke ad with the dreaded Whitney Houston? Or every time the actors pronounce a sibilant “S” it sounds like they’re frying 10-foot high slabs of bacon behind the screen? Is that what’s troubling you, bunky? Is there an a__hole sitting behind you talking at his date as if he were watching TV? Is that what’s making your head spin around like Linda Blair’s?

Well, we think that having a good listening experience at the movies is as satisfying as a great live performance of a symphony. We want to take a careful look at theaters in your area. If you’ll fill out this little survey, your humble editor will attempt to report on the results a couple of ishes down the road. Then we’ll do this again, and continue to clarify the picture of the state of theater sound out there. After a few such surveys, we should all have a better idea where the best theaters are.

New THX Leader

We heard folks chat about it over a year ago in the Lucasfilm lunch rooms, and now we’ve seen it, a new THX: The Audience is Listening “leader”, or footage run before the feature film. Naturally, it sounds just as good as the old one, and sets the tone for a dynamite sonic movie experience. And it has more complex, engaging graphics. Have you noticed the predominance in advertising and TV graphics that feature lettering apparently made of three-dimensional chrome…? You know the style, where sophisticated computer-graphic artists synthesize at great expense lettering you could chisel off the back of any Ford truck? THX got the new leader out to theaters in time for that graphic design style to be old hat. Quick move, THX!

— ed.

Commercials

The picture palace is a kind of sanctuary. We understand movies are expensive to make and distribute, but hate to see the boundary between movies and TV becoming blurry. (A good example of that is the growing number of talkers that invade movie audiences lately.) When MSNL caught a recent show, we protested the American Express commercial with our usual hissing and caterwauling. Others in the audience joined in, as they always will, and that can be fun. But after the show we made a serious trip to see the manager, and asked politely why there must be commercials. To our surprise, protests must be a regular occurrence there, because the young manager was ready for us with a pocketful of photocopied address cards listing the responsible corporate party.

As long as the Odeon brass have gotten used to complaints, we think MSNL readers will want to express their views. Write a letter stating how little you enjoy paying $7.50 for oversized TV commercials to:

Ms. Karen Gold, Cineplex Odeon Corporation,
1925 Century Park East, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA, 90067

Please drop us a line letting us know if theater commercials occur in your area, and whether you’ve spoken to managers about it.

On the brighter side, we understand that Disney Studios is no longer distributing films to theaters that run commercials.¹ We’re sure Walt would have approved.

Cineplex Odeon

Last issue, we took to task Cineplex Odeon Theaters for displaying commercials prior to movie trailers and the main feature. The most notable offending advertisers have been Diet Coke and American Express. Perhaps Ms. Karen Gold, at Cineplex Odeon has received enough complaints, or it could be serendipity. For on our last visit to a Cineplex theater (we usually boycott them because of the offensive use of screen time to advertise), we discovered that American Express has changed its tune. Instead of a blatant and seductive ad about travelling using “The Card”, there was an award-winning animated short shown, sponsored by American Express. We at MSNL find this a very appropriate way to promote business while providing a service to us filmgoers. This is especially true considering how rarely we get to see shorts anymore. Keep it up, American Express and Cineplex Odeon. See? We do have a voice.

Los Angeles Times Shows Sound Timing

A fairly long-standing tradition in the Los Angeles film theater scene is the convention of having the Los Angeles Times promote some area of Southern California living prior to the feature. Recently, the Times has been doing mini-segments on movie making. This month, they feature Sound Editor Cecelia Hall talking about post-production sound. Also shown are Foley artists Kenny Dufva and David Fein, as well as Foley mixer Greg Curda. Ms. Hall does a fine job of representing us post sound mavens. If you have an opportunity, try to catch this visual glimpse into our work before it becomes history.

THX Trivia

Digital Watch

MSNL readers are always on the lookout for the best in new sound tracks. It’s always true in the entertainment arts that technology can overwhelm craft. Knowledgeable film-goers appreciate an artistic sound job, regardless of the playback and recording systems used. It’s always been MSNL’s policy that human choices are the bottom line when a sound track draws an audience into deep involvement. New technology presents a very different set of challenges, and gives us tools to better display the crafts at work. You don’t want to miss the fun of Murray Spivack’s sound effects for King Kong, just because of ancient technology! So if you hear something interesting on any movie screen, even in mono, we want you to write us about it.

Nevertheless, the ephemeral success of O.R.C.’s Cinema Digital Sound, and its heir apparent to the high-tech throne, Dolby SR-D, has created in theaters a more consistent level of quality, with more dynamic range and stable multi-channel imagery than we’ve experienced in the last thirty years of cinema playback. And that challenges us to make our tracks better.

For those who may be compulsive about seeing everything “out there” that’s digital, we offer the following list of Dolby SR-D releases as of November, 1992:

• Aladdin
• Batman Returns
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Honey, I Blew Up the Kids
• Malcolm X
• The Mighty Ducks
• Pure Country
• Under Siege

As of this date there are 45 theater screens set up to run Dolby SR-D. By the end of 1992, the overworked Dolby Labs techies will have filled orders more than doubling that number. They plan to hit 100 before this coming New Year.

THX News

Here’s the latest Audiophilia from our friends in San Rafael:

The THX organization is now ten years old. This past Summer’s count of THX-approved rooms was 650, including professional dubbing stages and some private screening rooms.

In Sweden, THX and Svensk Filmindustri have been cooperating to restore a 75-year-old theater, The Skandia, for THX sound. The challenge has been to preserve the classic architecture of the room (including widening the 1.33:1 screen while building the speaker wall… it was built as a silent theater,) and yet be true to THX’s acoustic demands.

Santiago, Chile now has a THX room and a DTS room in the Cinemark 6 six-plex.

There are now 27 manufacturers on board with the Home THX Program, making components and installations for private home playback systems. This brings state of the art theater sound to the average Jane or Joe who has an extra $5000 to $50,000 lying around.

