Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act

Transcription

Hi, John Hess from Filmmaker IQ.com and today we’ll look at the epic history of synchronized sound at the movies. Our story begins with one of the original American pioneers of film - the prolific inventor Thomas A. Edison. Edison didn't invent motion pictures, but he did invent the phonograph in 1877 - a device which could record and playback sound etched onto a wax cylinder. In February of 1888, Edison attended a lecture by motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge - the man who first documented the gait of a galloping horse and inventor of a very crude projector device called the Zoopraxiscope. Aftward the two men met privately - why not marry the the idea of Edison's sound recording with hugely successful phonograph with moving pictures of Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope? There was a one major technological hurdle - there was no way of amplifying sound for large audiences to hear. The Phonograph used larged horns to direct and amplify sound but this wouldn't be enough for a crowded theater. Because of this Muybridge abandoned the idea and returned to photographing his motion studies - but not Edison. He believed the future of film was not in projection for large audiences, but in individual exhibition - Edison saw a future of coin-operated entertainment movie machines. By the year's end he had a crude design in mind and set his lab assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson on the task of developing a machine that would be called the Kinetoscope. In 1894, Dickson and Edison experimented with recording sound and images together for playback on a device that would be called Kinetophone - a Kinetoscope connected to a phonograph. This film restored and synced by Walter Murch in 1998 is the only surviving Kinetophone film in existence and dates from sometime around 1894 to 1895. So from the very beginning - the design of motion pictures included the use of synchronized sound. Unfortunately getting and keeping sync was nearly impossible in these early machines. But the Kinetoscope by itself did catch on. On April 14, 1894, Andrew Holland opened the first Kinetoscope parlor in New York City where for 25 cents you could get a chance to see five of Edison's peep show viewers. Though there was money to made in arcade entertainment, with the advancement of film projection, it was becoming clear that Edison was wrong about individual viewing and that motion pictures would find a place in public theater exhibition. Again sound faced the technological barrier that had discouraged Muybridge from the very beginning. Other inventors did take a crack at the sound sync issue. In 1900 at the Paris World Fair, three separate photograph synced devices were exhibited, the Phonorama, Chronophone and Phono-Cinema-Theatre. But these sound-on-disk systems suffered from three major problems: sync issues if the stylus on the phonograph should skip a grove, amplification, and the fact that wax cylinders and later on 12 inch discs, could only hold at most maybe 5 minutes of recording time. The marriage of film and sound would have to wait. But in the mean time, film would go from a arcade novelty to a major international industry. When sound technology finally caught up, the movie business was a game of moguls and big money with sound threatening to turn the entire industry on its head. Twenty years after Edison and Dickson's first sound and film experiment, the movies were now a major entertainment outlet. But it's important to note that even though we call it silent film it was never really silent. When the nickelodeons gave way to the Movie Palaces around 1915, these large movie establishments would employ live orchestras to play music and add sound effects to the happenings on the screen. Some directors like D.W. Griffith even commissioned scores to be performed along with specific scenes in his films. But only the biggest theaters could afford such luxuries. Smaller venues would make do with a pianist which was still a big expense. So now the effort was now on to trying to get pre-recorded music to go along with silent films so smaller theaters wouldn't have to pay for musicians. Instead of recording audio to a separate disc as Edison had tried, inventors focused on imprinting the audio right onto the film strip itself. In 1919 three German inventors - Josef Engl, Joseph Massole, and Hans Vogt patented the Tri-Ergon process that converts audio waves into electricity which drove a light. This light would then be photographed on the film strip negative - the density being the strength of the signal. When playing back, a patented flywheel would control the speed and the a light would shine through the audio strip and onto a reader which converted the light back into electricity and into sound. That solved the sync and length issues with sound on disc - but not amplification. That would be tackled by a giant in the development of radio broadcasting: Dr. Lee de Forest. In 1906 De Forest patented the audion tube - the first electronic device that could take a small signal and amplify it - a key piece of technology for radio broadcast and long distance telephones. In 1919, de Forest's attention turned to motion pictures as he realized that his audion tube could provide much better of amplification for these optical sound on film systems. Three years later in 1922, De Forest had designed his own system and opened the De Forest Phonofilm Company to produce a series of short sound films in New York City. They churned out lots these sound films - several one and two reel photofilms a week and by the middle of 1924, 34 theaters on the American East coast had been wired for De Forest Sound. Over a 1000 films were made in the span of four years from vaudeville acts to plays to speeches from prominent people like President Calvin Coolidge, even this comedy routine from Eddie Cantor in 1923 But De Forrest�s success out East did not pique the interest of Hollywood. He had offered the