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Movies made sound with a light bulb: Sound-on-film
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- Published on Dec 24, 2022 veröffentlicht
- Just like the movies in a theater!
Links 'n' stuff:
The Engineer Guy did a fantastic explainer on the mechanism of film projectors - much deeper than I went as I was focused mainly on sound. Check it out if you want to learn more!
• How a Film Projec...
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Science & Technology
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I worked for 9 years back in the 1970's as a sound engineer in a film laboratory. I spent many hours recording optical sound tracks for 16mm film. As for the nice dark track on the prints; the film processor had a thickened developer that was applied to just the sound track area by a narrow wheel. This allowed the sound track area to retain the silver and make a nice dark track. The same was done for reversal films. It was important to have the track be as sharp as possible. While recording the sound negative, some of the light would scatter into the unexposed area. The same would happen when the negative was printed onto the final print. We would run exposure tests to get this effect to cancel and leave a nice sharp sound image on the print. If it was wrong, noise and intermodulation distortion would result. Another point you many notice is that the slits narrow down during the quiet parts. A DC bias was placed on the galvanometer to keep it as narrow as possible for quiet sections and then open up for the louder parts. This greatly reduced the film grain noise during projection. Great video as usual.
@OVMEBReed
Fascinating stuff! Thanks for the education! As a recent college grad in the early 90s, I worked for a small outfit in Chicago that was once the B&H Printing Division. My work included the re-engineering of a modular continuous contact motion picture film printer. One of my mentors would go on to receive an Oscar for creating a new sound head for copying these new digital audio tracks.
We used perchlorethylene in our Wet/Dry printers to prevent light scattering due to scratches on the film. The library of congress is able to restore some archival films using these machines.
Our 16/35/70mm printers were distributed worldwide and were used by all the major studios to make copies of the original masters for distribution to all the cinemas.
I truly enjoyed the original video and so many well-meant & well written comments.
Incredible, thank you for that detailed explanation. I feel smarter now lol
Lucky
@Brent Fisher The double spacing is not about typewriter flaws, as the same (hypothetic) tolerance issues would ruin the spaces between words. It's about human readability as the larger gap between sentences is more prominent than the smaller single space after a comma or abbreviation period. The fact that computer fonts use the same period graphic for all uses of the period keyboard key shows that computer font technology never replaced double spaces after sentences, and in fact software features to automate the job will frequently get the grammatical rules wrong, requiring users to edit the mess made by autocomplete.
I did the same work for several years and the sound bit is developed as a lithographic film pure black or white, no shades of grey ( i remember it had to be pre-fixated on reversal film first because the first developer would destroy the soundtrack resulting in a blue optical soundtrack and useless ) the sound developer itself was a highly concentrated lithographic developer i had to mix myself, nasty stuff to work with ...
As someone that almost always watches with closed captions on, I appreciate all the extra work that goes into adding those in. I especially liked the captions during rewind
I had to scroll to find someone else who noticed them.
28:49 - There's an episode of Columbo called "Make Me a Perfect Murder" in which you get to see this reel change technique done. Also, I have to say, it's crazy to me that people were able to figure out how to make this stuff work as well as it did so long ago. Not just the reel change technique. Everything. Every part of this just seems amazing.
The film "Fight Club" had some, ahem, interesting film lore presented in it as well.
I think that Columbo episode might actually have been where I first learned about cue marks too.
And once you have learned about cue marks, you'll ALWAYS notice them. You can't un-see them anymore.
From that point on, I could tell 8 seconds in advance when the break will start in the movie theater (in the middle of the movie, at the end of a reel) or sometimes even on TV for the one channel that only put in a single advertising break (and timed it the same as they would in a cinema).
That was like 15-20 years ago when I still watched regular TV sometimes.
But even after all those years of watching mostly digital content with no cue marks, I noticed the first cue marks in this video straight away (the ones at 10:28, way before he starts talking about changing reels). I started laughing and had to explain to my son (who has never heard of cue marks) what I found so funny. 😄
De-synchronizing your voice while pointing out the de-synchronization issues of old phonographs in conjunction with projectors, was a very nice touch.
39:03
I thought it was my phone being my phone.
Lol
Very clever. He got me, and left me no room to feel that I could detect it.
thx i hate it
80s kids like me who watched plenty of these in elementary school will have waves of nostalgia from this video! What amazes me is how clean and crisp the sound is from the film.
When I saw _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_ in a movie theater in 1982, the projectionist missed one of the reel changes, and the movie ended (and the lights came up automatically) RIGHT in the middle of the heart-rending Spock-is-dying scene. Nothing kills the mood faster. Among the groans heard in the audience, someone called out, "Well, that's it. They ran out of money." (Referring to the film's producers.)
😂😂😂
🖖🖖🖖
Something went wrong when I was watching LotR 3 in the theater. In the final big battle scene, the screen went bright white and the sound cut out for a few minutes, and the audience was just about to start walking out when the problem was fixed.
No idea if the cinema used reels or hard drives though.
@Jason Arencibia I worked as a projectionist in the 1990s. In my theater, the lights were controlled by bits of metallic tape stuck to the film. When the tape passed in front of a sensor, the lights came up. Sounds like this theater used a similar system, so the lights would have come up at the end of the "last" reel, even if it was projected out of order.
That's a joke my dad has made many times since then lmao
odd that the lights would come on automatically, it's possible, I only worked with reel to reel a few times taking over another theater for someone, I can't remember what would happen if we missed switching projectors. they are all set up different! with a platter system that I'm used to it was a little strip of metallic tape on the last reel, that tripped a sensor to turn the lights on.