The THX Laser Disc Program is now underway. THX will fly a representative to your home or apartment who will rummage through your laser discs and run a white glove over each of them, carefully removing every speck of dust. Just kidding. Actually, it means new releases of discs, the picture and track of which will be mastered or re-mastered and pressed under THX scrutiny. The Audio Police have already worked over the Star Wars Trilogy and The Abyss, (including new footage. Come on, Jim Cameron, the show’s over. You can stop editing it now.)

Happy tenth anniversary, folks!

Fall Holiday Titles from Buena Vista Feature Dolby Stereo Digital

MSNL received a press release with that headline, touting the fact that Dolby Stereo Digital (which we often refer to as SR-D) will have been used on 16 pictures from Disney alone in 1993. We won’t reproduce the press release. You can see plenty of fluff like that in the commercial audio magazines and trade papers. But MSNL applauds both Disney and Dolby. Their dedication to sound reproduction shows a real respect for their audiences.

The Integral Critical Triangle

How is success measured in the movie business? There is, obviously, the business of box office receipts as weighed against the costs of production, distribution, and promotion. That is the easy metric. Cineastes always assess the artistic achievements of any film.² Because making a movie requires the coordination of many skills and methodologies, films have a rich history of adapting, perfecting, and displaying new technologies. The degree of success or failure of any work in popular media may be measured in terms of a figurative triangle’s three sides: Art, Business, and Technology always come into play, and we can look at any musical recording, stage play, television show, or computer game through that same lens. An ideal work of commercial media might be comparable to an equilateral triangle, while the lengths more commonly will stretch and shrink as we evaluate the subject. Changes in one aspect will affect the lengths of the other two sides, just as the three angles must adjust in order to add up to 180°.

Extreme expressions of artistry make it necessary to disregard the profit motive. New technology sometimes eats up the box office. Many popular and profitable films do little to disturb the conventions and standards of technology, and may do little or nothing to advance the art of cinema. Hollywood as a mass-market industry has always been most comfortable with standard methodologies and techniques, formulaic stories, and routine distribution to exhibitors. With too much of a sure thing set up for business, a film invites the critics’ jibes about it being so much commercial Pablum. In such a case, the artistic leg of the triangle is seen to wither under conservative business decisions.

One “classic” and popular film had at first been conceived as such an unimposing equilateral triangle, perceived while in production as formulaic and routine. Released early in the U.S.’s involvement in World War II, its box office was disappointing. But the art side has been stretched by public perception over time: Only in the postwar period was Casablanca rediscovered by mass audiences, when it played on television. Although the project only ever had striven to be what Pierre Bourdieu has called “bourgeois art,” changing times and perspectives have provided an entirely different evaluation of the art side of this particular triangle. And that is not a new story for mass art.

What about an oblique triangle with enormous technology and business sides: is it still art? James Cameron, as a savvy producer, notoriously finds extremely expensive new technology with which to tell his stories. The artistry in his filmmaking is never very risky (Titanic is hardly an experimental film), but Cameron’s restless compulsion to push movie technology is always extremely expensive for him to indulge. He routinely gambles gargantuan amounts of his own money on the potential business success of his projects. With such long artistic integral triangle legs devoted to technology, there is little left for high art, and yet he consistently produces, writes, and directs highly satisfying, quality entertainment, which also does excellent business. Other films risking huge investments in innovative technology have achieved modest success artistically but have lost out in their contemporary box office races. (Fantasia [1940] and Rise of the Planet of the Apes [2011] come to mind.)

The critical lens can be applied unconsciously for mainstream audiences. Sometimes hearing negative gossip, moviegoers believe a film to be an unpopular and costly failure, so they decide to skip it altogether. People who don’t normally care a whit about the entertainment business may decide not to see Ishtar (1987), for example, or Cleopatra (1963), or The Lone Ranger (2013), and participate in the self-fulfilling prophecy that causes those projects to flop.

The Theater Beat articles reprinted here present a film industry in one of its most popular and successful periods: Box office receipts were healthy. Young people were going out to the movies. Adventure and action movies graced the wide screen and its surround-sound speaker systems routinely, with craft and quality unknown to earlier generations. But lurking behind the screen were the same kind of technical uncertainties and incompatibilities that the industry in the early sound period had endured. Even as MSNL wrote glowingly of new optical-digital multichannel sound formats available to be printed on 35mm film, there was something of a horse race going on between them, and none were compatible with their competitors. The industry wants standardization, both for production and for exhibition. When there is innovation, no matter how promising, there is also instability.

For big-event films in 2016, committed fans visit the most high tech theaters, which run digital projectors, the modern equivalent of the 70mm house with 6-track mag discrete sound, and thereby the presentation quality is predictably excellent. During MSNL’s publication, many first-rate soundtracks were buried by poor exhibition, and the industry could only struggle and strive for some more consistent and stable quality as it tried new methods.

Contributors were apt to vent actively and knowledgably about the exhibition experience. Good analog sound had become commonplace in 35mm stereo rooms, and that turned movie sound into a proverbial glass half full. Thin walls, incompetent management, audio distortion, and missing speaker channels made that glass half empty. The few expressions of outrage here and in the Editorial and Opinion excerpts in these pages³ will have to serve as fading footprints, ephemeral artifacts of the striving (by both workers and the Industry) for mass proliferation of high-quality sound for films.

Digital Watch

The AMC chain seems to come up with new ways to impress MSNL, but in an odd way. Our multiplex in Burbank is no model of perfect presentation. Its projection and sound are on the better side of average, but only by degrees. For instance, at a recent matinee of Wolf, the surrounds crackled during a warm-up period between the mono trailers and the “Feature Presentation” stereo banner, and were never heard from again. It would be a mistake to expect sound effects to parade around loudly in a subtle Mike Nichols drama, but there may well have been some moody city and country night backgrounds we completely missed. Three front channels is enough sound when you’re busy watching Jack Nicholson work.

