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» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Operations   » Film Handlers' Forum   » "Cinema Digital" sound (Page 1)

 
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Author Topic: "Cinema Digital" sound
David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

- posted 01-16-2002 08:47 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Just curious if anyone here had the opportunity to work with Cinema Digital sound in a commercial theatre. I think it was developed by Optical Radiation (what a great name for a company!). I recall seeing Dick Tracy in spring of 1990 at the Edwards "Big Newport" in Newport Beach CA, in 70mm Cinema Digital sound. My recollection of the Dick Tracy show is it was flawless sound-wise.

Besides only working on 70mm, wasn't C-D also severely handicapped by not having any analog fallback? A digital failure would mean no sound, period. How did the system perform during its limited commercial application? The format actually had at least one major advantage over current digital sound formats: It supposedly used very little compression. But at that time, they didn't have a 35mm version working yet, and I guess Dolby and others leapfrogged Optical Radiation by coming up with a viable 35mm system first. Thus making "Cinema Digital Sound" an interesting historical trivia question for film handlers I guess.

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- dave
Crab juice, or Mountain Dew?

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Aaron Sisemore
Flaming Ribs beat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups any day!

Posts: 3061
From: Rockwall TX USA
Registered: Sep 1999

- posted 01-16-2002 09:00 PM      Profile for Aaron Sisemore   Email Aaron Sisemore   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Its CDS (Cinema Digital Sound) and was developed by ORC and Kodak.

Both 35mm and 70mm CDS prints of several titles (with the 70mm 'Dick Tracy' being the 'historical first') were made, and yes the major drawback was that there was no analog backup track (the 35mm prints had the CDS track in the space where the regular analog track would go). Unfortunately, the system was extremely unreliable and failed constantly. This problem ultimately killed the format in a couple short years...

I believe Brad has a CDS system in his screening room.

-Aaron

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Ethan Harper
E-dawggg!!!

Posts: 325
From: Plano, TX, USA
Registered: May 2000

- posted 01-16-2002 09:11 PM      Profile for Ethan Harper   Email Ethan Harper   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Cds had no ananlog backup because it was printed in place of the analog soundtrack on the film. I have heard some theaters would get 2-3 prints shipped if they played that certain movie in CDS format in case something did go wrong. They did print CDS on 35 and 70 as well.

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--"That's my story and i'm sticking to it!"--


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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

- posted 01-16-2002 09:12 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I searched on "cinema digital" before posting, didn't realize the correct acronym is CDS (duh). I see now there's been a lot of discussion about this.


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John Walsh
Film God

Posts: 2490
From: Connecticut, USA, Earth, Milky Way
Registered: Oct 1999

- posted 01-16-2002 11:34 PM      Profile for John Walsh   Email John Walsh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
The "Hollywood" legend I heard (don't know if it's true) is that CDS demo'ed their system to Steven Spielberg. There were problems, so Spielberg said "No way" and went for DTS. Although CDS did fix most problems, it was too late: that demo killed the company.

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Thomas Hauerslev
Master Film Handler

Posts: 451
From: Copenhagen, Denmark
Registered: Aug 2000

- posted 01-17-2002 02:52 AM      Profile for Thomas Hauerslev   Author's Homepage   Email Thomas Hauerslev   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Bobby Hendesson once wrote this about CDS.

A list of the films is here here.

I was fortunate to work with CDS with "T2" in 35mm 10+ years ago. Worked perfectly. Terriffic sound.

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Cheers, Thomas
..in70mm - The 70mm Newsletter
www.in70mm.com www.dp70.com www.70mm.dk www.hauerslev.com http://hjem.get2net.dk/in70mm


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John Pytlak
Film God

Posts: 9987
From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922
Registered: Jan 2000

- posted 01-17-2002 07:59 AM      Profile for John Pytlak   Author's Homepage   Email John Pytlak   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Steve Kraus' site also has CDS information:
http://members.aol.com/cds3570

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

- posted 01-17-2002 09:47 AM      Profile for Mark Gulbrandsen   Email Mark Gulbrandsen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I think the reason it used all of the available space was because it was un-compressed digital data.
Mark @ GTS

