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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polette and
Speaker 1: I'm an editor at how stuff works dot Com. Sitting
Speaker 1: across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan. I
Speaker 1: can't stand them. That actually ties into our topic today,
Speaker 1: well as it usually does. Yeah, often sometimes I don't
Speaker 1: have time and I just pick a quote at random,
Speaker 1: But this time that actually has to do with what
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about today. It's going back to
Speaker 1: our movie making series, which we we've kind of you know,
Speaker 1: we slacked off on for a while. But we've got
Speaker 1: a lot of topics that we cover here at tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: not just movie making. So we decided we revisit the
Speaker 1: whole movie making series and look at how they put
Speaker 1: sound on film. Right. Yeah, before before any of this happened,
Speaker 1: if we would introduce that podcast, it would have sounded
Speaker 1: like So it's a good thing that we are recording
Speaker 1: a podcast. It's it's nice that we have a way
Speaker 1: of plate of of keeping sound in some sort of
Speaker 1: fashion where we can replay it at a later date. Actually, um,
Speaker 1: I was I was looking back in preparation for this podcast.
Speaker 1: I was looking back at one of my movie books
Speaker 1: from one of my classes in college. Uh, that would
Speaker 1: be Understanding Movies by Lewis Giannetti, a very old version.
Speaker 1: This book has come out in many, many incarnations. Now
Speaker 1: they're in the double digits. But you know an interesting point.
Speaker 1: Movies have always had sound. It's just that they didn't
Speaker 1: always have sound on film. I mean the earliest movies
Speaker 1: were just visuals, and they would hire someone to play
Speaker 1: along with it in in the uh, in the theater,
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, on an organ. I mean
Speaker 1: you see that. I think back to us the Three Amigos. Actually, right,
Speaker 1: it's either an organ or it's an old clanky honky
Speaker 1: tonk piano. And uh and yeah, that's that's sort of
Speaker 1: the general image we have those early films. But some
Speaker 1: of them, like some of the really big movie houses,
Speaker 1: would have a full orchestra player and uh and and
Speaker 1: in fact, that actually played a large part in why
Speaker 1: there's sound on film, or why sound on film arrived
Speaker 1: when it did. Um. In some places, of course, they
Speaker 1: couldn't have a full orchestra. They just didn't have the
Speaker 1: space for it, or they didn't have the people, and
Speaker 1: you might have just a single musician playing on guitar
Speaker 1: along with the film, in order to provide a soundscape
Speaker 1: that goes along with the things that the audience are seeing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, at the time, of course, dialogue
Speaker 1: was you'd see them mouthing words, but you wouldn't hear
Speaker 1: the actors actually speak. You, you know, see the important
Speaker 1: stuff on cards. That the more occasionally you would have
Speaker 1: a narrator. Yeah, once in a while you would have
Speaker 1: someone who would provide narration and provide dialogue, but they'd
Speaker 1: be doing it live on stage while you're watching the film. Uh.