I feel Alec is going to slam a full IMAX projection system onto that table next month.
That would be awesomr
@Das Ganon Those technologies are in anachronistic order.
I'm still thinking he's going to do a video on Theatrical Lighting sometime.
Carbon Arc, Limelight, Filaments, LEDs & Xenon Arc.
If his patreon does well enough
That would be awesome
Insane how smart people were back then and continue to be today. Makes me feel we stand on shoulders of giants
Its all iterations on monkey to the next
For a guy so obviously perfectionist, I can´t believe you didn´t talk about Norman McLaren. He was an Irish film maker who worked at the National Film Board of Canada. He made not only some amazing animated films, but also invented (of developed) an "animated soundtrack" technique where he created the sounds (and music) by "painting" then on the optical sound strip of the film.Pretty amazing thing to do.
One of the other benefits of DTS was that you could produce a foreign language version of the film without having to change the film print. Just supply DTS CDs in the appropriate languages that the cinemas could use.
Love your work!
The word you're looking for is "translation".
Oh, that is genious! The DTS after all is just "we're this, and we're here", so that would indeed be easy! Cool!
This was amazing. It always fascinates me that the waveform I'm used to seeing digitally is the same on analog sources. And knowing how they were written to and read off the film is very interesting. But the most interesting thing I learned from this video is that the film gets slowed down to a ticking, "show one still frame for a fraction of a second" at the projection site in order for the persistence of vision to do its work. I had no idea that film didn't just run through smoothly, but it makes sense once explained. Then knowing that the sound area does have to run through smoothly, so both those sites have to be separated by a series of gears and capstans etc to make them run at different styles is the craziest thing of all. Thank you so much for this video, I absolutely loved it.
Norman MacLaren, at the National Film Board of Canada, hand-drew abstract sound-tracks, directly onto the master print. His Oscar-winning anti-war film, "Neighbours" is a masterpiece.
Everyone watched Neighbours when I was a kid - UK in the late 80s
@I Identify as your Daddy No enough people watched "Neighbours."
Now all we have are warmongers.
Thank you for sharing this. Truly a historic film.
Bell and Howell must have sold a zillion of those to schools!
Deeply appreciate the de-sync and drift moments in the said explanation moments! Always wonderful!
@Gameboygenius Edited would show up as edited, though. Like this.
@JS I remember your comment saying something different. Either you edited it or Clip-Share had a glitch where it showed the wrong comment. (Very possible, I've had that happen before.)
@Gameboygenius In this video sure, but I don't think he's messing up with the sync on other videos on youtube randomly ... But who knows!
@JS I used to have it happen all the time on this one specific laptop I had, I still don't know what was causing the issue though.
Respect! You have an extraordinary skill of breaking down complicated technology into easily digestable pieces. I have watched only a few videos so far and I never had to rewind or pause in order to understand what was just said. Even more, you are covering seemingly every possible angle and in the end I feel like nothing was left unanswered. Some teachers could learn from you!
Agreed!
Absolutely love your videos. Can't think of any other channel that I learn so many fun facts from. Like "footage"... Never even thought of the origin of the term. Never stop being you! Thanks a million!
Can you pretty please make the films you have publicly available, found the samples wildly interesting
@HyperSlime64 sorry, new to this channel in the first place, can you share a link please?
I would be very interested in watching 100 year old films
I would love to see them too :)
@E BOThe thought Ihad when seeing that was: hey, that is what I was taught at uni.
Man, I just gotta let you know how awesome you are.
Idk how you do it, but the way you present these technology videos is just incredible.
Thanks, once again.
My pleasure!
Great... now we need a colab between you two!
Letting your audio get slowly out of sync was genious
Spoilers
@rogermwilcox Bro you need Premere Pro. Elements isn't much better than Windows Movie Maker. PM me if you want a download link.
I watched with subtitles on, and I didn’t notice it, since my eyes were glued on the bottom.
Synchronization pun indeed.
@Yuppi I feel this. I'm so used to videos just being slightly out of sync that I don't even start to notice until it gets REALLY bad
@Bob Roberts I hope it was Phil Hartman.
My grandpa worked in a movie theater back in the 60s or 70s so it’s nice that you explained how they had to work the projectors for movies :)
I worked as a projectionist for Aye Emme Cee around '08 and ironically the 35mm prints (the last around that time before everyone switched to digital) had a form of this. The film would move through a platter and the "brain" would read the side of the film and decode it and then produce the sound. Best job I ever had.
About ten years ago while I was in uni, I worked as a projectionist for a small student run cinema, projecting 35mm film on an old projector which I believe dated back to the 60s. It was quite a fun experience and I have many fond memories involving the things mentioned in this video.
Since we were mostly trying to show current releases (usually a couple of months after they first appeared in cinemas) we unfortunately had to abandon the analog projector in ~2015, not being able to get 35mm reels for current films from our distributor any more.
I grew up in the 80's when they used projectors like this in schools. In middle school, they were slowly transiting to VCR. They had a media closet with both versions because some things were still on film where other things was in VHS.
Your timing is impeccable. A month ago I pulled out two16mm projectors from long term storage to rehab mechanicals and electronics so they were ready for some recently “found film”
Been marathon film viewing and then I go to your channel and find this! Synchronicity
The another advantage of DTS's off-film approach that you didn't mention is an ability to switch soundtrack language without changing the film, which made it very useful in countries where movies could be released in different language versions.