technology to moguls like Carl Laemmle of Universal and Adoph Zukor of Paramount but they saw no reason to disrupt the silent movie cash cow business they had with something as frivolous as sound. That is until one studio took a gamble, going back to a sound-on-disc technology. Vitaphone was a sound on disk process created by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Labs that used a series of 33 ? discs. When representatives tried to sell the technology to Hollywood in 1925 they faced the same disinterest that De Forest had. That is except for one relatively minor but venturesome studio: Warner Bros. Pictures. In April of 1926, Warner Bros. with the financial assistance of Goldman Sachs established the Vitaphone Corporation, leasing the sound technology from Western Electric for the sum of $800,000 with the intent of subleasing to other studios. Warner Bros. never intended the technology to create "talking pictures" - instead using it to provide synchronized musical accompaniment for Warner Bros. films. To demonstrate their new acquisition Warner Bros launched a massive $3 million dollar premiere in the Refrigerated Warner Theater at Broadway and Fifty second Street in New York City on August 6, 1926. (It was called refrigerated because the movie theater was really the first time people of that era got to experience air conditioning). The feature film was Don Juan with a lavish score performed by the New York Philharmonic along with many sound shorts including a brief speech from the president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America: Will Hays. The premiere was a resounding success with critics praising it as the eighth wonder of the world. Warner took the show on the road, hitting Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detriot, St. Louis as well as touring Europe. Despite the success, industry insiders weren't sure about sound's future. You see the entire economic structure of the film industry would necessarily have to change. New Sound studios would have to be built and new expensive recording equipment installed. Theaters would have to be wired for sound and there was really yet to be a standard sound process. The star system, with actors trained in the ways of pantomime, would be upturned as now they would be required to speak for the first time. Foreign sales would plummet. Silent film's title cards could easily be translated for export, but not dialogue and dubbing a foreign language was still technology of the future. Even the musicians who found employment in the movie palaces would have to be laid off. For all these reasons Hollywood hoped that sound would be a passing novelty but the moguls began to move to protect themselves anyhow. Loew ( which would become MGM), Famous Players Lasky (soon to be Paramount), First National, Universal and Producers Distributing Corporation signed an agreement which came to be known confusingly as the "Big Five" agreement, where the studios agreed to all adopt a single sound system should an industry wide conversion come to fruition. Meanwhile Warner Bros didn't halt on their Vitaphone investment. They announced that all their 1927 films would be produced with synchronized musical accompaniment and in April of the same year built the very first sound studio in the world. In May, production would begin on the film that would cement sound's place in Cinema: The Jazz Singer. Originally the Jazz Singer was suppose to be a silent film with vitaphone musical accompaniment. But Al Jolson improvised those famous words and Warner Bros. left them in. Later Jolson adds more dialogue in this tender and intimate scene where his character sings to his mother. As you see the film slips back into silent film title cards. Thsse were the only two pieces of improv were the only pieces of spoken dialogue in the film but the impact was enormous. This wasn't a speech or a canned performance, this was seeing actual drama unfold on the screen. And although synchronized sound had been around before, it was the Jazz Singer that was the first feature film to use it in such a realistic almost voyeuristic way. The film went off to be an international success earning 3.5 million dollars worldwide. At roughly the same time Fox Film Corporation's William Fox who was not part of the Big Five Agreement but a minor studio, much like Warner Bros., also saw potential in the talkies. In 1927, Fox acquired the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film process for $50,000 and began releasing Newsreels with sound. These newsreels were a hit and Fox began sending camera crews around the world to interview famous personalities on camera pumping out three to four newsreels per week to Fox theaters. In a shrewd move, Fox negotiated a reciprocal contract with the Vitaphone corporation in which each studio would license the other's systems, technicians and theaters thus covering both Fox and Warner Bros. should one sound system become standard over the other. By the end of 1927 it was becoming quite clear - sound was here to stay. A dismal year for the industry, only the sound films were able to attract and do big business. Even the worst sound film outsold the best silent ones. The moguls were forced to act. With sound a sure thing, the studios began the process of picking a standard in accordance to the Big Five Agreement and there were a lot of optical sound-on-film options. While still pushing Vitaphone, Western Electric had developed their own optical system under Electrical Research Products Incorporated and won the contract with Paramount and Loew's. RCA and General Electric had perfected a system called Photophone and after narrowly losing the contract to Paramount, acquired Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Office, Pathe and Keith Albee-Orpheum to create a new major RCA controlled studio: Radio-Keith Orpheum - RKO By the summer of 1928, every studio in Hollywood was armed with some sort of sound system license. Warner Bros. continued to lead the way making the first 100% all talkie - Lights of New York in 1928. It did so well in the box office that Hollywood insiders who thought silent pictures and talkies could coexist at least for a while, realized that silent film was all but dead. In 1929 three quarters of all films made in Hollywood were released with some kind of pre-recorded sound which included 335 all dialogue features, 95 features with mixture of dialogue and subtitles and 75 features with musical score and sound effects. 