Speaker 1: But yeah. Eventually, the silent films got to a point
Speaker 1: where the art of the silent film was so well
Speaker 1: developed that if you were a really good silent filmmaker,
Speaker 1: you could keep those little cards to a minimum because
Speaker 1: you were able to express everything you needed to in
Speaker 1: the scenes just through the visuals, and so you would
Speaker 1: have them pop up every now and then to provide
Speaker 1: important information, like if a character suddenly reveals a secret, well, clearly,
Speaker 1: it's hard to reveal a secret without any dialogue and
Speaker 1: so that might be important, but for other scenes where
Speaker 1: you see two people having a loving conversation with one
Speaker 1: another or a fight, you might not have a card
Speaker 1: pop up at all, because really they just want to
Speaker 1: get across that emotion that moment. There wasn't the words
Speaker 1: were not important. And uh even apparently some of the
Speaker 1: early filmmakers who were around at the time of the
Speaker 1: transition to sound on film uh actually didn't want to
Speaker 1: do it. They said that the idea of synchronous sound
Speaker 1: with the film would actually hamper their ability to edit
Speaker 1: the film the way they wanted it to. That it
Speaker 1: wouldn't that it might actually slow them down, or or
Speaker 1: they would be anchored to the soundtrack of the film,
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to be constrained. One one notable
Speaker 1: was the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein. Sergeie Eisenstein said, you know,
Speaker 1: I remember watching Battleship p Tempkin in my in the
Speaker 1: aforementioned movie class, and yeah, I can't imagine actually having
Speaker 1: sound in some pieces of that because of the montages
Speaker 1: he put together. But uh, other movie makers realized that
Speaker 1: they could use the actual actors voices and you could
Speaker 1: hear uh dialogue without having to you know, do stage
Speaker 1: whispers as you might see on you know, in a play. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you could you could add the subtleties of actual
Speaker 1: verbal lang wage And there are things that you do,
Speaker 1: those things you couldn't do with a narrator or with
Speaker 1: the Q cards. That's true. And UH. The idea of
Speaker 1: actually putting sound to film goes all the way back
Speaker 1: to the earliest days of film itself, because Edison struggled
Speaker 1: with ways of creating a sound and film device that
Speaker 1: would let you to watch moving pictures and hear prerecorded
Speaker 1: sound at the same time. He worked on that starting
Speaker 1: in the mid eighteen eighties. Yeah, so this is nineteenth
Speaker 1: century technology. Yeah, and so by he came up with
Speaker 1: a Kineta phone. Now, the Kineta phone combined two earlier
Speaker 1: UH inventions, the Kineta scope, which if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: one of those, it's it's the circular device that has
Speaker 1: slits cut in it, and it has a series of
Speaker 1: images on the inside. And when you spend the device
Speaker 1: and you look through the slits, you see those different
Speaker 1: images appearing before your eyes in a very a quick succession,
Speaker 1: and it provides the the illusion of animation, illusion illusion
Speaker 1: and a Kineto phone or the connect. The phone part
Speaker 1: was from the phonograph. Of course, we all probably know
Speaker 1: what a phonograph is. You know, records sound on a
Speaker 1: cylinder or a disk, and then it uses a stylist
Speaker 1: to create vibrations which are then uh turned into sound
Speaker 1: waves through some sort of amplifier, yes, often just a horn. Well,
Speaker 1: he created the Kineta phone, which combined these two things.
Speaker 1: You had to use rubber ear tubes to listen to
Speaker 1: the sound. Yeah, you don't want to hit the Kineta
Speaker 1: phone at the end of a hard day's work because
Speaker 1: who knows who's been there before you, Yeah, just saying,
Speaker 1: And they were the picture and the sound were somewhat synchronized.
Speaker 1: They used a belt system to link the two so
Speaker 1: that as the Kineta scope turned, the phonograph as turned
Speaker 1: as well. It wasn't perfect, obviously, It was one of
Speaker 1: those early kind of prototype sort of almost a curiosity
Speaker 1: really that presaged the whole sound on film movement. What's
Speaker 1: interesting is that we have one of these films we do.
Speaker 1: One of them exists that we can actually people can
Speaker 1: go and look at if they want to. Um. It's
Speaker 1: called the Dixon Experimental Sound Film, and it was filmed
Speaker 1: sometime around what's it about. It's about seventeen seconds long.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's the fellow Dixon actually um he was
Speaker 1: uh playing a violin a fiddle in front of aum
Speaker 1: recording phonograph. And there's two men, um, two of Edison's
Speaker 1: lab assistants who are dancing to the music that Dixon's
Speaker 1: playing on the fiddle. And um. What's interesting is that
Speaker 1: the film and the phonograph were separated the cylinder, So
Speaker 1: you had the film and the cylinder existing in two
Speaker 1: different places. The film was with the Library of Congress.