That's what my favorite cinema did back then. German Copies with english DTS-discs. This also meant of course if the copy was bad or other problems occured, that the movie randomly switched back to the german sound for short periods when DTS didn't work.
@Geek49 with an AI text to speech, you could even use the actor's original voice. "I'm Skallagrim, and I approve of this ether-flavored coffee!"
It was also possible to use the DTS time codes to drive a second projector to add subtitles. That was the original plan, I don't know if it ever happened.
I was a little surprised he didn't mention the ease of adding multiple soundtracks. But a creator only has so many feet of film, right?
Also cartoons could have different language versions easily made maybe even unofficial translations could be made later in the movies life. Somewhat like people are transcribing movies and making subtitle files nowadays but with actual sound
My dad was a cinema projectionist when i grew up and i often got to see movies from the projection room and sometimes help to rewind the film. His theater never upgraded to digital projection before it shut down so in my mind projectionists are still sweating their asses off working the film hehe. Weird to imagine it's not actually like that anymore. Thanks for the great video!
As a former audio engineer this is an absolutely brilliant explanation
That "Code unto others" line is absolute gold and I can't believe they were complaining about stuff like that even in the 60s/70s.
Makes it even sadder that it's still such a problem now.
Did you think bad coding was just invented a few years ago?
This was an amazing amount of great explanation. I never fully understood how sound was encoded on film in days of old. In the 1960’s it happened occasionally that a movie would stop in the middle for anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or so, and now it’s clear what the projectionist was frantically doing.
man it really doesn't matter what you choose to talk about it's always a banger.
I love it when you are explaining the process of audio video syncing, the section is intentionally off-sync.
... followed by cue marks! 😁
And the cue marks when he mentioned the cue marks on film. *chef's kiss*.
lmao that was the best part
@Al T. Rivera Thanks.
By the way, did you know that if you type it out with a colon, then it will automatically become a link to correct place in the video?
9:11
@ronindebeatrice Thank you! I usually read the captions, so it's hard for me to spot these the first time around.
I love how in depth this channel gets on topics. 😊
Now this is something I haven't come across Clip-Share in many years! Very informative, grabbing and entertaining! Good old fashioned keeping people glued to the screen type of production!
Well done sir, I thoroughly enjoyed this, my late Stepdad worked in a drive-in cinema when we was young and he used to tell me about those cue dots in old films, and how he had to get good at the art of switch over, or the horns at the drive-in would be honking mad as the patrons got upset! hehe!
The pressure plate was to keep the film flat against the focal plane. I was running these things in the early 60s
You tend to feature physical/mechanical technologies, and I don't know if there is one for this, but it'd be interesting to see the process of transferring early CGI and computer animation to film before theaters started using digital projectors.
Oh man I remember projectors in school, and it flapping around at the end. They were probably considered old even then though and it was not that long until VCRs and TVs were more common. Also never realized those dots were markers! Used to see them all the time at our cinema. I thought it was some kind of dirt on the film, and guess I never realized they were always in same spot.
This is one of my areas of expertise so I'll try not to go completely into shop-talk mode. SDDS could do 8 channels, yes, but it often carried the same 5.1 mix as Dolby Digital and DTS. The extra two channels were between the Left, Center, and Right channels behind the screen, so backwards compatibility was a no-brainer. AMC made a huge SDDS buy and installed SDDS in ALL of their screens in the US, or at least they were supposed to. They certainly had a ton but I don't think it ever reached 100% of AMC screens. SDDS is indeed the least preferred format though. That's because instead of dropping back out to analog stereo when it failed, it would often drop do a crappier low-bit rate digital mode with fewer channels. It sounded awful, way worse than even Dolby A-Type. Only when that failed would it drop to ANALog sound. I wish I knew you were working on this as I could've sent you some DTS discs. BTW DTS was really only a 5 channel system as it doesn't have the ".1". Instead it took the subwoofer information from the surrounds, which made the surrounds not-full range. There's so much more nonsense I could blab about but I'm stopping now before they use my text as a new border wall or something. PS - They got rid of silver soundtracks and opted for cyan dye soundtracks. You can see one on the platter picture you showed with the film coming out of the center. Yeah that was a whole thing which was a fun conversion in the industry.
What do you mean by "shop-talk mode"?
@Aquatarkus Consumer format DTS is totally different, the only relationship is the letters DTS in the name.
@Nick Wallette Dialog Normalization is the bane of Dolby Digital (it doesn't feature this theatrically). If it's set wrong then you get very noticeable "pumping" of the volume. If it's encoded correctly at -31db then this issue goes away and 0db is 0db.
@Game Sack Regarding the relative audio level, Dolby Digital has a dialog normalization level setting encoded in that can attenuate the audio level to ensure that dialog is always at a fixed average level. This requires applying negative gain to bring the absolute audio level down to this normalized level.
IIRC, DTS doesn’t have that (though I might be wrong?)
You can rip the audio tracks from a film with both DD and DTS, strip the dialog normalization, and both should be at 0dB gain. In theory, this would give you the true mastering level of each soundtrack, but it is subject to whatever gain processing each master goes through, during export, encoding, and then the decoding codec on your playback device, etc...
@Aquatarkus WOW OK I'll try to answer the best I can:
1 - The subs were derived using a simple low-pass filter. Home DTS is an extremely different beast than cinematic DTS. In the cinema DTS used APTX (I think) encoding. Home DTS was a completely different codec and eventually a completely different company. Theatrical DTS would eventually become Datasat. DTS-ES was their version of Dolby Digital EX, a center surround channel matrixed from the left and right surrounds, just like Pro-Logic.