175 silent films were released into smaller provincial theaters that had not been wired for sound but even those were becoming more scarce. In just a span of 2 years, from 1927 to 1929 the entire industry was retooled from production to exhibition - at an estimated cost of $300 million dollars more the 4 times the valuation of the entire industry. This money was lent from corporate Wall Street giants J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller group who controlled Western Electric and RCA. But the investment paid off in big profits as audiences came in droves to see the talkies. It was because of sound that Hollywood was able to survive the first wave of the Great Depression that started with crash of the stock market in October 1929. Had it not been for the bold moves of Warner Bros and Fox pushing the industry early on, the money required for sound conversion would have been delayed for another 10 years or so. And when effects of the crash finally made its way to Hollywood in 1932, silent film was all but a forgotten memory. Fox's Movietone and RCA's Photophone were the standard in the United States and Tobis Klangfilm's Tri-Ergon was the standard in Europe. Warner Bros. who had made bank with Vitaphone had plenty of cash to make the switch to sound on film. Sound was now common place in the movie theater and it would take another threat to bring the industry to the next big innovation: the threat of Television. The period from the 1927 to 1950s or early 60s is considered the Golden Era of Hollywood - the Studio Age - a rich period of mass production in which sound played a crucial role. With sound came the advent of the lavish musical and the familiar musical animation. The silent slapstick comedy of Chaplin and Keaton gave way to the fast talking humor of the Marx Brothers and romantic screwball comedies. Horror gained new ground bringing in German Expressionism influences along with eerie sound tracks - the first great horror icons, Dracula and Frankenstein were all part of the sound era. Though the studios would experience ups and downs in the first 30 years of sound, major industry shaking challenges were just ahead in the 1950s. First was the Supreme Court Case United States vs Paramount Pictures in 1948. The Paramount decision ended the studios control over their own theaters - declaring the practice an illegal vertical monopoly. It also limited the practice of block booking, where studios could force theaters to purchase large blocks of movies - often bundling prestigious A-pictures with a bunch of low quality B-films. This effectively killed studio's mass production mentality bringing an end to the studio system And then came television. Between 1946 and 1955 Movie theater attendance plummeted dropping 50% as suburban audiences decided they'd rather catch the latest show on television than make it out the theater. The old way of doing business was dying and Innovative producers realized the only way to get people out of the house was to show them something you couldn't get at home. This is when we see the use of stereoscopic 3D which led to an explosion in Widescreen Aspect Ratios along with huge projections - making the trip to the movies an experience. And to create that immersive feel came multitrack sound. For most of the studio era - sound was recorded and played back on a single mono track. 1940's Fantasia from Walt Disney would be the first film released with a multichannel format call Fantasound but only two theaters were equipped to play back the surround sound - at $85,000 per theater. Who could blame them? But theaters in 50s were desperate for something draw audiences out. "This is Cinerama" in 1952 - a bold new widescreen format that used 3 strips of film to create an 146 degree field of view treated audiences to a total of 7 audio channels recorded magnetically onto the film strip. Exhibition placed 5 loudspeakers behind the screen with two placed in the rear for surround sound. 20th Century Fox's Cinemascope - also amped up the channels of audio to a total of 4 - left, center and right for loudspeakers placed behind the screen and the fourth as an surround sound effects channel which could be switched on and off with a 12 kHz tone to avoid unnecessary hiss when there was no surround sound present. VistaVision used something called Perspecta - a mono optical track that could be directed to three speakers using an subaudible tones to activate left speaker at 30Hz, middle at 35hz and right at 40hz. This really only worked for isolated sound effects and dialogue and was pretty much abandoned by 1958. The large 70mm prints of the 50s like Todd AO also boasted a robust six channel sound. But the problem with many of these systems was they used a magnetic strip that ran along side the film. This added to the cost of the print and would wear down over time resulting in little specks of iron oxide that would flake off and jam the projectors. Once Hollywood had settled into a new groove of filmmaking in the 60s, 35mm with it's aging mono optical track became the go to format. But audio technology progresses and a one company would forever change the audio landscape and become almost synonymous with movie theater sound. The story of Dolby and film theater sound really begins back in the 1930s. In the rush to equip theaters with sound, the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences became an important technical resource for filmmakers and theaters on how to shoot and properly wire for sound. Consistency was always the problem, big lavish theaters could afford great sound while smaller theaters had to make do