One assumes that most of the Burbank AMC’s 14 rooms have similar standards to the better-than-average suburban theaters around the country: The hardware is OK, they don’t leave the anamorphic lens on by mistake, the Dolby is usually decoded, if a bit blurry. Broken speakers will get noticed and replaced. Volume is usually consistent. Acceptable standards are upheld, but nothing to write home (or newsletters) about. And yet the AMC chain always seems on top of trends in other areas of management.

They sell tickets in advance and by phone with some efficiency. They have the first seats many filmgoers have seen with built-in cup holders in the arms. There is some intelligence in the concession and condiments set-ups. Bathrooms have automatic faucets, a high-tech innovation that is both sanitary and water-conserving. AMC was the first chain to respond to the recent news flap over fat content in popcorn cooking oil. They were in the press on the second day of the flap announcing that they have always used canola oil, more expensive but less fatty than the widely-used coconut oil.

Finally, AMC has announced that they have gone completely smoke-free. There is no smoking anywhere in the property. Clean lobby air is a welcome refuge for our nostrils and the vulnerable bronchi of asthmatic movie fans. That is a far cry from our memories of Art Houses like the Bleeker Street Cinema in the ‘Sixties, where we as counterculture audiences burned tobacco and other substances with abandon, as heedless of fire laws and common sense as we were of our health. In rooms such as that, in cities and college towns around the country, plumes of smoke would glow with reflected screen light, and every movie began to look like the newsreel scenes in Citizen Kane.

The AMC chain should be commended for their leadership and good judgment. Even if they stopped all this innovation in important matters of health and social conscience, we would have lost our chance to needle them about their technical mediocrity. AMC and Sony have announced that they have signed a $25 million deal to install SDDS playback systems. That means that the roughly 1700 AMC theaters will use SDDS as their exclusive digital medium. Sony bought up the Loew’s Theater chain, about 900 well-established rooms. Stories in The Hollywood Reporter and The Los Angeles Times proclaim that SDDS will be in about 150 of the former Loew’s houses. Presently priced at $13,800 per theater, SDDS remains the most costly of the three contenders. (DTS costs the theater owner about $6000, and SR-D around $10,000.) It also boasts eight channels (L, LC, C, RC, R, L-Sur, R-Sur, and Subwoofer or utility channel) and would appear to offer the most sound potential for future wide screen releases. MSNL has been arguing that three front channel positions are adequate for the moderately wide 1:1.85 screen ratio of most releases. By the end of 1994, Sony expects the number of SDDS rooms to rise from 0 to 350. Dolby’s digital SR-D would be in about 700 to 800 theaters. DTS is in about 2400 worldwide.

Pair of Palaces—Mono à Mono

We recently took Citizen Ted Turner to task for messing around with the mix of Gone with the Wind. We suggested that high-tech methods could be used to clean and restore original monaural mixes, not to impose stereo effects when they never existed. There was a limited re-release of one of Turner’s properties plundered from MGM-UA, seen in L.A. not long ago: a musical about a pubes-cent Kansan who prances around a green city with a dancing scarecrow and a comedian in a mangy fur suit. This time they got it right! The mono sound was crystal clear and not at all tarted-up.

The Crest theater in Westwood, CA (a fanciful restoration of a ’30’s picture palace… complete with Hollywood-postcard murals and a ceiling star field with animated comets) presented the picture beautifully. Lights, curtains, period music were all done with loving care. To complete the perfect introduction, they ran a fair 35mm print of an Oscar^®-winning Tom and Jerry cartoon. It may be the first time some in the audience have seen classic animation in 35mm, not to mention their first experience with The Wizard of Oz in a theater. Incredible detail in the black-and-white sequences (more tornado than you’ll see on TV), a full 1:1.33 screen ratio without TV cutoff, and (best of all) completely articulate sound.

DS heard lyrics in Munchkinland that always seemed like gibberish. VTA even theorized that Burt Lahr may have been faking some lyrics he couldn’t remember in the King of the Forest routine. And this is a film you need to see with an audience. So thanks, Ted. Re-releasing classic pictures in 35mm is a very sane and moral way to burn up some of your extra money.

Our only quibble with this one is the promotional line that implies that you’re going to see a Technicolor print. Wrong! It’s a “regular” print made from the original color- separation materials, which is great. But it lacks the magic of a true dye-transfer print. Some years ago, the last of the Technicolor printers left Hollywood and the USA forever.

—DS

BTTF Rides on 12 Speakers +

While some would argue that home audio can nearly out-do the movie theater sound experience these days, theatrical films relying on state-of-the-art sound editing and mixing techniques can really wallop audiences with a different kind of impact, making a much more visceral experience. Modern amusement park rides integrating the best of large-format photography and big time film audio can quite literally knock you out of your seat!

Sound editors in Hollywood last month, working under the design and supervision of Sandy Berman and Randle Ackerson, had the task of prepping sound effects for a new ride based on Back to the Future, set to debut in Universal’s park in Florida. The audience seats will be programmed to make moves (like Disneyland’s Star Tours) that emulate a flight simulator.

The BTTF ride will be housed inside an Omnimax projection dome, for ample visual stimulation. The twelve-channel mix will include six speaker positions outside the simulator and six more inside, in order to give a real feeling of depth and reality to the ride. There is also an inaudible channel called high-frequency injection (does that sound ominous?) by which high sounds can be programmed to stimulate further motion directly. The visual special effects filmed for the ride are first-rate, including the detail and humor we associate with the BTTF trilogy. In the few minutes of film made for the ride, there seem to be as many sound effects as in many a full-length feature. Every frame is jammed with explosive action. If only the sound editors’ chairs would have moved at their Moviolas! But we are told the final mix of the footage will be done inside the actual ride as its construction nears completion… And so we imagine the scene at that mix: Seats of the director and producer leaning this way and that… sudden lurches and surges as the mixer reaches for audio faders, trying to make a delicate cross-fade. Wham! The mixing board turns nearly upside-down. Whoa! The hairy cross-fade turns into an awkward squawk of distortion… The seats lean suddenly again… Whoa! Sparks explode from every VU meter. You got it… It’s another old episode of Star Trek!