Speaker 1: The cylinder was with the National Park Service because it
Speaker 1: was part of the Right Museum. So you've got and
Speaker 1: and for a long time, no one knew that these
Speaker 1: two things were actually connected, that they were a part
Speaker 1: of the same event. And then it was discovered that
Speaker 1: that was indeed the case. And uh and so ah,
Speaker 1: a fellow by Walter Merch was given the task to
Speaker 1: resynchronize these two different medium right, and so he took
Speaker 1: the film, which was seventeen seconds long, he took the cylinder,
Speaker 1: which had a recording that was about two minutes long,
Speaker 1: and he had to find out where they seek up
Speaker 1: and so You can actually see that on YouTube now
Speaker 1: if you go to YouTube and you search for Dixon
Speaker 1: Experimental Sound Film, it's on their Grant's a guy playing
Speaker 1: a fiddle and two other guys dancing with each other.
Speaker 1: It's but it's interesting. It's the very first uh surviving
Speaker 1: sound on film experiment that we can see. And granted, now,
Speaker 1: technically the sound is not on the film itself, right,
Speaker 1: there are two different devices that coexist. And that was
Speaker 1: kind of the case for the earliest sound on film,
Speaker 1: uh the or the earliest films that incorporate sound in
Speaker 1: the pre record sound The first the first one really
Speaker 1: was Don Juan Um or Don Juan for our friends
Speaker 1: over in the UK. Yes, but that one is a
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers film, and it was using something called the
Speaker 1: vita phone. Yes, which remarkably enough, is not a phone
Speaker 1: packed with all the nutrients that you need for the day.
Speaker 1: I was very disappointed to learn that you can have
Speaker 1: a vitaphone and still get scurvy. Yes you can. I
Speaker 1: like that, so at any rate, Yes, that's a vitamin
Speaker 1: C joke. YEA. The vitaphone was again, it was a
Speaker 1: phonograph system and it was hooked up to a projector
Speaker 1: with a with a Pulley system of Pulley in belt
Speaker 1: system and it would synchronize the music with with whatever
Speaker 1: was being projected on screen. Now, don Juan, this was
Speaker 1: just music. It was not dialogue. Yeah. And it was
Speaker 1: a wax record too, was it not? I believe so,
Speaker 1: yes it was. It was a wax record for the
Speaker 1: earliest one. So they really did put it down on wax,
Speaker 1: Yes they did. Yes, it's that was That's not just
Speaker 1: a saying, um. And so sound on disc not sound
Speaker 1: on film. And the disc was a thirty three and
Speaker 1: a third RPM disc. It was developed by Bell Telephone
Speaker 1: Laboratories and Western Electric and it actually used several discs
Speaker 1: clearly because you can't you know that the disc does
Speaker 1: not have enough space on it to record an entire
Speaker 1: film's worth of soundtrack. And I understand typically to the
Speaker 1: sound for sound on disc films was recorded after the fact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: more than anything else. It wasn't it was SYNCD up,
Speaker 1: I guess to the to the movie as it was,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't done simultaneous right well, and in this
Speaker 1: case again it was it was a soundtrack. It was
Speaker 1: the music. It wasn't dialogue. So you could record it
Speaker 1: anytime you wanted, well, right, right, But as as the
Speaker 1: as they continued to make sound on disc because the
Speaker 1: jazz singer uh you know the year after uh Don
Speaker 1: Juan slashed you and came out. Um yes, I remember
Speaker 1: that from my college English classes as well. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it was. It was out and it had it
Speaker 1: had additional material, including sound effects and dialogue, if I'm
Speaker 1: not mistaken. There was some resistance to putting sound on film. Early.
Speaker 1: Part of it was that the silent film art had
Speaker 1: really progressed to a point where people felt comfortable with it.
