my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Community   » The Afterlife   » Stereophonic re-mixes of mono soundtracks (Page 1)

This topic comprises 2 pages: 1  2

Author Topic: Stereophonic re-mixes of mono soundtracks Robert Harrison Expert Film Handler Posts: 239 From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA Registered: Jun 2005 posted 11-13-2005 09:57 PM                     Does anyone else out there become aggravated when they purchase a DVD of a movie they know was originally in mono that now claims to be "remastered in 5.1 digital sound?" Now, I'm not talking "purist" here. I have nothing against this practice, except when the results are truly awful. A case in point would be the new box set of "Billy Jack" movies. While they did manage to keep the dialogue centered on all four films, everything else was coming mostly from the right channel. Also, reverb was added to the sound effects. Fortunately, they did include the original mono track as an option. Fox DVDs are notorious for always claiming to have "stereo" tracks on many titles (although not going so far as to say 5.1), such as "One Million Years, B.C.," "Silver Streak" and "Wizards." In each case, the sound, including dialogue, is all over the room, in what I have dubbed AmorphouSound. (Even with their original 4-track titles, the dialogue tends to drift around a bit. That may be attributable to multiple microphones on the stage, I can't say for sure.) I realize that if they only have a composite track to work with, that there is only so much that can be done. Some seem to do it better than others. A good, or at least acceptable, re-mix of such is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." On other Eastwood titles, remarkable re-mixes have been accomplished. On those, they must have had the separate dialogue, music and effects tracks to work with. Some Elvis Presley movies have limited stereo, usually with everything imaging between the left-center and right-center positions. Then, there is something like the new issue of the 1953 "War of the Worlds" (listed as a 2.0 stereo track), where sound is panned here and there, front and back, yet there is no separation on the music, as you would find on "Blazing Saddles" or the new issue of "The Sting." Then there are some early Godzilla titles, which go from strictly center to surround, with no attempt to have any separation effects in the front left and right. They also added some obnoxious .1 boom effects here and there that seem to be coming from another movie. The worst of these is the original "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" which promises the obligatory 5.1 mix. It turns out to be just another AmorphouSound deal with reverb added. Then, we have the films that were originally 4-track magnetic or Dolby matrix, that are suddenly "5.1." In a lot of these cases, I wonder how many have actually been re-mixed or, at least, run through a Pro Logic II decoder. My statement, then, would be: If you can't do a decent re-mix, don't bother. And, please, don't call it 5.1. It's a rip-off. Some of us (and you boogers at the video companies know this) will buy a new issue of a movie only because of the supposed stereo re-mix. I'm contemplating buying the new issue of "The Battle of Britain," since the original DVD was only mono. Sometimes, I get lucky, like with "Black Sunday." At other times, I wind up with AmorphouSound. Anyone else out there as picky (or gullible) as me?  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 11-13-2005 11:16 PM                        I know the results are pretty bad when they "remastered" all of the Star Trek episodes from mono to 5.1. It was really really bad. Even worse wa when they did the same to the original Transformers. Fortunately the original mix is still an option.  |  IP: Logged Paul Linfesty Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1383 From: Bakersfield, CA, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 11-14-2005 12:02 AM                     quote: Robert Harrison Even with their original 4-track titles, the dialogue tends to drift around a bit. That may be attributable to multiple microphones on the stage, I can't say for sure. Many early Fox films recorded with three mikes lined up within the composition of the image, others used pot-panning in the sound mixing stage. In either case, this was known as "directional dialog" and was quite common in 4 and 6-track magnetic films from the 50's through mid 70's. It was very deliberate and some appreciate that the original mixes are being kept by Fox.  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 11-15-2005 12:06 AM                     quote: Paul Linfesty Many early Fox films recorded with three mikes lined up within the composition of the image, others used pot-panning in the sound mixing stage. ..if you see any production picts of "the ROBE", you can see this "tree" holding these three mics above the camera. Early analog stereo recordings also used this "tree" concept for three-track recording - to elimate the "hole" effect with having the center mic to fill in that "hole." Decca took this tree method and called it "the DECCA tree" of three mics on a pole with a "T" across the top of the pole with center in the middle and the left and right on the ends of the "T" - hanging over the orchestra. I heard that studio session masters were done on 6trk, 65mm film - this is probably why the DVD's can be issued in 5.1 whereas the titles were originally released in mono for the theatres. I could be wrong on this and maybe someone can "fill in the blanks" on this area. -Monte  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-15-2005 06:49 PM                     The recent DVD release of "The High And The Mighty" has a Chase re-do on it and its unimpressive at best. Don't know if this Warners Cinemascope job was actually miked in stereo or not but I suppose it could have been... I would have thought the music woulda been real stereo though. I highly reccomend this DVD though as its a neat time capsule to watch and it represents