VistaVision Returns!

[Sean McKinnon]

There were no anamorphic adapters used.

[Steve Levy]

Regarding the marrying of Pro Tools for playback with film, this was an outgrowth of the desire to get away from the ailing Tascam MMR-8 and MMP-16 units to accommodate filmmakers desire to view their workprint with their freshly mixed track immediately after leaving the re-recording stage. While I was the driving force behind making this work, I cannot take all of the credit. Two of my colleagues from the WB Sound Department were instrumental in making this happen. Namely Evan Daum and the late Jeff Berlin.

In 2019 I had made several unsuccessful attempts to lock ProTools 10 to a Simplex 35/70 projector by taking the bi-phase signal from the shaft encoder and turning it into SMPTE timecode.
The projectors would slew and the JSK-1128 boxes were outputting slewed timecode. When following timecode, Pro Tools requires it to be jitter-free and not slew.

Jeff constructed a bi-phase generator at his bench to simulate a shaft encoder, and we fed it directly into an AVID Sync HD box into the bi-phase port this time. We varied the output frequency of the generator and the session dropped out. Just when we were about to put the project down and rethink it, Evan came over and had a look at the way the session was set up. He adjusted the session settings and we found that the audio would indeed play back and follow the varying bi-phase signal.

The next step was to try it out in a booth with a projector pulling film under mechanical load. It worked repeatedly on both machines. We tried it in 2 more projection rooms and had success.
Pro Tools has been successfully married to film for dailies as well as workprint for several features to date. A clean bi-phase signal is absolutely necessary.

While I haven't done it yet, I would imagine that it is possible to play an ATMOS track with a 70MM film print utilizing Pro Tools and a Dolby renderer unit.

[Ryan Gallagher]

While I haven't done it yet, I would imagine that it is possible to play an ATMOS track with a 70MM film print utilizing Pro Tools and a Dolby renderer unit.

Cool to hear about those efforts. I guess another question would be how many rooms have both ATMOS and 70mm capability? Certainly not many, but at least for new releases ATMOS mastering probably already exists, so minimal extra work there. Fun to think about.

We are not one of those rooms currently, but there is a slim chance we might be after our slated restoration.