Speaker 1: As you pointed out, the editing issue was there. Um,
Speaker 1: some people just thought that audiences wouldn't really care for
Speaker 1: sound on film. There was also a real problem of
Speaker 1: how how do you create the right volume so that
Speaker 1: everyone in the theater can hear this sound because the
Speaker 1: speakers weren't great this early on. It's my opinion that
Speaker 1: they are still wrestling with how much volume is enough
Speaker 1: of a well, now, it's the other way around, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's at what point do we start dialing it back?
Speaker 1: When audiences complained that they can no longer hear anything
Speaker 1: else once the movie's over, I'm looking at you, Michael
Speaker 1: Bay and uh the but yeah, the the earliest, the
Speaker 1: reason why Don Juan was even attempted was that you
Speaker 1: had the Warner brothers, uh see a demonstration of this system,
Speaker 1: and um, Sam Warner was totally buying into it, right.
Speaker 1: Jack Warner was not as impressed until Jack Warner saw
Speaker 1: one film that included an orchestra playing and it played
Speaker 1: the music as well, and then he thought, this is
Speaker 1: what we should use this for, not for dial dog,
Speaker 1: but just for the music, because there are so many
Speaker 1: movie theaters out there that don't have a full orchestra,
Speaker 1: and now they can benefit from that. This is brilliant. Well,
Speaker 1: then you had the Jazz Singer come out, which was
Speaker 1: just going to be singing right. There was not any
Speaker 1: dialogue in that except Al Jolson decided to add lib
Speaker 1: a little and they kept it in the film and
Speaker 1: it ended up being a big commercial success. So then
Speaker 1: a little bit later in you had another sound film
Speaker 1: come out, Short film, very short film, famous one cartoon.
Speaker 1: It was a certain a certain mouse made appearance in it.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm getting at, right, Steamboat Willie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, and uh, the mouse sure
Speaker 1: can drive a riverboat, pilot a riverboat. I should say
Speaker 1: it was the first film that really truly synchronized sound
Speaker 1: two images and made it part of a story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so from there there was no turning back. Uh. But
Speaker 1: the vital phone system really limited you quite a bit.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it had two points of failure, right,
Speaker 1: because I mean if the Vito phone breaks, then suddenly
Speaker 1: you've got no sound whatsoever. Right, So how do you
Speaker 1: simplify the system so you no longer have two devices
Speaker 1: to depend upon? M m. Let's see, you could put
Speaker 1: this sound on the film brilliant? But how do you
Speaker 1: do that? I mean because superglue? Yeah, nail that note
Speaker 1: to the film buster. Um no, Actually it was really
Speaker 1: an ingenious design. Yes, it's creating an optical uh track
Speaker 1: on the film that doesn't show up on the screen,
Speaker 1: but it allows light to pass through it, and depending
Speaker 1: on how much light passes through, that's what Jenn rates
Speaker 1: the sound you hear. There are actually photo cells that
Speaker 1: receive light and then depending upon how much light they
Speaker 1: do or do not receive, they send electric current to
Speaker 1: another device which will create the actual sound. So in
Speaker 1: a way, you're looking at the physical you're like, you're
Speaker 1: really an optical representation of what sound is. Right, You've
Speaker 1: re recorded the sound, you print it on the film
Speaker 1: so that it only allows specific amounts of light through.
Speaker 1: It gets matched up to the two frames of the
Speaker 1: film so that everything is synchronized because it's all in
Speaker 1: one place. You've got the images on the film and
Speaker 1: you've got the sound on the film, usually to the
Speaker 1: right of the images. So if you were looking at
Speaker 1: a strip of film, you would see the images in
Speaker 1: in the middle of it, and just on the very
Speaker 1: far right edge of the image you would see this
Speaker 1: weird line or sometimes two lines, and that was the
Speaker 1: optical track for the soundtrack. Yes, and you use an
Speaker 1: audio pickup or an audio a reader to to see that.