with less than stellar setups. In 1938 the Academy essentially standardized a frequency response - a sort of worst case scenario which all sound mixing stages would be calibrated to so that sound editors knew what their mix would sound like even in the least capable theaters. Theaters with good sound setups would have to handicap their setups to match this Academy Curve. To our modern sensibilities the Academy curve killed audio fidelity but it ended up doing one very important thing - it masked the high range hiss that was so prevalent in the analog recorders of the day. But masking the problem doesn't make it go away. As the music industry became more sophisticated in the 60s, recording artists turned increasingly to multi-track recordings - this high end hiss became a serious problem. If noise was bad on one channel, mixing together 16 channels only amplified the problem. One engineer by the name of Ray Dolby came up with a solution. By splitting up the input signal into frequency bands and applying compression before recording the sound onto a tape he could record a much better signal to noise ratio on the recording medium - for playback, the Dolby would reverse the compression and the result was dramatically reduced noise. This system, Dolby A, was introduced in 1966 and pretty quickly became a standard in the recording industry. Dolby's attention then turned to the film industry. In 1971, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange would be the first film to use this Dolby noise reduction on all magnetic generations up to the print master though the final release print was an optical mono track. But the cat was out of the bag. Academy curve was replaced the following year with Dolby's X-curve which is defined using pink noise and calibrated from a listening position of two thirds of the way back in a theater - which incidentally is the best place to sit when you go to the movies from an audio standpoint. For the first time, sound engineers were calibrating speakers for the psycho-acoustical response and taking into consideration the reverberation of any given room size. Armed with Noise Reduction and the new EQ standards, Dolby released a new audio system - Dolby Stereo with the release of 1976's "A Star is Born" -Dolby Stereo sported 4-channels cleverly encoded onto the two optical strips that ran along the film. The two channels were known as Left Total (Lt) and Right Total (Rt). A center channel was derived from everything that was in both channels and 3db down. A surround channel is recorded down 3db on both Lt and Rt channels so that one channel is plus 90 degrees and the other was minus 90 degrees. In 1977, Dolby Stereo would get it's first real showcase in Star Wars which did just okay at the box office. Star Wars would go on to win an Special Achievement Academy Award for Ben Burtt in the sound effects department. A sequel later before the release 1983's Return of the Jedi, George Lucas and Lucasfilm got in on the movie sound business with the THX sound system. THX wasn't a recording format but rather a quality assurance system. THX-certified theaters had to pass several rigorous criteria in terms of reverberation time versus volume, picture sharpness, noise limits and screen properties all for the honor of being a certified THX theater and playing this sound effect dubbed Deep note: Movie sound was serious business. In 1986 Dolby released Dolby SR, the second generation professional recording system with even better noise reduction and recording dynamic range which gave engineers master recordings that were indistinguishable from live sound. 1987's Robocop and Innerspace were the first films to be released with Dolby SR. Coming into the 90s, in 1992, Dolby released Dolby Digital with the film Batman Returns. Dolby Digital uses a 5.1 surround sound format using their AC-3 compression algorithm. The digital data was printed in between the sprocket holes and the Dolby analog tracks were kept as a back up or for theaters that didn't have a digital reader. A year later two new digital sound formats were also released: DTS and SDDS - (DTS) Digital Theater Systems premiered with Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park in almost a call back to vitaphone using a CD-ROM for audio playback which was synchronized to a timecode embedded on the film strip. Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) which premiered with the film Last Action Hero printed digital data on both edges of the 35mm print sporting 7.1 surround sound - the first format to exceed Cinerama in terms of audio channels. As we move into digital projection the audio component is simply embedded as a file with the digital package. Current Digital Cinema formats are able to handle upwards of 16 channels of audio. The always forward thinking Japanese broadcasting service NHK has even debutted their 8K projection with an astounding 22.1 channel surround sound. What industry insiders thought was a novelty in 1927 is now, in the words of of Spielberg, "half the picture". Cinema and moving pictures have this amazing grip on our collective psyche - it's more than just merely entertainment or frivolous escapism. At the core these stories told through camera direction and performance remind us of a fundamental human fact - that you and I are not alone -that what you feel isn't only felt by you - that we are all on this human journey together. The act of storytelling. What may have started out as reenactments around a flickering campfire are now reenactments on a flickering screen - and sound - to hear your fellow human being speak or hear the howl of the wolf and the sound of the surf crashing into the shore - Sound was the final key to unlocking cinema's amazing power. No matter how you slice the history of cinema, it is a story of inventors and showmen, magicians and technicians, dreamers and those with the courage to make those dreams come true. Be part of that amazing tradition. Make something great. I'm John Hess and I'll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com