the first major "Air Disaster" epic made a long time before the Airport movies were even an idea. I'd go for a ride in that DC-6 with Wayne and company any day!! The big bonus is the second disk that has a ton of stuff on BATJAC Productions and how and why John Wayne formed it and how it was named. There are also pieces on Demetri Tiomkin, William Wellman, and the writer of the book as well as stuff shot at Chase doring the re-mix, and during the restoration of the film itself. Excellent value... I think I paid 9.99 for this DVD. A little seen John Wayne film that not been around in decades. Mark  |  IP: Logged Robert Harrison Expert Film Handler Posts: 239 From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA Registered: Jun 2005 posted 11-16-2005 05:45 PM                     Let me add that I do enjoy directionalized dialogue. I was even hoping it would come back into vogue with the digital sound formats. Apparently, only some CGI movies are doing this. I will say, though, that something like "Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea" is a bit much in a home system such as mine when the speakers are located outside the edges of the picture. I'm sure the same soundtrack was wonderful in a theatre with the speakers positioned behind the screen, where the voices could match the positions of the actors. My comment about dialogue jumping around was a reference to how, in the same scene, one person's voice would be fairly localized at a certain position, while another person's voice sounds like it is coming from all over the place. "Prince Valiant" is an example. Also, "Journey To the Center of the Earth" sounds a bit "phasey" to my ears. And on "Shining Star," some background sound effects jumped around WITH the dialogue.  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 11-16-2005 06:02 PM                     quote: Mark Gulbrandsen The big bonus is the second disk that has a ton of stuff on BATJAC Productions and how and why John Wayne formed it and how it was named. Wayne and producer Robert Fellows founded Batjac in 1952 as Wayne/Fellows Productions. When Fellows left the company years later, Wayne re-named the corporation after a ficticious trading company mentioned in the 1948 film "Wake of the Red Witch". With this formulation of this company, Wayne had control of his own films instead of having the studios having their say. Kinda like what happened with Buster Keaton in the silent era: Keaton had control of the movies that he made under his own company until he blundered and "signed his life and career away" with MGM in 1928, whom later on, in 1933, fired Keaton for his bad abuse of alcoholism. From then on, Keaton never regrouped himself until it was almost too late. Kinda fun being your own boss... -Monte  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-26-2005 01:46 AM                        As with most things old, the amount of preservation when it comes to motion picture original elements, it swings widely from title to title, studio to studio. It can go from all the elements being kept safe and secure and not deteriorated, to elements totally ruined or even lost, and this even on blockbuster films that you would think, "gee, what kind of morons would 'loose' the sound elements of a picture like SPARTACUS, or LAWRENCE OF ARABIA?" Total morons it seems. Then there are quite a few films of the 50s and 60s that had music recorded stereophonically but only ever got released in mono, or were played in stereo interlock in only limited engagements, while everywhere else they played with only standard mono prints. The DVD releases on such titles naturally can go back to the vaults and do restoration from real stereo elements, again, if they do still exist. I have not read anything definatively about THE ROBE's soundtrack, if the original multitrack mag elements still exist, all I know is, neither the CD nor the DVD has real stereo music, which is an awful shame given the great score by Alfred Newman, albeit self-pirated. In fact, what they have done on both CD and DVD is a terrible fake stereo job that adds echo and splits the frequency bands, alternating from them left and right. IMHO it's the music that is the only good thing about the film -- what a shame not to have the original stereo. Who cares if Newman "stole" it from his Academy Award winning score for THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (listen to the soldiers march and then again to the finale -- identical for both pictures). Guess he figured, "Hey, if Fox is willing pay me twice for the same music, more power to me." To his credit tho, THE ROBE does have some very haunting melodies which he added, but THE ROBE finale is note for note, chorus and all, as HUNCHBACK. Check it out sometime.  |  IP: Logged Paul Linfesty Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1383 From: Bakersfield, CA, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 11-28-2005 12:05 AM                     quote: Frank Angel what they have done on both CD and DVD is a terrible fake stereo job AFAIK, the DVD features the correct 4-track mix, albeit with a clipped high end (to get rid of that "hiss" that Fox loves to do.