Speaker 1: And uh, from from our article on on movie sound,
Speaker 1: I did read that, Uh, you the analog pickups are
Speaker 1: often blow the lens while the digital pickups are above it. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because of course now we do have digital sound. In
Speaker 1: the earliest days it was all absolutely and in fact
Speaker 1: most well we'll get into this, but most most films,
Speaker 1: even the ones that have digital sounds, still have the
Speaker 1: analog track on it. And we'll explain why when we
Speaker 1: get to that point. Yeah, there's there's usually an exciter
Speaker 1: lamp inside the the actual not that kind, but it's
Speaker 1: a lamp that provides a particularly bright and pinpointed light
Speaker 1: through the the optical tracks. So it's specific for that
Speaker 1: within a projector. And um, yeah, it goes all the
Speaker 1: way through the pre amplifier, the pre amplifier, since the
Speaker 1: amplifier which creates you know, increases the the What Chris
Speaker 1: is looking at me and laughing, I'm just wishing I
Speaker 1: hadn't done that. Oh the yes, the excited part. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's okay. I'm sure that I'll get plenty of mail
Speaker 1: about it, don't you worry. Alright anyway, So yeah, the
Speaker 1: pre ampsence sends the signals to the amplifier, which then
Speaker 1: sends the signal to the speakers, and then you get sound.
Speaker 1: And uh, there were some a lot of movies early
Speaker 1: on in the in the forties started using this system,
Speaker 1: not the digital as I said before, just the endim
Speaker 1: um and one in particular really went overboard. Yes, Fantasia.
Speaker 1: Once again, we go back to Disney Fantasia. If you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with Fantasia, it's a film that presents several
Speaker 1: different classical music pieces set to animation done by Disney. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of the animation, actually, much of the animation is
Speaker 1: completely original. It doesn't have any or it doesn't rely
Speaker 1: upon their their stock characters. There's a couple of pieces
Speaker 1: that do, depending on which version of Fantasia you see.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah, I'm Disney liked to experiment with new technologies.
Speaker 1: He was. He was very into pushing the envelope. And uh,
Speaker 1: I mean even when they the studio released snow White,
Speaker 1: a lot of people told him it couldn't be done,
Speaker 1: that creating a creating an animated feature that long would
Speaker 1: be very difficult, it wouldn't go over well with the audience.
Speaker 1: And I think every time people told him, you know,
Speaker 1: it couldn't be done or he was crazy to try it,
Speaker 1: he I think it just pushed him more to try
Speaker 1: to develop new technologies. So Fantasia was certainly an ambitious project.
Speaker 1: Ambitious project, I'm sure it was. Um the it it
Speaker 1: had multiple tracks of sound, so it wasn't just mono
Speaker 1: sound coming from behind the screen. That was the Other
Speaker 1: thing is that early early movies with sound, they had
Speaker 1: the speakers were actually mounted just behind the screen. That
Speaker 1: was it. And it was just blasting the sound through
Speaker 1: the screen at the audience. Fantasia was more sophist, kid.