2 - Yes I believe this is true. Not theatrically, but only for the home.
My first technical job out of school was in a university library's AV unit, and I remember being shown, and being fascinated by the audio banding tracks - I never really thought much about it again until now, thanks so much for the explanation!
Ive got a bunch of 16mm films and some of them have bad sound tracks, particuarly ones with agfa film stock, for some reason the clear part of the track goes yellow with age and doesnt let as much light through. Im quite impressed how much research you have done on the different types of sound tracks, there was quite a few they used, and i find some types dont work as well on my eiki projector, particularly the prints that ran 4 tracks in parallel.
I went into this video thinking it "wasn't for me", but the 40 minutes flew by and I found it all genuinely fascinating. Part of my job over two decades ago was splicing damaged film in a museum on these little displays. Everything in this video answered so many questions that I didn't know that I wanted answering! Thank you T-shirt-Tweed-jacket-guy! New sub!
Actually even as far as the 1990s, TV stations had similar problems as projectionists. When cassette based video tape formats like Betacam SP became popular, one problem was that they only had fairly short run times. So movies were typically split on multiple cassettes which required a switch over. Though with video tape that's probably somewhat easier to do as you have time codes.
@Silica 🏳️⚧️ AFAIK that was done in some countries where they interrupted TV programs by so-called commercials. You can see it in the "Mr. Bean" series.
!!! my dad told me that when watching something on TV sometimes a little dot would appear at the top right corner right before advertisements Was that a que marker??
@alte Bänder I don't think we regarded that as a tbc. It was a lot of rack units of analogue circuitry though. My recollection is that there was nearly always a CRO attached for alignment/ maintenance purposes. ( I addition to the usual vectorscope and WFM that was part of the system).
@bloozee Well strictly speaking all analog direct colour recorders (for colour) had a form of TBC. However usually that could only correct for a microsecond or so to get the chroma phase correct.
@alte Bänder quad was indeed 2 inch .. and very noisy due to the suction pumps sucking the tape into the cavity... I still have one of the pumps in my shed. We used B format in our studio but the rest of our network used C. Our facility had two quad format machines when I started.. one of them had a TBC!
Just recently restored a Fumeo 16mm Cinema projector that had both pickups for magnetic and sound on film. Very cool to discover how it worked and it was a real experience getting a 70 year old piece of machinery to work.
I love that you edited in all the little analogue cues into the video. Very well done.
The timing cues were even timed correctly between the scene changes! I hope the editor had fun with it.
Did anyone else notice he put the black blob in the upper right hand corner of his video several minutes before he showed that was the way it let the projectionist know to switch reels?
@DårK Šøûł No disassemble Johnny 5!
@Richard Hayes The out of sync sound really bothers me. It makes my brain feel like it has a short circuit 😆
And the out of sync sound! He's awesome isn't he.
You have to be one of my favorite tech video makers, your humor is great! Keep up these neat videos! I remember those cue marks on films, man I feel old!
Sir, you are tremendously skillful in the arts of education and story telling. Keep up the good work!
The way you said "illusion of movement" and "theater" makes me think it was a reference to Don Hertzfeldt's The Animation Show; if that was deliberate, you're awesome lol. Nobody I know is even aware Don Hertzfeldt exists
I'll track down his films! Regards from Baltimore.
ALL HAIL THE DARK LORD OF THE TWIN MOONS!
My spoon is too big! (though my favorite was angry bees flying out of my nipples...)
This was a really well-done video! If your mind is blown by how the projector has to stop each frame momentarily in order to produce a clear image, think about how flipbooks utilize the same principle.
This video was awesome, I'm only 31 but did watch a lot of older movies as a kid with my folks, and although a new the basics of how films were done, this was great to be re-educated, and learn a bit more of the nuances that evolved throughout. Great work man
I haven’t worked as a projectionist since 1984, but when that cue mark popped up, the countdown timer started in my head and I switched to the next projector with my hands just as you had that cut. You freaked me out! Thanks!
I always knew it was going to be a good class when they brought out the bigger reels. One thing you didn't really get into enough for my interest, was how the signal from the optical reader was converted into actual sound... did they modulate some kind of tone with the variable amplitude signal coming from the reader? I need to look this up...
Absolutely fascinating video, especially the digital sound stuff.
Also, thank you for explaining how the projector would display one frame at a time rather than just a stream from the film. I always wondered how this would actually work.
Amazing... Also these old films are just so comforting for some reason. I already watched through the whole Cobol film the other day, it was like wrapping myself in a warm blanket!
I want to see that COBOL film in particular! Do you have the name of it, or know if it's available online?
What a great Documentary! I am always in awe to see how complicated yet brilliant those things are. Thank you for those beautiful worthwhile 40 minutes.
Brilliantly done. Love the out-of-sync bit-and even the captions (especially the reversed clip toward the end) are spectacular. 🤩
This made me nostalgic, I was in AV club in HS in the early 70s. We had a full auditorium with a projection booth, in it was a 16mm RCA Porto-Arc projector from the 50s. It was hand thread with a separate lamp house containing an arc lamp. A transformer that looked like an arc welder lived on the floor underneath the projection stand which powered the lamp. The projectionist had to learn to manually strike an arc to get it started. A clock mechanism fed the carbon rods together at the rate they burned away and a prism in the side of the lamp house projected an image of the arc onto a glass scale so that the projectionist could monitor the proper gap between the rods to ensure that the adjustable clock speed stayed correct.