—DS

Digital Watch

Optical Radiation Corp. has concluded deals with some of the major studios to release packages of feature films in Cinema Digital Sound versions. 20th Century-Fox has committed to five more CDS films in 1991, following the December 7th release of the new Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands. Summer of ’91 will let us hear Sigourney Weaver hollering at monsters in Aliens III. Bette Midler will do something divinely digital in For the Boys next Christmas. The other three Fox releases are to be announced. Fox has been no slouch in the history of movie sound. They released The Robe in early four-track magnetic stereo. Although it wasn’t the first Dolby stereo film, Fox’s Star Wars is widely credited with issuing in the optical stereo era.

Each time the opening-run theaters get their first digital release, they are fitted with the necessary CDS projection and decoding equipment. By the end of 1990, there will be 35 working CDS theaters in the US and 5 in Europe. Flatliners, though not released in digital domestically, will be heard digitally in Europe. ORC’s Dave Koyle tells us they love CDS in Europe. People who follow home audio trends are not surprised that European audiences enjoy high-tech sound in movies. The audio cassette and CD are European inventions. There is a trend to build impressive, comfortable high-tech multiplexes (not your old “cheese-box” multi’s with thin walls) in Europe. “People don’t eat in these theaters,” Koyle told us. “They’re there to watch and listen.” As elegant as the best Hollywood screening rooms, Munich’s Kinema and Brussels’ Kinepolis ran CDS prints that out-drew the same films running in six-track mag.

While CDS seems to be on its way to invading every major market already set up for 70mm six-track films, there is yet to be released a 35mm Cinema Digital track.

—DS

CDS Not Dead. Not Alive, but Resting Heavily

Audiences noticing the growing number of Dolby SR-D digital releases advertised in newspaper movie sections may have been wondering what happened to the Cinema Digital Sound format “CDS.” (See MSNL Vol I, #12, 14, 16, 19.)

Just a year ago, CDS was still talking to film industry people about releasing a number of films, both in 35mm and 70mm. But we haven’t noticed an advertised CDS release in a long time.

In the Summer of 1992, Dolby SR-D came out of the testing closet and seemed rudely to bump CDS entirely out of the marketplace. What happened?

CDS was doing very well before SR-D came along. The costs were going down, theaters were getting set up, there began to be some public recognition of the new process, as the state of the art “CD”-style sound for movies.

CDS worked very well, and met all the technical expectations of industry sound people. Directors liked the big, clean sound and the lavish use of the buzzword digital. Mixers and editors liked the stability of the discrete multi-channel image, and the feeling that their work would not be vulnerable to the varying adjustments, slight inaccuracies, and occasional aberrations of existing formats: Dolby’s and Ultra-Stereo’s matrixed optical releases, and 70mm magnetic discrete tracks all have their technical compromises. CDS was like having a compact disc un-spiralled along the film’s path. Even dust and splices could be filled in by digital error-correction routines. It seemed that Optical Radiation Corp. and Kodak had presented the movie world with a nearly perfect product.

Post-production euphoria over CDS may have reached levels paralleling that of the advent of CD’s in the consumer audio industry. Ridiculous claims (a CD smeared with peanut butter or scraped across concrete would play with the clarity of a live performance) were countered with the usual whining of audio Luddites, (it’s cold, you can hear the sampling, it’s the end of civilization as we know it.)

CDS, during the honeymoon, seemed as invulnerable in the cinema market as is the CD in the home, if not yet as widespread. But Dolby’s SR-D, even before it was ready for the marketplace, provided theater owners and film making companies with a good reason not to buy CDS. Now we are seeing a proliferation of SR-D releases in theaters, presumably offering “CD Sound” in a different movie format. Evidently, Dr. Dolby’s team has won this competition. The story of CDS’s development and downfall throws some light on how new technology comes to a theater near you. Or how it doesn’t.

MSNL contacted Carl Frova, who is Vice President of the Scientific and Industrial group at Optical Radiation Corp., to get a clearer picture of CDS’s birth and its current status in the industry. ORC is a company whose Cinema Products division designs high-tech projection equipment and other hardware for specialized film format exhibition as well as standard movie theaters.

The company had gone into partnership with Kodak to develop and market a new product which could reproduce motion picture soundtracks (with CD-style accuracy) on the same strip of film as a 35mm picture. Although their first releases were on 70mm, the 35mm’s that followed sounded identical.

Kodak’s agenda has always been to find ways of keeping sound on film, even in an age where new technology could conveniently keep sync between separate media. Special process theater systems, such as Showscan and some amusement park rides, do not require their sound and picture to be on the same strip of film. Laser discs and electronic sync handle the audio in these theaters very well. For mass-market movies, studios and distributors would prefer not to handle “double-system” inventories. Assuming handling costs could be evened out, there is no technical reason why film soundtracks shouldn’t be broadly distributed on a laser disc medium. But Kodak manufactures rolls of film stock, and Rolls of Film Stock is what Kodak must sell.

Having extensively researched the digital sound field, Kodak people chose wisely to work with ORC. They knew the projection booth hardware inside out, and could develop ways of writing digital audio data onto film. Kodak would develop ways of accurately printing data files on film at prices that suited regular film distribution, and ORC would find a way to read that data in theater projectors at 24 fps, and convert those files to state of the art, multichannel theater sound.

Both companies invested a great deal of money and the time of many talented people. CDS was successful in a way. There are 50 theaters worldwide with CDS equipment in the booth, waiting for CDS movie tracks to play. It seems to have been even bigger in Europe than in the US: There are 30 CDS screens in Germany alone.

ORC and Kodak had a very high monthly investment in the system, and, although market growth was going to be slow, the enormous worldwide interest in the system must surely have been a serious threat to Dolby Labs. Dolby was developing SR-Digital.