Speaker 1: It was using a fantas sound is what they called it,
Speaker 1: and not there's no big surprise there. We mentioned that
Speaker 1: on our Surround Sound podcast a little bit. And they
Speaker 1: used actually used four mono optical soundtracks. And the problem
Speaker 1: here with four mono optical soundtracks is that's too many
Speaker 1: to fit on the actual film of the images that
Speaker 1: you're watching on the screen. If you were to fit
Speaker 1: four optical tracks side by side, it would creep into
Speaker 1: the frame of the movie and you would see that
Speaker 1: on the right side. Would be really weird, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there there's a physical limitation to the amount of space
Speaker 1: available on the celluloid. In this case, you would have
Speaker 1: to otherwise create new projectors that could handle much wider film,
Speaker 1: and that's a little expensive. Yeah, this was already a
Speaker 1: little expensive. But what they ended up doing was instead
Speaker 1: of having the optical tracks appear on the same film
Speaker 1: as the actual movie, they had two separate reels of film. Really, yes,
Speaker 1: one reel of film had the images and the other
Speaker 1: reel of film had the optical tracks on. So you
Speaker 1: had to have two projectors to show this movie the
Speaker 1: way that Disney intended it to be screened. The second
Speaker 1: projector would just be handling the soundtrack, which is crazy
Speaker 1: to me, but each of those tracks would be sent
Speaker 1: to specific groups of speakers, and that way you could
Speaker 1: get the the sensation that you're sitting in the middle
Speaker 1: of an orchestra, right, which is really what they were
Speaker 1: going for there. They wanted to They wanted to sort
Speaker 1: of transport you as if you were actually sitting in
Speaker 1: a symphony hall, not watching a movie screen. This was
Speaker 1: a very manual way of doing it because they would
Speaker 1: fade the sound in one speaker and turn it up
Speaker 1: in the other two produce that audio illusion of depth.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean people who are using the more
Speaker 1: modern tools where you can play with different tracks and
Speaker 1: add all kinds of different tracks in their computers, and
Speaker 1: this was this is a more hands on approach, if
Speaker 1: you will. So, do you know how many of these
Speaker 1: fantas sound systems actually got sold? No, but I'll take
Speaker 1: a guess. I want to say four you are twice
Speaker 1: as optimistic or four. Yeah. One was sold to New
Speaker 1: York's Broadway Theater and the other one to Carthe Circle
Speaker 1: theater in Los Angeles, and you bet the one in
Speaker 1: n l A. But I thought they were five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to install this thing. That's only slightly expensive. Keeping
Speaker 1: in mind this is that's incredibly expensive, and it needed
Speaker 1: fifty four speakers in the in the audience in order
Speaker 1: to do this properly. So yeah, it's obviously this is
Speaker 1: not the kind of sound system that's gonna work for
Speaker 1: every theater, clearly and not, and it's not necessary for
Speaker 1: most movies. So really, the fantas sound was one of
Speaker 1: those things where it really kind of showed you where
Speaker 1: movie sound could could go to, but it wasn't practical
Speaker 1: for moving forward, so most most of the film studios
Speaker 1: stuck with the optical tracks. Um. And that was pretty
Speaker 1: much the case until sometime in the fifties when they
Speaker 1: started to experiment with a new kind of soundtrack on film,
Speaker 1: which was magnetic. Yes, now that magnetic, Uh you know,
Speaker 1: I would assume, based on on what I know of
Speaker 1: these things that uh, we're talking the same type of
Speaker 1: technology that you would see in say a floppy disk
Speaker 1: or cassette tape exactly. So uh, yeah, that that was
Speaker 1: certainly an innovation, but you know, they and it it
Speaker 1: did have better sound quality. Yeah, supposedly the magnetic approach
Speaker 1: was superior to the optical tracks at the time, uh,
Speaker 1: in sound quality if you leged to see the movie early,
Speaker 1: because unfortunately, one of the by products was that the
Speaker 1: magnetic tape or the magnetic coding rather, would wear down
Speaker 1: over time, and of course as you showed the film,
Speaker 1: it would wear down faster. And so if you were
Speaker 1: to catch a movie three or four days after it
Speaker 1: had started playing in a movie house, especially if it
Speaker 1: had a lot of shows during the day, the sound
Speaker 1: quality would be it would be noticeably less pristine, right,
Speaker 1: it would not be pristine compared to if you had
Speaker 1: seen it the first time. They screamed the film. So
Speaker 1: that's not the case with the optical tracks. I mean,
Speaker 1: as long as the films in good shape, the optical
Speaker 1: tracks are just fine. And uh, there are most of
Speaker 1: the movies that were made with this magnetic or some
Speaker 1: of them anyway, were they were made with this magnetic approach,
Speaker 1: did not have the optical tracks as a failsafe. Some
Speaker 1: did because people were saying, hey, you know what if
Speaker 1: the system fails for this, do we have a backup plan?