If the clock speed was too slow the gap got wide and the picture went dim and turned yellow. If the speed was too fast the gap narrowed causing the picture to dim and turn blue. Properly adjusted the projector produced a really beautiful and very bright picture.
Each year our club would rent a feature film and charge admission to a “movie night” as a fundraiser. 16mm features came on two huge reels, we couldn’t show a feature without a break because we had one projector. Instead we watched for the cue marks and switched to a slide projector that contained an “intermission” slide. The tail out of these films was black so that the projectionist didn’t have to close the window on the film projector, the slide projected right over the blackout giving enough time to kill the arc. We also had a hand cranked rewinder that was much faster than the projector rewind.
I absolutely loved being a projectionist and got really good at it. That quirky sound of a 16mm optic soundtrack always brings back memories.
Those systems have been known to create cold fusion if not properly aligned.
@Joe Kelly When I ran properly maintained lamp housings, yes the drift was minor..
As for UCar carbons, they seemed to work ok when I used them, but they may have been old stock.
The one issue that I've seen:if the carbons are not stored well, sometimes they can absorb moisture-this can cause the carbon to BEND slightly as it is being used-compensating for this can be a hassle.
@M. K. I'd have to make small adjustments. None of them drifted too far. Plus this was in the early 90's, and my boss lamented that the quality of Union Carbide carbon rods had slipped over the years (they had become a boutique item, as pretty much only smaller art houses and colleges used them) and no longer had very steady burn rates.
I was in AV club in the early 1960s at a small high school in semi-rural Ohio. We had a couple Bell Film-o-Sound projectors that were our daily drivers -- very reliable and pretty easy to learn for an 8th grader. But I was interested in our "back up" projectors - a Victor Animatograph and a Victor Animatophone. Both were 1930s-era "portables," though it took two of us to lift them onto a cart. The separate audio section of each was full of ancient-looking vacuum tubes. The projector motors took several seconds to come up to speed after turning them on, with a loud whine that was nicely hidden by the racket made when the clutch was engaged and the film started moving. They seemed to work OK, though. But they were scary machines, and I think we used them just once.
Still, that experience stood me in good stead when I worked at a TV station ten years later and loaded innumerable films onto the four RCA TP-16 projectors in the telecine room. Those were 6 feet tall with almost-professional-level film handling and capacity for large film reels. I got good enough to be able to thread one in just a few seconds -- speed which was needed during the Christmas advertising peak, when I might have maybe a dozen short commercials to load, per projector, during the half-hour evening news program.
@Joe Kelly If you needed to readjust them every few minutes, they were not working correctly-it DOES happen:one place I worked, covering another operator's vacation, had Peerless Cinarc lamnphouses-basically the same as the Magnarc, that were so worn out, that just running to the restroom(in the same room), resulted in an over-wide gap, with the resulting poor light.
This is, as usual and expected, very cool! I wonder if you know anything about those green laser vein finders that the phlebotomists, nurses, and vampires use to find usable blood vessels for drawing blood or inserting IV tubes? I'd love to see a video about that!
I thoroughly enjoyed this video! You went so in depth about so many topics regarding film. This film projector seems pretty complex it must have cost a pretty penny back when it was new? I don't think you ever mentioned when that model was from a side from the fact the amplifier had tubes? Would that put it to the 50's or 60's probably? Also the mechanism with the sprockets and the three teeth to advance the film on my gosh that seems so complex and delicate and the fact it doesn't just completely destroy the film is amazing.
I really had no idea how the sound was encoded onto a film and I still don't 100% understand how the light is transformed into sound although I can see how it makes sense as light and sound are both forms of energy which have their own frequencies.
I loved the insight into the job of a projectionist. I knew they had to switch reels but 1 - I didn't realize feature films could come on up to 9 reels and 2 - it is so clever they had two projectors in the same booth to have one loaded and ready to go and I was definitely one of those kids sitting in the theater turning around to look up and see where the film was coming from. I did notice there would be 2-3 different windows back there but I didn't really know why. I figured one was probably for the projectionist to look out and make sure the film was running OK.
I guess I will finish this already too long comment post up by saying I fully enjoyed the snippets of vintage Epcot Center film. (You must follow RetroWDW Clip-Share channel / Lake Buena Vista Historical Society) I love when they have their retro home movie night though they don't do it as often as they did during the pandemic.
I guess I will say one more thing is that there is something inherently more special about watching a movie being projected on a big screen. We have tried to recreate the experience by using a digital projector in our back yard to watch feature length films in our back yard during the warmer weather.
Love your videos and keep doing what you do =)
I have to say this was an extremely interesting video! Really great pacing and depth! Thank you for making this!
Watching this video was a wonderfully educational time and also fed into a topic I occasionally obsess over. There was this optical synthesizer//composing machine made in the soviet union called the variophone and for a while, it was somewhat of a mystery how sound could be translated onto the film for those compositions. This video has gotten me extremely close to understanding that machine, so I thank you for it.
I've never been interested in this topic, but you explain it so well that you make it easy to care about!
Great video! A few things that might be of interest:
- Magnetic sound on film was more of a feature of cinema sound than you might have realised. When CinemaScope premiered in 1953, the wide image was only half of the selling point - the other was the 4 channel high fidelity soundtrack, which was achieved by putting 4 magnetic strips on the edges of the film.
This 4 channel layout (Left, Centre, Right, Surround) is what Dolby would emulate when they came up with their Dolby A encoding system utilising the optical soundtrack. (btw Stereo sound for cinema has always meant at least 4 channels, not 2 as is the case in the home).