Dolby’s popular “A”-type noise reduction, their Dolby Stereo 4-channel system, and now their Dolby Surround systems for home video and broadcast are so familiar to audiences that the company name has become synonymous with quality. That is the same kind of marketing success that made audiences once confuse all color films with Technicolor, much the way we call every brand of tissue “Kleenex.” Dolby’s SR noise reduction process, though not much in the public limelight, has become a bench mark in rerecording, and is sought after as a firstrun 35mm release format for bigger-budget action and musical films. No wonder a competing digital process was threatening. Today Dolby has 45 SR-D theaters set up, and is looking to more than double the number by the end of ’92.

Digital rerecording is able to capture an overwhelming amount of data by storing a final audio mix on magneto-optical discs. In order to accurately record something as long as a movie, Dolby employs sophisticated techniques of data compression borrowed from recent satellite communication technology. These software algorithms allowed Dolby to create the same kind of high-tech audio storage as CDS. Dolby uses a coarser, larger dot, printed in the track area to represent the bits in the audio file. The track area used is smaller than CDS’s. Dolby’s digital area is right by the edge, interrupted by the four sprocket holes of each frame. They leave the traditional track area between the sprockets and the picture for use by the back-up Dolby SR analog track.⁴

What Dolby must have found easy to sell the theaters was the compatibility of SR-D with the SR analog systems already in the field. That has to be more attractive to the theater owner, whose formidable graduation from analog to digital would be softened by the system’s “twin engine” approach. Should the digital track fail, however momentarily, the audio is replaced by analog SR sound. When a CDS track fails to be reproduced, there is no audio at all.

Unfortunately for ORC and Kodak, the film industry itself was in a slow period. Looking at the economic depression, those few owners who wouldn’t balk at the idea of investing $20,000-$25,000 per screen to improve their big sounding rooms with CDS must have been truly worried when they heard about SR-D coming around the corner.

According to the perception of studios as well as theater owners, the price of making a CDS release, as well as the licensing fee required for CDS/ORC’s involvement, was really on the high side. Theater owners also were being asked to ante up many thousands of dollars for conversion to CDS equipment, and for having their theater sound systems brought up to standard.

ORC ran into great resistance as owners must have thought it risky to invest in a new technology that might become obsolete. Most were interested in both systems, and were anxious to window shop and compare them in the field. But there was virtually no way to compare the two systems until SR-D was installed and running in more theaters.

ORC tried to make it easier and less expensive: They developed a way to move all the electronics for CDS around on a mobile cart. The CDS reader was stripped down to an outboard box on each projector. This with the mobile electronics would make the rest of the system accessible by other projectors.

Since the ’91-’92 Winter months, CDS sales were slow enough to raise alarms at ORC. The company, like any business, had anxious stockholders to worry about, and could not keep shoveling money at the system. They were forced to cut back on the effort, keeping just a few people on the CDS team. People in the CDS group must have the feeling that they were promoting Betamax video in an era when VHS took over the world. Many of them believe that CDS is a technically superior system, that it simply sounds better than SR-D.

The CDS hardware may not be scrap metal just yet. David Koyle is a believer. The former P.R. director for ORC has put together a group entirely outside of ORC’s corporation, which is actively looking for financial support to continue their work under a new name, CDS , Inc. That company, if successfully organized, could purchase the technology from ORC and head off into the sunset, doing soundtracks the CDS way.

Is ORC in trouble because of their failure to win this competition? Hardly. Carl Frova is very excited about other things they are doing, such as a new computer program to improve the focus and uniformity of light coming from high-tech projection mirrors. They have a number of projection innovations of interest to specialized venue theaters (like Showscan and Imax.) Systems used to display images in high-tech amusement park rides, like the Back to the Future ride in Florida, benefit from ORC developments. They have a new machine that can project an 8-perforation 70mm frame. This implies the possibility of image quality rivaling that of Imax, but with a major reduction in material and printing costs.

Good luck, ORC. Good luck, Kodak. Good luck, CDS, Inc. Good luck, Dolby. Just keep the movies sounding great.

—ed.

Double or Nothing

The potentially bewildering terms, “single-system,” “double-system,” “single-inventory,” and “multiple-inventory,” suggest an obligatory preface to Theater Beat: Dolby Digital SR-D—A Progress Report. (After all, MSNL sometimes published the motto Eschew Obfuscation and Epitomize Adoxography.)

Until 1994, theaters were running all kinds of prints. We often tell students to imagine the plight of the hapless projectionist in a 1928 Vitaphone booth, finding that the distributor had shipped an extra audio disc for Reel 5, but no disc at all for Reel 6. Rick Mitchell’s report on the potential of Dolby Digital takes into account the pressing need for standardized digital audio on all composite 35mm prints, at a time without an industry standard.

It is not so difficult to understand the concept of single-system vs. double-system methods of recording and exhibiting motion film images with sound. But to fully appreciate Rick Mitchell’s article, we have to put these theories in the context of how the movie business relies on efficient methodologies to display images and sound. Consumers are familiar with the assumption that recording video with a smart phone, or even on a 1980s-era videotape, captures the image and the audio together. (How the A/V data may be separated or combined deep inside the engineering is invisible to us as consumers.) Professional film sound production has always separated the sound from the film camera or video camera on the set, in order to optimize recording equipment for the best audio quality. That would be called double-system because it involves two machines in the movie’s production stage. Professional practice is to control picture and track separately, so that each can be refined and mastered separately by post-production experts.

Early sound films recorded dialogue on a separate audio recording sound camera, exposing modulating light onto a reel of film negative, separate from the cinematographer’s camera. In the short history of Vitaphone, Warner Bros. pictures were recorded onto 16-inch discs, like records. Before Vitaphone, early talking pictures recorded audio onto cylinder phonographs. That was the production end: double-system recording, whether on disc, cylinder, or optical sound film. On the exhibition end of a film’s life, those early methodologies required double-system playback: a film projector had to be linked to a phonograph for playback, either disc or cylinder.