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Jack Johnston
Film Handler

Posts: 20
From: Rancho Cucamonga, CA, USA
Registered: May 2001

- posted 01-21-2002 01:26 PM      Profile for Jack Johnston   Email Jack Johnston   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I worked for ORC (Optical Radiation Corporation) during the CDS heyday and the reports of field failure were GREATLY over exaggerated to say the least. Yes there were a few failures for this new technology but the 'rumor mill' went to work fast and efficiently to make ORC the "first in/first out" of the digital sound arena. In one field failure of "Days of Thunder" in Westwood, California, the system power supply was backed into a corner blocking air ventilation which lead to the failure regardless of the instruction manual making very specific comment on how to place the supply to allow sufficient airflow.
As reported above from Copenhagen, I was in the theatre the night they played "T2" as the closing film for the very first Copenhagen Film Festival. I worked closely with Steen Larsen (God rest his soul) and the evening ended on a very HIGH note - as the attendees exited the theatre I stood in the lobby..."Yeah good movie, but the sound, it was great" was hearlded from the masses.
CDS fell victim to Hollywood where no one wants to be first but everyone wants to be second. What did they say about the 'talkies' - it'll never last; what did they say about the advent of color: same thing. ORC did have problems but those problems were primarily those of ego for being the first digital system ... the systems, when installed/maintained ran an impressive 96.4% reliability - whatelse in the booth can you say that about?

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

- posted 03-31-2002 05:52 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Today I found this newspaper clipping, a display ad by Edwards Theatres for the debut of CDS in their flagship location. Kind of a nifty piece of movie trivia, especially as it relates to the eventual widespread use of digital sound (I also mentioned this in my Edwards obituary in the Ground Level forum).



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Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

- posted 03-31-2002 06:08 PM      Profile for Gordon McLeod   Email Gordon McLeod   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Until this xmas I had a CDS ceramic tiled cup coaster
What ever happened with the laserdisk timecode system that strong tried to market in cojunction with a ca based company
I often wondered if it hadn't had its development by the for-runners of DTS


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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

- posted 03-31-2002 06:45 PM      Profile for David Stambaugh   Author's Homepage   Email David Stambaugh   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I vaguely remember that "Fantasia" ran in digital sound at an LA-area theater in the late 80s. I think there was a newspaper writeup about it that talked about syncing the film to a sound source that might have been VHS tape. Does anyone remember the Corvus Mirror backup system? It allowed huge amounts (for its time) of digital computer data to be backed up to standard VHS tape. Maybe this sound system was related to that. I dunno.

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Brad Miller
Administrator

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

- posted 03-31-2002 07:00 PM      Profile for Brad Miller   Author's Homepage   Email Brad Miller       Edit/Delete Post 
I think John F. Allen did that Fantasia setup. To my understanding, it was an external digital source (digital tape, cd, etc.) that was sync'ed up to the film. There may or may not have been some form of timecode to keep things locked together. JFA would be the best person to explain the setup.

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Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

- posted 03-31-2002 07:00 PM      Profile for Gordon McLeod   Email Gordon McLeod   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
That was John Allens use of a digital on video tape I gather it used a shaft encoder on the projector to lock it up


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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

- posted 04-01-2002 12:19 AM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I'm trying to remember the specifics of the "Fantasia" screening in the 1980's (Widescreen Review had an interview with John Allen some years ago where he went into detail about how they rigged up the setup). Basically it was a separate digital audio reel to reel tape system playing 2.0 channel stereo audio in synch with the 35mm film print.

The marketing of the HPS-4000 sound system as "the first in digital" was always kind of a confusing thing since HPS-4000 itself was more akin to THX and not a sound storage/recording process. That's why I always consider Cinema Digital Sound to be the real "first" theatrical digital sound format. It was a complete digital sound delivery system.

I've never been able to find out for sure just what the bitrate was for CDS. I know it was not uncompressed LinearPCM. But even though Delta Modulation does not require as many bits as LPCM, one could argue the audio is not really compressed --at least not in the typical lossy data reduction method used by DTS, Dolby Digital and SDDS. Sony's Super Audio CD format (with its Direct Stream Digital encoding process) uses a more advanced version audio coding like that used by CDS. But they call it Delta Sigma Modulation. I'm not a math wiz or audio engineer so I couldn't break down the specific differences. Judging by the audio quality of CDS, it did sound very very good. I was always impressed by the sound of "Dick Tracy" and am wondering just how good (or not so good) it will be transferred over into Dolby Digital 5.1 with its upcoming DVD release.

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