The original Cinemascope was also a wider ratio (2.55:1) than what became the 'Scope standard (1.35:1) because it originally widened the image into the previous optical soundtrack area.
This "Mag-strip" was also utilised for the 70mm format, with 6 channels recorded onto the edges of the film. 70mm never had an optical soundtrack. Even once filming natively for 70mm became a rarity, big films were still often optically 'blown up' onto 70mm release prints pretty much purely to take advantage of the better soundtrack. 5.1 in the layout we know it today was already in cinemas since 1979 thanks to 6-track mag strip 70mm when Apocalypse Now premiered. Also, it sounds awesome.
- When doing traditional double-projector presentation, projectionists would often put some splicing tape on the edge of the film in the lead up to a reel change - the clacking sound the tape would make as it passed through the rollers / gate would serve as an audible warning that the reel was soon to end.
- SDDS utilised ATRAC encoding - the same compression format Sony had invented for the MiniDisc! Also, whilst it was 8 channels in its premiere format (which added two more channels behind the screen - the same as the original Todd AO 70mm Format), SDDS also had a standard 5.1 mode. For many years prints with all 3 soundtrack formats like the trailer you have were very common. What was less common was studios opting to upmix to the full 8 channel format. The advantage of having those extra 2 screen channels is again being utilised by Dolby Atmos.
- DTS didn't ever utilise higher capacity DVD Roms. However part of the original design of the system had allowed the timecode to also be used to trigger in-theatre effects. And from memory there was also provisions in the DTS bitstream itself to accomodate triggering other than the soundtrack. For this reason, DTS did get some limited use in special venue scenarios. It was also the only one of the 3 digital sound formats that had a 70mm version. Which was easy because the SMPTE timecode was just added to a 70mm print.
@Cinema Synesthesia Back in the late 1970s I was one of a group of volunteers working to restore and reopen a historic (1911 vintage) cinema that had been closed for over 20 years. The original projectors (Kalee 7s with Western Electric 4A soundheads) were beyond saving due to corrosion and vandalism, but we had been given a pair of Kalee 20s. These Kalee 20s came with "penthouse" magnetic soundheads and it was my intention to recondition these heads and add the necessary electronics to give ourselves the ability to screen 35 mm mag prints. I did a fair bit of research into the system at the time such as finding the articles about it in the JSMPTE issues from 1953 when it was introduced. However I was advised that this was now an obsolete format and that 35 mm mag prints were no longer available, so I didn't proceed with the plan.
The Kalees were fitted with Dolby Digital soundheads in 2000 and are still in good working order, though they get little use these days. They now share the tiny projection room with a Christie D-Cinema projector which earns our bread-and-butter.
@David Faraday @sguttag great replies both of you. This thread rocks.
@sguttag Fox Grandeur was an entirely different format from modern 70 mm film. The perforation pitch was greater than the 64 to the foot of 35 mm which is also used by modern 70 mm film.
Modern 70 mm film is actually based on another failed wide-screen format from around 1930, Paramount's 65 mm format. When Todd AO were starting work on developing their "Cinerama through one hole" format they acquired the cameras which had been built for this system, which is why negative film for 70 mm is actually 65 mm. Print film had an additional 2.5 mm added each side to make room for the magnetic stripes (two tracks are recorded between the perforations and the edge of the film on each side, one between the perforations and the image on each side).
Early Cinemascope films with an "effects" track used a 12 kHz tone recorded on that track together with the audio. The absence of that tone muted the relevant amplifier so that audiences wouldn't be disturbed by hiss when there was no "effects" recorded.
Early Dolby Stereo films also didn't have a surround channel.
Near miss @CinemaSynesthesia. 70mm did have an optical (variable density) format with Fox's Grandeur. It was also 4-perfs/side per frame.
Stereo for cinema always meant at least 3-channels, not 4. The surround channel started out as an "effects" channel and some titles omitted them and some 35mm magnetic prints omitted the surround stripe. Later DTS units (XD10 and XD20 could do higher channel counts). You can also have multiple DTS players track off of one reader to expand channel count. And, while they never did change their disc types, the later units could ingest via USB (that fancy new thing) and later software versions of the later units could also exchange content via network.
I ran a Norelco DP70 for Wehrenberg theaters in Missouri it was probably the best film projector ever made.
I love your videos! You should do one on neon signs and the old mechanical flashers they used to use.
I would love to see you cover mercury-arc rectifiers! These weird, blue glowing, mad scientist style devices were used in the early days of electricity to rectify AC voltage into DC for applications such as electric trains, charging of electric vehicles etc. Photonicinduction made an interesting video on them but I would love to see your take on MARs!
One of the most informative videos I have watched on Clip-Share! Thank you so much Alec - stay awesome.
This was fantastic. Not that I actually think you will read or respond to this, I still want to throw out that the history lesson of the different audio formats and the transitions the cinemas had with tech sounds like a GREAT idea for a video. I'm sure getting a hold of that tech is far more problematic but if it were to present itself to you. I hope you would consider it.
I remember being shown the projection room of a new multiplex in the early 1990’s. They used to feed the film through 2 or more projectors so they only had to rent one film, to show on many screen simultaneously. The projectors were locked electronically to ensure speed matching. They also put metallic strips on the film to trigger events, lights down, curtains open, wide screen from the adverts etc.
Alec's Christmas present to me is the knowledge of where the word "footage" comes from
Now you can start to work on the idiom of "roll the tape" when no video recording uses tape any more!
@Gzalo and "long-métrage" is used for long-form videos.
