AndyDursin wrote:Here are some comments from Michael Thau on the condition of the 1978 mix --
Going back to the original mix, we were shocked when we heard it. We grabbed the original 70mm full-coat that actually had the label from the Pinewood stage on it; it had a date of November 1978. We put it up in a dubbing stage. We had Dolby down there a couple times verifying that the set up on the Dolby units, the decoding, was correct. Superman was the first film that was originally recorded in a 70mm 6-track split surround but here's the rub that no one knows about but it's the truth. They mixed in split surrounds but they did not use the surrounds very much, especially in a stereo way because it was very new and they were very scared of it. At the last second, here in America, they brought it over to do some final mastering on the 70mm and they chickened out and the film was only released with mono surround in the 70mm format. So they mixed it for stereo surround, but it was never released that way and the fact is that there wasn't much difference anyway.
In 1978, Dolby was just beginning to become prominent and on their recording dubber they could put a 6-track head up, a 4-track head up, a 3-track head or a 1-track. The 4-track would be for the standard Dolby mix: left, center, right, surround and the Dolby system had an crossover, where anything below a certain frequency would go to a subwoofer. The 6-track would be the same except they would have two added channels of baby-boom (low frequency bass) with more volume. The 3-track would be for the mono stems: dialog, music and effects, and the single-track would be for the mono mix. But they didn't have three recorders; they only had one at the time, the same here in the U.S. as well. So they could not record simultaneous 4-track dialog, music and sound effects stems (left, center, right, and surround.) You do a whole mix, and then you do another mix. They recorded first, the 6-track mix, then the four, then the mono mix, then the mono stems. They tried to make them one after another so they would sound the same. There really isn't much of a difference in the 6-track or 4, except in volume and bass. But you weren't preserving your stereo stems at that point. So, what came off the stage was the full mix or mono stems, which is one reason why we couldn't even reconstruct anything. We only had the mono stems. With dialog it doesn't really matter that much because you normally put the dialog down in the center channel anyway. Superman was different; they actually draped it across the whole front three speakers, which really prevented us from using any of the original mix. It doesn't work that well and sounds strange. Stereo was kind of a new gadget and I think they were just playing with the new toy. Dialog is best kept in the center channel for clarity.
And some more...
DF: How did you begin the audio restoration?
Michael Thau: As far as the restoration goes, Dick and I sat down and watched the film first and talked about restoring some of the scenes into it. I had to talk about the stuff with Dick before we went to the DVD department and pitched them on what we wanted to do. So we ran Dick's personal print of Superman, which was made in 1984 or 1985, and we were just shocked to hear how mono the mix was. Dick swore, and I agreed with him too, that the titles would fly past you to the right and the left of you and they didn't. They just stayed very in the center speaker, in mono. We got the sound engineers up to the projection room and double-checking that everything was set up correctly. There was some stereo-ness to the music and sound effects, so we pitched on redoing the sound.
DF: It was amazing and I still had the laserdisc that I was comparing back and forth.
MT: The laserdisc is actually something I want to talk about. The sound on the laserdisc, what you hear there, that's what it actually sounded like. It's not that a laserdisc doesn't have good quality sound compared to a DVD, laserdiscs have pretty good sound reproduction. What you're hearing was what the Dolby Stereo mix actually sounded like! It was amazing how bad the sound was. We couldn't believe it. After a lot of talking about it we figured out what happened, a lot of it had to do with the fact that lots of picture changes were being made at the last second while they were in the process of mixing. They would pre-dub the dialog on one stage but then there were changes made and rather than making the changes to the original dialog dubbing units and starting over again, they would take the pre-dub, conform that and then remix that again on another stage. And they were beginning to lose many, many generations because of the rushing to finish. And the newness of Dolby, sometimes the machines weren't calibrated and set up correctly so now you have an element that has been messed up and they would use that as an element, multiple generations down. And the sound effects, most of the sound effects those days were optical sound effects, probably mono too. Optical sound is much worse than sound on mag stripe. Sometimes those optical sound effects would be many optical generations down. Some of the big breaks in Krypton in the original mix were actually wood breaks and there was a horrible electrical sound effect that was definitely an optical sound effect that they used over and over again when they went for shock value. No pun intended. It was used a number of times just as something that would cut through and grab your attention hopefully.
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"When I found the music, beautiful music units that were the mix-downs from John Williams' 24-track sessions and he mixed them down for some reason into 6-tracks, maybe because he knew there was going to be a six-track mix. It took us a while to figure out the layout; two sets of left, center, right tracks, these masters from Anvil Studios. They allowed us to do a true stereo surround mix. Bob Garrett was our music editor and dutifully mimicked the music cuts and built the stand alone music tracks. He also mastered the music-only track in 5.0.
But you're not going to have all this beautiful music flying around you and have the old mono effects. Supervising sound editor Jay Nierenberg, Donner, and I sat down and ran the picture and made a list of what we called "signature" sound effects. These were sounds that were very distinct sounds that we wanted to retain, but make sound better. Jay's team at Soundstorm captured digitally these original effects, and reproduced them, vastly improving their dynamics and frequency range in stereo. Examples of these are the baby's starship, Superman's x-ray eyes, and the rings that trap the villains on Krypton. Then Soundstorm went through the film and built thousands of sound units to completely rebuild the rest of the effects, always with an eye on the original mix. We updated old effects and designed new ones where appropriate, like the new crystalline sound of Krypton and all the helicopter sounds. Dan Leahy, effects re-recording mixer, obviously had the most work of anyone on Warners' Dubbing stage 'D.'
DF: So you have your "signature" sounds, but what were the deciding factors in where you would deviate from the original? Like the first appearance of Superman. When Jor-El's mask revolves around, there's a new whoosh that goes along with it.