“Sound-on-film” techniques since about 1929 standardized Hollywood production as double-system and exhibition as single-system (modern film sound production began on optical film stripes and moved later to magnetic film and audio tape). But its real value was in establishing a single-system playback standard on the exhibition side. With each reel comprising film images along with an optical track printed photographically, studios no longer had to distribute phono records. One projector could output light to the screen and audio to the amplifiers. Somewhat ironically, the final iteration of film prints in the twenty-first century carry digital audio patterns as optical data near the picture, just as the ancient sound-on-film had done. That would be described as a single-system playback medium.⁵

Before distribution to theaters, film labs “marry” picture and track together as a composite print. The historical question is whether to exhibit film via double-system (expensive, unwieldy, and has the potential to match one reel of image with a different reel of sound) or single-system (one projector handles image and sound from a single medium). In the twenty-first century, Digital Cinema Package (DCP) computer files offer both the simplicity of single-system projection and a multiplicity of soundtrack types, depending on the needs of any theater audio system.

Dolby Digital SR-D

A Progress Report by Rick Mitchell

On May 12, 1993, the Hollywood Section of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) held talks on Dolby SR-D at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The session was conducted by Ioan Allen, David Gray, and Simon Wynn of Dolby Laboratories.

Dolby SR-D is one of several efforts to use digital technology for sound for theatrical release, one of three announced as single system process. Like Cinema Digital Sound, Dolby SR-D is a discrete six channel stereo system with left, center, right, and subwoofer up front and separate left and right surrounds. However, where the CDS track replaced the normal analog optical track, (requiring the making of two different types of release prints to satisfy distribution needs,) SR-D places its digital track area between the perforations, and also carries a normal 4–2–4 matrixed SR optical track, to which the system is designed to automatically switch should any problems occur in the digital track. The basic design of motion picture projectors, going back 98 years, has always protected both the picture and the perforation areas; The rare damage that occurs to the perfs in a 35mm print can be traced to either a problem beginning at the edge of a print, to print shrinkage, bad splicing or mis-threading by projectionists.

The status of Cinema Digital Sound is in limbo at the moment, (see MSNL Fall ’92). There have not yet been any public demonstrations of Sony’s eight-channel system other than the release of The Last Action Hero. After tests on Star Trek VI and Newsies, Dolby SR-D officially premiered last summer with Batman Returns and has been used on more than 20 features since then, with playback equipment installed in over 150 theaters worldwide. One asset in promoting its SR-D process is that Dolby is not charging extra for its use. Printmastering, the final stage of film dubbing, encompasses the complete integration of multichannel Dialogue, Music, and Effects masters into whatever combined medium is required by a particular release-printing format.

For instance, a Dolby A-type printmaster might consist of a series of fullcoat magnetic film reels containing two tracks. Those magnetic tracks will become the source for the two tracks of optical negative shot for final release printing. For a special format like SR-D, two printmasters are necessary; one on optical disc for the digital, another for the Dolby SR optical version. Between making two print-masters and enhancing the use of the surrounds, an extra day must be added to the dub. The six channel digital dub is mastered to a magneto-optical disc from which the sound negative is exposed concurrently with the SR variable-area track. The SR track can also be printmastered to the magneto-optical disk. According to Dolby spokespeople, some non-digital releases have also been printmastered this way. But at present a film printmaster is still a delivery requirement of the studios. In the laboratory, the only change required is the enlarging of the track printing head to include the perforation area. The negative exposure process was designed to interface with standard track processing and printing procedures. What happens in the projection booth? To upgrade standard projectors, addon “penthouse” boxes containing optical-digital mechanisms and electronics are installed to read the track. A number of manufacturers are incorporating digital readers in the sound heads of new machines, which would obviate the need for a penthouse attachment. In order to accommodate the distance between picture and track, Dolby has established a 26-frame advance as standard for digital tracks. A digital delay keeps the track in sync with the picture. Beyond the special reader and decoder for the digital track, existing equipment is used to read the SR analog portion.

Because the dynamic range of digital sound exceeds that of 70mm magnetic as well as Dolby SR SVA (Stereo Variable Area describes the optical track which provides the 4-channel Dolby Stereo signal), Dolby strongly recommends theaters contemplating use of the process evaluate and upgrade their amplification and speaker systems, as well as the acoustics of their auditoria. How does Dolby SR-D sound? The author has auditioned SR-D prints in four other venues in addition to the Goldwyn theater at the Academy and the results were less than dynamic in only one: the Mann Chinese Theater. Problems in this theater are due to the room’s size and acoustics, not to the technical process. The sound of the digital movie is cleaner and crisper, in soft as well as loud passages, and sounds that may be lost in analog tracks will punch through in digital.

Although there were no format comparisons presented at the SMPTE sessions, the author had occasion within the week to see Matinee presented in SR-D, SR, and Dolby A. The playback of SR-D came as a surprise, at the new theater in the new Television Academy complex in North Hollywood. Many of the cast and crew at the Matinee screening might have attributed the sound to acoustics and adjustment of the new room, but SR-D sounded great. The film has a wide range of loud and soft sounds that come across dynamically in digital. The Dolby A at the Royal Theater in West L.A. (which admittedly does not have a very good sound system,) was flat and lifeless, with many of the softer dialogue passages completely unintelligible. The SR version, seen at the new Galaxy 1 in Hollywood, was much better. But the Galaxy lacked subwoofers, essential to the “Rumble-Rama” effects and the dramatic impact of Matinee and the film-within-it, Mant. Additionally, we had occasion to see a double bill of Aladdin in 35mm SR-D and Beauty and the Beast in 70mm magnetic SR at the Disney venue, the El Capitan theater in Hollywood. Allowing for stylistic differences in dubbing the two films, and the possibility that the theater’s system had not matched equalization for 70mm magnetic and digital, Aladdin actually sounded crisper and brighter. Perhaps most significant about SR-D is that unlike the analog SVA processes, its stereo image is discrete, meaning sound editors and rerecording mixers need to rethink their concepts of stereo dubbing. Especially important is the balance of screen ratio and sound format (often mismatched aesthetically) of pictures intended for release in the anamorphic format. Disney and Warner Bros. embraced Dolby SR-D quite early, with most of their releases in the last year in that format, and an increasing number from other companies announced throughout the summer of 1993. Installations around the world have also jumped, suggesting that any future for Cinema Digital and Sony Digital will rest in making their systems compatible with installed digital projector sound systems, much as UltraStereo has remained in the marketplace because it is compatible with Dolby Stereo. Dolby spokespeople mentioned that there are home use applications for their technology. It may undercut the uniqueness of the movie going experience to give ready access to high-end sound to home viewers.