...a little deeper but that's why Final Cut calls the storage files "bins" _(all the different lengths of cut film in physical editing bays that weren't actively being worked with were stored in literal BINS under/around the editing table)_
…I'm somewhat astounded people didn't realize this
Now ask why we “dial” a call on a cell phone!
Fun fact, nowadays you can buy sound film for your regular 35mm photo camera. It is a very high contrast stock, so if you expose it correctly, you can get some pretty dramatic results. There's some photographer Clip-Sharers that have used it in the past if you want to learn more.
Hi! I absolutely love your videos and have been binging them for awhile now. I would love to see a video about LCDs. I would have never guessed they had little fluorescent bulbs in some of them!!!!
You got a LITERLOL from me at the "Sound Synchronization" gag. This is a huge part of why I love your channel!! Happy New Year, and keep 'em coming!
_"The herky-jerky gate and the smoothly-turning sprockets", "Rocket surgery" and "Earl Eye-spottable" are my favorite concepts in this video._
Super interesting and never new that this is how sound was put onto the film. As a modern record producer and engineer I immediately recognized the wave forms as I see and work with those all day in ProTools. And I have many optically controlled sound devices/effects; compressors, filters, wah pedals, etc, and I knew the relationship of light and sound, but this just blew my mind that that was how sound was encoded onto film. I would have guessed some form of magnetic strip like audio tape. Really glad I stumbled onto this both being a music producer, but analog/vinyl music enthusiast too. Fascinating and super cool!
I was a projectionist back in the early 90's and I remember when we got the Dolby Digital and DTS systems retrofitted to our projectors. We never got the Sony system though. The systems would instantly fail-over to the analog track if the digital signal experienced temporary corruption and switch back as soon as it got a good digital signal again. And yes, you could totally hear the difference when that happened but at least the audio didn't completely drop out if too much dust got on a section of digital squares. Also, try pointing an infrared remote at the light sensor behind the sound drum and press one of the buttons. You'll get a nice burst of digital noise pulses!
@Soup That's unfortunate. With proper film handling and equipment you do not have to remove frames to splice reels together (and the reel changes can be seamless). Often one frame is removed to match the heads and tails to the proper leader, but you'd never need to remove more than that. Removing more, in my experience, was usually a sign of laziness (e.g. not wanting to spend time removing old splicing tape/tape residue so just cutting off the frame instead).
@Chubbysumo Consumer DTS on DVD and Blu Ray is totally different, it's just an audio compression system like MP3 or Dolby Digital. I have no idea what the situation is with current theatre presentations.
@Chubbysumo You wrote that dialogue "was perfectly clean, no background noise at all, like, you could tell it was recorded in a sound booth, but once it was mixed with all the other sounds, it fit the movie." Only now that I read that do I realize that of course the studios would do it that way. It would be much easier for them to do all of the background noise and sound effects once, and get them right. Then the human voices, which will vary between different language releases, can be played back at the same time along with the rest. It's obvious in retrospect and an excellent solution. Thanks for letting us know about that.
@Chubbysumo Most films these days are mixed with the dialogue, and often only the dialogue, sent to the centre speaker. Playing a film with the centre speaker not working sounds weird because all the incidental sounds are there, the music etc is all there, but when people open their mouths no sound comes out.
@Subway Garage SDDS was the last to launch (in 1994) and the first to be discontinued (in 2004). In the meantime it had by far the lowest market share at around 10%. But since from about 1998 almost all prints carried all three digital formats it didn't much matter which system your projector was equipped with.
Hello, I love your educational videos. You do an excellent job at trying your best to explain the most difficult subjects, and do a great job. I’ve always been fascinated with technology, audio and video. Been repairing equipment for about 3 decades. Its truly amazing the wonderful technology and marvel of so many common household devices that people take for granted every day without any knowledge of what’s actually happening. Keep up the fantastic job with your channel young man. I feel like bringing out my 16mm Singer brand sound projector again soon after watching this. Took me since the 80’s to finally get one to own. This is what my school system used just before VHS became available. There is something truly wonderful and fascinating with these mechanical marvels. Next is to purchase my own Edison cylinder record player. I already own about 100 cylinders and play on my best friends Edison Standard player which I helped him fix about 15 years ago. 😎👍
As someone who dabbled as a projectionist in the student cinema at university, this was a lovely bit of nostalgia... Especially the cue dots which I'm apparently still trained to spot immediately Thankfully we had a platter system, so no switching projectors for me.
Hi Alex, the sound pick up is actually a solar cell on these projectors. In later years the applicator or chemical applied to the sound track area to make the background of the track black in order to reduce noise was eliminated. The sound track without the applicator was then cyan in color. In order to read the sound without also reading allot of surface noise, the solar cell was replaced with an LED pickup.
Wow, I have never seen the Dolby codes before. What a great idea to place it in the area between the sprocket holes. Thank you for these insights!
I love the audio mis-sync “demo” and visual film cue marks subtly edited into this informative video. Congrats on another amazing video!!
And a decade later, keeping audio and video in sync is still damn near impossible.
I worked in a movie theater in the late 90s-2000s and learned about the DD and DTS signals back then. It was genius. And the platter systems made it easier for theaters. The build-up and tear down sessions were fun. Some of our theaters in the multiplex would share platters between 2 projectors. Good times.
When clicking on this video, I never imagined how cool audio on film was. I truly learned a lot. Thanks.
Awesome video!
This brought back so many memories working in the projection booth. By the time my brother worked there a few years later, the projectors were upgraded to full digital and eliminated the use of film reels at our theater.