MT: Donner. He told us to put a grandiose sound there. It seemed to need something. But I disagree with some people who have reviewed that particular section in the film and said, "It lost all of its dramatic momentum because it was all just music at that point." The music sticks through there clearly. As a matter of fact, where that whoosh is, there's almost a hole in the music. We didn't changed the music. In fact, we really pushed the music at that moment. And what we are particularly proud of is the main titles. Now they sound like what Dick and I thought they did sound like, and the direction of the sounds. And anote about digital sound effects. They have no hiss or white noise in them if they're recorded correctly. So you actually can play them lower then analog effects and still hear them better, playing the music even louder!
DF: How did you handle the original dialog track?
MT: I had the 1/4" production dialog rushed right over (from England) as quickly as possible. I was really pissed off that it had been missing for so long and we finally found it and we were going to mix the second I came back. So I had to get that stuff there quickly and we actually dug into them some times to salvage dialog when the original had built up noise or bad EQ. We couldn't use it as much as we wanted because a lot of the original dialog had been interlaced with looped lines. A lot of times we were stuck with just the mono stems of the dialog. But lead re-recording mixer Steve Pederson did an amazing job with the dialog (and the music). We also gave the original mono stem to a place called Novastar that did some restoration on it digitally. Then Steve had just a flat mono stem so that he could EQ as he wished. We also had the 70mm, in case we wanted to use that every once in a while and then we had the Novastar dialog treatment. So we had different ways of going back to the mixed dialog. Remember, those tracks had all the effects on them; echo, anything, it was all married on there. And, like I said, with Brando it was all looped lines. We never found the (original) loop lines.
The mix took about seven weeks. Of course it was wonderful to be able to move the music and sounds all around into the theater. We always referenced the original dub and balanced toward music or effects if they were favored in the original. That is, until Dick listened to a playback of a reel and gave us ideas brewing in his mind for over twenty-two years¾ "LOUDER!! STRONGER!! THIS IS SUPERMAN!! Make him FLY around the room!"
Were these "print" comments somewhere or were they in an audio interview? I always find these kind of discussions very interesting and helpful in providing insight. I've never really found many orginal "Dolby Stereo" mixes to be satisfying - in or outside of a theater. Although, even back in the late 70's and 80's, the theater still had a better sound system than what I had at home.
In 1985 I bought Radio Shack's TV MTS stereo decoder to connect to my stereo system. This would decode MTS stereo ("Multi-channel Television Sound as I remember it stood for) that was beginning to be multiplexed on over-the-air channels. The idea was to use it for multi-lingual programming or alternative content, but everybody just wanted to hear TV in stereo. I worked for "The Shack" at the time, so I remember getting the first unit that arrived at the store and field testing it at home. The sound was a step up from the TV speaker, but not much better because it was no different than listening to the vaunted "Simulcast on FM stereo" events that they used to do now in then in the late 70's and early 80's when something special was broadcasting in TV. It had the same bad FM compression, that limited dynamic range, and really limited stereo separation. I bought it at the time a new series had started on NBC that was just starting to be broadcast in stereo - AMAZING STORIES. It was definitely stereo - and not bad - but suffered the same channel drift and high-frequency "buzzing" that plagued cable TV stereo audio later on.
Flash forward one year. I had acquired yet another "Shack" first-to-hit-the-store item - the Dolby Surround Sound decoder. I had this hooked up in-line with the MTS box and was able to hear the same content in multi-channel surround sound. ABC played Superman and yes, after you factor in all of the buzzing, compression, and limited signal-to-noise ratio, the Superman broadcast sounded vastly uneven at the time. It was my first experience listening to the movie apart from seeing it in the theater in 1978, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to confirm that the audio was amuck. I was also fortunate to have one of the Shack's first VHS HiFi VCR's, so I was actually able to record the stereo sound from the MTS decoder and the picture from my cable TV source - the following year RS released an updated VHS HiFi deck with built-in MTS sound, so I was again compelled to upgrade.
Anyway, the following day after the Superman broadcast, brought the tape into my film-101 class and the professor proceeded to show the audio Engineering professor at the Music Department. While they seem amazed at the quality of this "VHS HiFi" technology, they both were lamenting over the surround mix, but concluded that it was impossible to form an accurate opinion based on a TV broadcast through multiple consumer devices that may or may not accurately represent what was originally intended. Ok, so I got that part about the consumer devices, but all of that aside, it sounded like a "content" problem back then. Perhaps it was the source that ABC used for the broadcast, how it was encoded to tape, or what source they used. However it was undeniable that that it sucked.
Flash forward again. The first generation Warner Home Video release of Superman - the one in that over-sized clam-shelled case with the Warner logo was only recoded in VHS stereo - the first consumer attempt at stereo on the VHS platform - and sounded basically like two mono channels with a slight "pan" in each channel to mimic stereo. This was bad sound and didn't support the decoding of the surround information. Several years later, Warner released Superman again in VHS HiFi stereo (the release in the norma-sized white cardboard slipcase). Now, I could hear in VHS HiFi and decode the surround information. This had much better fidelity, but as with most of the Dolby Surround content, the surround information sounded mono and just had this "airy" echo-ness to it that sounded strange.
I only have the DVD set of all of the movies in the metal case and I haven't revisited either the original sound mix DVD or the newly created 5.1 mix. Are the BluRay's a significant upgrade from the old DVD set? By the way, Superman was on Cinemax the other night and it sounded and looked great on cable.
There's the scene with Sallah set to be executed by a young German soldier, and a fight scene from Last Crusade with Indy fighting Pat Roach inside the blimp, we see being shot, but the actual finished footage is conspicuously MIA. And why did Crusade and Temple Of Doom get such short thrift when it came to removed footage?