—RM

1993 is Digital Summer

SR-D, SDDS, DTS Make Alphabet Soup in Projection Booths

The Summer of ’93 finds three very promising entries in the digital audio field establishing themselves in movie theatres around the U.S. Dolby SR-D, as MSNL has noted in previous issues, is very strongly established in theatres that tend to have first-run big films. Post production professionals here feel that producers are becoming aware of the digital option. Many who hold the purse strings are asking all the right questions at dub time, about making the extra print master for a digital release. Rerecording mixers, facilities managers, and supervising sound editors will continue to encourage their producers to release digitally. Predictably, the field’s two newcomers have debuted on expected major Summer Blockbusters: The Last Action Hero (no blockbuster after all, as it turns out,) showed off Sony Pictures’ new Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, or SDDS. Jurassic Park is the home of Digital Theater Systems’ DTS sound track. Universal Studios and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company have cooperated to nurture their new double-system release format. DTS was set up in over 800 of the 2400 theaters showing Jurassic. As different as the two movies (and their aesthetic approaches to sound) are, their way of storing audio data and playing it back are very different indeed. Both systems caused a flurry of excitement among film audio people. Many went out to see the dinosaurs and Schwarzenegger with the same enthusiasm as the kids in the target audience. But the professionals would claim they were out to audition sound systems more than thrills.

It seemed a forgone conclusion that Sony would invent and promote a digital audio system for film. They certainly are a major name in home electronics for audio/video… why shouldn’t they develop some proprietary system that could have a new standard for professional data storage at the Hollywood end, a playback system in movie theatres, then have a scaled-down version at the consumer video end… perhaps with a licensed data-encoding system common to the film and video software itself! It would have surprised no one in Hollywood if the Japanese parent company would heavily push the development of such a system. But that was not the case. According to insiders, SDDS is the brainchild of Mike Kohut, a former rerecording mixer who is now the Director of the Post-production Sound department of Sony Studios/Columbia Pictures. Mike had been working for a long time with his engineers to develop a new system. They have come up with a digital pattern printed optically on the film (like CDS and Dolby SR-D), which feeds eight channels of speaker systems with digital audio. The discrete channel positions are Left, Left Extra, Center, Right Extra, Right, Left Surround, Right Surround, and Subwoofers. SDDS carries the optical digital bits on the two outside edges of the 35mm film, and has a standard Dolby A optical stereo track to fall back on, should the digital fail.

SDDS works very well. MSNL caught an industry screening of The Last Action Hero at the Cary Grant Theatre, which is the main dubbing theatre at Sony/Columbia, the very room where the movie was originally mixed. The sound track is, predictably, cluttered with gunshots and car crashes appropriate to the action genre films that the movie so cleverly parodies. It’s so relentlessly busy with sound effects driven by the action that nothing in the track can really stand out. There are few quiet moments, where mixing sound with subtlety would have a chance. The sound editors and mixers did a remarkable job of compiling all that material and making it play well, and did their jobs under exceptional time pressure. The results are not artistic.

Audiences are numbed by the overwhelming action, and it is to the credit of digital sound’s clarity that so many loud and mechanical effects do not become annoying. With the wonderful lack of distortion, you can listen to much more without fatigue or headaches. Playing in analog, TLAH commits sonic abuse on audiences in average theatres. There was nothing in The Last Action Hero, at least as viewed at The Cary Grant, that really seemed to necessitate the eight channels. The sound effects work is dynamic and clean, with ubiquitous bullets flying across the screen, or fenders scraping, or Arnold’s funky Pontiac growling colorfully as it revs its way off the road.

But with so much going on, you’re not conscious of the locations of these sound events in any precise manner. General movement over three speakers and two surrounds is adequate without Cinemascope width.

It is almost mysterious why the movie turned out to be a box office bomb. No one knows the action material better, nor how to make its conventions look totally silly, than director John McTiernan, writer Shane Black, and Arnold himself. There is a synergy of intelligence, style, and humor when these three work together. Look at Predator again with that in mind. Whatever its shortcomings as a marketing effort or as a movie story, TLAH was an appropriate film with which to introduce Sony’s SDDS. It’s loud, it’s overdone, and it’s not necessary. But like Jurassic Park, the way the action rollercoasters you through the story is too much fun to waste your time thinking.

Jurassic has introduced audiences to DTS. This is a new system using a CD-ROM to store the audio data. It is kept in sync by referencing itself to timecode data printed optically on the 35mm film, next to the back-up Dolby A analog track. Like Dolby SR-D and Sony SDDS, DTS is expected to switch imperceptibly to the back-up analog track for whatever period of time its checking and verifying routines sense any momentary digital failure. Dolby labs can be proud that their standard A-type optical was chosen as the back-up for their competition’s systems. Their own SR-D is backed up by Dolby analog SR, which is much closer to digital in terms of dynamic range. In any case, Dolby functions as a kind of insurance of quality sound for each of the current digital formats. Dolby has become the de facto “Lloyd’s of Film Audio” insurance company.