Have you made a video about tube amplifiers? I have one fr my headphones, and understand the basics of how it works, but I think it'd be cool to get an in depth video/ history about them. Its funny how in my head 100 year old technology like this gets stored under "magical mysticism" in my head since I don't fully understood how it works. Over the years you've lessened the number of things stored that way in my brain.
I worked as the projectionist at my school and we used 16mm films for our ‘school film’ movie showings in the theatre. We had a pair of Agfa 16mm projectors in the lighting booth. Fond memories of my time doing that… This was in the mid-late 90’s
The whole synchronization bit is gold. EDIT: Holy crap. I never realized that's how Dolby digital started out. Like in my head I was like that's late enough for a digital file right? I guess it was just spread across the sprocket of the tape...
What's also fascinating is how Dolby incorporated DD/AC-3 soundtracks onto Laserdiscs. By the time the AC-3 technology was introduced, most Laserdiscs had the newer stereo CD style PCM track on top of the two legacy analog tracks, and newer Laserdisc players fully supported decoding the superior PCM tracks.
With the analog tracks becoming somewhat obsolete, they were repurposed for extra features such as commentary tracks. You could even have two commentary tracks on a disc because the player allowed you to select which analog channel you wanted to play back instead of playing both at the same time.
That's when someone at Dolby had the brilliant idea to store an RF modulated 384(?) kbps Dolby Digital signal onto the analog track. Some higher-end Laserdisc players came with a separate audio output for the AC-3 RF analog track which would be fed into a separate RF demodulator, converting the RF track into a proper digital signal that could then be fed into a home 5.1 channel receiver.
I used to have such a Dolby 5.1 Laserdisc set-up and it sounded fantastic! But with the introduction of lower cost DVDs and their ability to natively support multiple digital tracks, Laserdiscs quickly became obsolete. And once Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were introduced, it was already game over for Laserdiscs.
Still, Laserdiscs paved the way for the home sound formats and features we have today, and I'll always be grateful to have owned them at one time.
My old gear and remaining Laserdisc collection will soon be put up for sale on Kijiji.
Yup, it’s in between the sprocket holes. The way they squeezed in multiple audio formats into ever smaller bits left in the film is truly stunning. The engineers must have been so happy when things went digital for projection.
Really illuminating(no pun intended) and thorough information here! Thank you very much for the enthusiasm and attention to such great topics; cheers!
I was an AV geek in high school using that same projector. I did projection booth duty in college using slightly higher quality projectors. I ran TV film to video telecine chains at a local TV station. I was a telecine system engineer in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s transferring 8/16/35 mm film to video. This video is so much fun, remembering each era!
One of the best educational channels I've ever found. Great video as always!
I've seen the SDDS logo in the credits of many movies, but I wonder why SONY did not implemented this format in their home AV receivers. They own movie companies like Columbia and TriStar after all. Maybe there wasn't enough space on the DVDs back then for 3 audio formats, or maybe SDDS was using too high of a bit rate to be recorded on a DVD. We can argue that they could do it with the blu-ray, but they didn't see the point anymore and it would just drive the cost up?
THANKYOU FOR THIS VIDEO! I always wondered how they did it.... and why old films and tv show parts filmed outside sounded different.
That projector brings back memories. I lost track of the number of films I saw in elementary school (mid-80's) that were projected from a 16mm projector. At one point the teacher taught me how to thread the machine. Good times.
Another fact that is often overlooked in the states with DTS is that having the audio on a separate medium makes DUBs so much easier as you only need to swap the audiodisc so switch to another language. I think around this time cinamas started to tver alot more variations here in germany, making runs with original language, than one with dub and sometimes even a third language when there was a large group of potential customers of that language near a specific cinema.Noone would have dealt with that chaos in the older days.
My main thought after watching this video is “what was that film?” I found it very weird and a bit funny the way it jumped from random subjects to other random subjects that are completely irrelevant. Great video!
Another fantastic trip down technology memory lane. I used a Bell and Howell similar to that one in the late 1960s and early 1970's in my elementary school. My mom was a teacher so I learned how to work one in second grade. Instant AV nerd for all my teachers. lol They could never seem to get the "slack" right, so they just had me do it. Plus It kept my ADD mind occupied. ROFL Thanks for your great research and presentation style!
Man this really has become the most interesting channel on Clip-Share for me. Please never stop! ;)
This is so fascinating as someone who just went to school for audio engineering. It really has come so far from analogue recording.
Yet another technology I didn't know about and now I'm fascinated by. Though I discovered your channel not long ago, you're one of my top 5 favourite ones (Destin's is another one, haha).
I just love his sarcastic humour, one of the funniest yet educational channels ever, the technicalities of the subjects discussed are indelibly impressed because it is presented in such a entertaining format, If i had teachers like this i would not have grown up so stupid.
and the whithering stare after delivering a salient point, lol! Makes me want to to look round to check I am the only one he is talking to.
I remember working as a projectionist in 2010ish and we had 18 film projectors and only 1 projectionist at a time. It was always fun when the film got threaded backwards due to rushing and the audio channel would dance on the side of the screen
This was an interesting and very entertaining overview. Thank you; Well done!
You have a bug where every couple frames a black artifact appear in the top-right. My guess is that during one of the skits where you added a nostalgia filter because you talked about old cinema artefacts, you forgot to then disable this specific artefact it afterwards.
Similarly, after your desync skits, it felt like you failed to properly resync them properly afterwards again, ever after. Even after you clearly did a hard cut to clearly make it easy on yourself.