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-28-2005 03:24 AM                        I don't know Paul, I've been a sound mixing and recording engineer most of my adult life, and I've listened to both the CD and the DVD many times on monitors, with headphones, in the same recording studio with URI monitors that we used to mix an album that won the Phoenix Award for Best Quadraphonic Recording of an Original Cast Album Rubber Nickles. At no time do I actually hear a real stereo soundfield of THE ROBE. Unless the original recording was so badly done (which I doubt), there is no way this is real multitrack stereo. There's no stereo imaging, which is what you get with slice-and-dice shifting of frequency bands. Just listen to one channel at a time A-B them, and you'll hear the very different coloration between the two. That's because of the artificial removal of half the bandwidth in chunks on one channel with the opposite chunks left in place on the other channel -- leaving it to sound like someone totally readjusted a graphic equalizer between each switch back and forth. And that's because they DID.....to make pseudo-stereo. It's a dead give-away. In natural stereo, both channels would have the same tonalilty. I am not saying they didn't put 4 channels of audio on the DVD, I am just saying they are not real stereo. And I wouldn't go by what hype the studios put on their DVD boxes. Like they don't lie thruough their teeth. These are the same guys who keep saying DVDs will "last forever" (Jack Valentie's own words when trying to argue before Congress why consumers shouldn't be allowed to make even a single backup copy of their legally purchased DVDs and CDs) when any archivest will tell you that DVDs and CDs are all subject to "rot." The aluminum substrat becomes too non-reflective for the laser to read it and they also fail due to delamination, where the the layers separate, again making them unplayable. Those guys.  |  IP: Logged Jeff Taylor Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 601 From: Chatham, NJ/East Hampton, NY Registered: Apr 2000 posted 12-01-2005 03:23 PM                     In Ron Haver's "A Star is Born" book he mentions the frustrations of trying to restore that film, and specifically the fact that Jack Warner ordered the re-use of the magnetic stereo masters of their '50's titles for TV work. It's kind of a crime to think that those stereo Garland tracks ended up being recorded over by a Sugarfoot or Hawaiian Eye episode! For ASIB they ended up dubbing the sound from the last remaining mag print, which was in extremely poor shape.  |  IP: Logged Robert Harrison Expert Film Handler Posts: 239 From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA Registered: Jun 2005 posted 12-04-2005 05:45 PM                     And now I would like to discuss the soundtrack for "White Christmas." We wind up showing this film every year at this time where I work as projectionist. Two years ago, we showed the DVD. It listed a 5.1 soundtrack. It didn't sound very good. Of course, I had to use the 2 channel mixdown from the DVD player into the non-sync of a CP55, which left me with left, right and surround. Still, a friend owns a copy of the DVD and he said it didn't sound that great on his 5 channel home system. Last year, we got a 35mm print. It had a stereo optical track. It wasn't really marked as to particular noise reduction format so I played it in A-type stereo with surround (we do have an outboard SR adapter). I went downstairs and at first thought, "Hey, not bad." It was a scene of a bunch of soldiers singing and their voices were coming quite prominently from the surrounds. Well, I had other screens to run. I come back later during a dialogue only scene and hear every word coming out of the surrounds! I ran upstairs and switched to stereo WITHOUT surround. Yes, the system was calibrated. No other film exhibited this problem. So, here's my theory: If the original soundtrack was Perspecta (a 3 channel process that was basically mono shifted from speaker to speaker), could it be that someone at the Paramount sound department took an original Perspecta track, decoded it through a Perspecta Integrator and sent the outputs to a Dolby matrix encoder? This was probably done a long time ago as I remember having an optical stereo print play here once back in the 80s. Since the matrix decoders will send any out of phase stuff to the surrounds, I'm thinking this might be what the problem was. (I don't recall what it sounded like back then.) The bottom line: we are showing it again on the 13th. This time I will leave the surround channel off.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-04-2005 07:48 PM                     Well...whereas Perspecta had a mono track that was shifted between the three front channels via sub-tones...these tone would raise and lower the level on the various channels. As such, there should be zero phase differences between the channels, even if run through a Dolby encoder. Now if there was ever a 4-track magnetic version created for the film after the demise of Perspecta...then the opportunity for phase issues to exist does come into play. Any anomolies on the master recordings of such a 3 or 4-track magnetic print could indeed wack out a "pro-logic" decoder.  |  IP: Logged William Hooper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1879 From: Mobile, AL USA Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-05-2005 02:26 AM                        Vistavision, originally with a mono soundtrack with optional Perspecta steering, so I'd bet that a print with a Dolby stereo optical track is a re-mix done in the SR period.  |  IP: Logged John Koutsoumis Master Film Handler Posts: 261 From: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Registered: Aug 2003 posted 12-05-2005 08:21 AM                     Is it possible that the print of "White Christmas" is actually a mono track? Not remixed in stereo. I've run it from DVD in 5.1 through a CP55 (via the 4 track mag input), it didn't sound bad at all. Very little surround though. High Society was the same kind of 5.1 mix but that looked and sounded brilliant. Worst stereo re-mix for of a mono film I've experianced would be "Vertigo". I know there were problems in not having full access of the soundtracks etc, but gee whiz!  |  IP: Logged

All times are Central (GMT -6:00)

This topic comprises 2 pages: 1  2

Printer-friendly view of this topic

Hop To: Select a Forum: Category: Operations -------------------- Digital Cinema Forum Film Handlers' Forum Large Format Forum Ground Level Feature Info, Trailer Attachments & REAL Credit Offsets Category: Community -------------------- Film-Yak Film Handlers' Movie Reviews The Afterlife Bob Maar's Joke-A-Thon Category: Classified -------------------- Equipment and Supplies Wanted/For Sale Help Wanted/Seeking Employment Category: System -------------------- Software Beta Testing Forum

The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.