MSNL was in a poor-to-average room of the Cineplex “Odious” chain, observing with disappointment a real lack of clarity and discrete placement on the screen. Although the room was THX, it is apparent that we heard the 4–2–4 DTS. That is, the track on the CD-ROM was probably made from the same stereo LT-RT mag printmaster that the Dolby A stereo optical prints are made. Theaters with DTS have the option of 4 or six tracks, the four being limited in dynamic range for the sake of the Dolby matrix. DTS will be moving shortly to four-channel discrete releases, which is an excellent marketing idea. Six-channel playback is suited to better theatres (Left, Center, Right, Left Surround, Right Surround, and Subwoofer,) The fact that DTS can be used for a four-track installation, such as an existing theater set up only for Dolby A Stereo (Left, Center, Right, mono Surrounds,) is appealing to the theatre owner not ready to rebuild her/his entire amplification and speaker systems. DTS in either form works well, and it doesn’t cost the theatre owners much to install. We did not make a judgment about the work of the editors and mixers based upon the way the film played in that room, and were in the process of adjusting our sonic expectations downward when the film broke.

To their credit, the attending projectionist closed the curtains and brought up the houselights immediately. The audience, completely losing their involvement with the film, squirmed and complained briefly. The curtains opened some 15 or 20 seconds later, houselights down, and (but for a few lost lines of dialogue) we were back in business. The DTS soundtrack was right there in dead-on sync, in spite of the film break. One got the impression that the DTS had probably found sync and caught up to the picture in less time than it takes to open the lamp dowser on the projector. Detractors of DTS base their complaints primarily upon the idea that all modern film audio ought to be single-system. Double system refers to any kind of projection requiring hardware other than, and sunk to, the projector. The success of the variable area optical track in sound movies is based in part on the convenience of printing sound and picture on the same strip of film. It makes life in the labs, the distributing and shipping companies, and in the projection booth much more sane. Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone was one 1920’s solution for synchronized sound in movies. Although other sound systems, even sound-on-film systems predate Vitaphone, it was extremely popular. Vitaphone relied upon syncing projectors to a record player with acetate discs. Naturally, discs had to be shipped with each reel of film. The mechanical and pneumatic link between projector and record was fairly sophisticated, and was meant to handle a certain amount of film splices and record tics. But mistakes could be made easily, such as running the wrong disc with a reel of picture. Realistically, film breaks or has bad splices, record skips, goodbye sync!

It makes an irresistible joke to say that Spielberg has re-invented Vitaphone after 70 years, to say that Jurassic Park is playing with “SpielaPhone” sound, or that someone might put the wrong CD on with a reel. The industry has a strong bias against double system sound, but there are reasons and precedents to make modern discs a sensible choice. Double systems work. They still thrive within the film industry, outside the local movie theatre. Preview screenings, for instance, are often handled with silent picture on the projector and magnetic film soundtracks running on a pair of mag film “dummies”. They are linked electronically, in the spirit in which Vitaphone was linked mechanically, and they usually work. Some special format shows and amusement park rides using heavyweight motion picture formats enlisted the use of a specialized laser disc for their audio tracks. Today, the CD-ROM discs for DTS are shipped inside an extra film shipping case along with the picture. It’s not possible to project the wrong disc, because picture and sound are linked by timecode supervised by a computer, a far cry from Vitaphone’s mechanical linkage.

1929 studio publicity still showing Vitaphone projector.⁸ Standing is director Hal Roach; kneeling at the turntable is Elmer Raguse, head of the Hal Roach Studio sound department. Photo from author’s collection.

DTS data disc. MSNL compared its double-system playback methodology to Vita-phone’s. Image from MSNL Vol III #1, p.1.

Any problems with DTS would be more along the lines of marketing, or with acceptance by theatre owners, rather than technical. MSNL cannot hear any differences in the three current digital film systems that are not due to the number or placement of speakers, their amplification, or room acoustics. Comparing four-and six- and eight-track systems is all apples and oranges. But where they put the digital bit image, whether on the film edge, the optical track area, between the sprockets, or on a CD is “six of one and half a dozen of another” to the audience’s ears. MSNL found that DTS sounds as good and no better than any other digital format. Reproduction of movie sound in digital is as exciting as are CD’s on a home system. Whoever claims to hear differences among the theatre digital systems not traceable to the room or the dub must be a tweak grande. Kurt MacFarlane is the director of engineering for the Edwards Theatres chain and a great proponent of high-quality movie sound. Commenting in The Orange County Register in a feature story on new movie theatre technology (6/20/93,) he said “Our competition isn’t other theatres. Our competition is home systems. People have better audio systems in their own living rooms than what’s in most theatres these days.”

Conclusion: Standardizing the Shape of Things to Come

(for a little while, anyway!)

The Industry’s struggle against having to distribute multiple-inventory composite prints, each one carrying a different format of optical digital audio with the same 35mm picture, was a short-lived one and has not been written about very much. As far as the author can tell, the studios each wrangled their own preferred multichannel digital audio system (Universal with its own DTS, Sony with its proprietary SDDS, Warner Bros. and Paramount with CDS and various forms of Dolby Digital). Apparently, the studios may have been blindly reliving the chaotic days when some theaters would receive Vitaphone prints with associated discs, some received prints with optical soundtracks, and some remained silent, and ran differently edited silent versions of popular sound films. By 1994, a few titles were being issued with all the existing digital-optical technologies printed next to the 35mm picture. That move to distributing a single inventory of movies capable of single-system digital audio playback in any conceivable format (including the very reliable Dolby SR analog 4–2–4 track) was a long time coming and brought with it the standardization and efficiency the industry needed.

35mm prints have now been distributed with single-inventory, multiple-format digital optical soundtracks as a standard practice for over twenty years and will not be replaced by any film format before the complete proliferation of digital projectors running Digital Cinema Package data. DCP files are licensed, scheduled, and distributed through the Internet, while film projectors are being sold for junk.

Technical innovation is nearly always off the track for mainstream filmmaking, gobbling up time and money for the pleasure it brings an audience. This especially is the case for novelty exhibition formats, which is where progress is tested on the public. Figuratively, the industry’s attraction to technical gimmicks and flash is akin to the proverbial immature lover, who might dabble in a series of exciting relationships but eventually settles down with a reliable partner (standardization). The industry needs stability, efficiency, and predictability to prosper in the long run, and that was never more true than in the history of exhibition technologies.