Speaker 1: And the idea is, well, we already know how to
Speaker 1: do the optical track, let's do that too, And that
Speaker 1: ended up being the rule of thumb for most audio
Speaker 1: systems moving forward. And even when we get into digital
Speaker 1: and all all the different ways of doing digital sound,
Speaker 1: most films still keep the optical track because if something fails,
Speaker 1: you can always go back to the analog soundtrack. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna be as good as an experience necessarily, but
Speaker 1: you'll at least have sound with your movie, right. And
Speaker 1: of course, with the the financial outlay of movie theaters,
Speaker 1: they don't want to turn people away because they can't
Speaker 1: show the film. They pay a lot of money to
Speaker 1: be able to show these films, so they want something
Speaker 1: that they can they can continue to make money off
Speaker 1: of and try to recoup their investment. Um. So they
Speaker 1: definitely want some kind of plan as a backup. Um Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing too, met the magnetic the magnetic
Speaker 1: readers that that technology was more expensive as well. Um,
Speaker 1: So that that makes it even that much more important,
Speaker 1: or at least I would imagine it would. Yeah, that would.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that factored into decisions as they went further
Speaker 1: down the road. So when we get to the sixties.
Speaker 1: That's when we finally get into Oh, did you have
Speaker 1: something to add before that? Oh, I just noticed in
Speaker 1: my that magnetic also did did you point out that
Speaker 1: you could have up to six tracks? No? I did not, um,
Speaker 1: so that's something else. That another advantage that magnetic cats.
Speaker 1: So we're sort of in the more modern era of sound. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all started getting to the point where they were
Speaker 1: starting to figure out how to matrix sound, which is
Speaker 1: pretty complicated. I don't know that we can really get
Speaker 1: into it, but it's essentially it's it's taking multiple tracks
Speaker 1: and combining them in such a way so that you
Speaker 1: can represent them as one one strip of optical track.
Speaker 1: So it's the one yes, and you you really have
Speaker 1: the left, you have a left side of right side,
Speaker 1: and then you have the center. And the way it
Speaker 1: works is everything that's coded for the left side just
Speaker 1: plays for the left side. Everything that's coded just for
Speaker 1: the right side plays just for the right side. Everything
Speaker 1: that's coded for both plays also in the center, but
Speaker 1: at a few decibels lower than on the left and
Speaker 1: right right. That's that's the easy way of explaining it,
Speaker 1: but it gets way more complex than that. So but
Speaker 1: in the sixties. That's when we see Dolby start to
Speaker 1: enter into the movie sound market, and they had the
Speaker 1: Dolby A type noise reduction introduced in and UH. And
Speaker 1: this was this was a pretty big development as well.
Speaker 1: It's another interesting approach. UM. They will be of course
Speaker 1: played or continues to play a really important part in
Speaker 1: in movie sound today. So but yeah, that was that
Speaker 1: was when they were hitting the scene. UM. And we
Speaker 1: started getting to the point where we're approaching, when we're
Speaker 1: getting to digital sound. That that really starts up in
Speaker 1: the seventies UM, or at least the first attempts at
Speaker 1: it UH. And then in the eighties we actually see
Speaker 1: even more of that. Now with digital you start using
Speaker 1: pixels instead of an optical track to UH to give
Speaker 1: the signal to the photocells in order to play back.
Speaker 1: At least that's one way of doing it, UM and UH.
Speaker 1: A couple of systems didn't use the optical track as
Speaker 1: a back backup UM, which became a problem. The one
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of specifically was the Cinema Digital Sound System CDs,
Speaker 1: which this this is all the way up into it
Speaker 1: was used with the film Dick Tracy And Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of the problems with this was that they did not
Speaker 1: use the optical track as a backup, the analog track
Speaker 1: as a backup, and so if your digital system failed,
Speaker 1: there was no backup to go with. And actually that
Speaker 1: did happen at a couple of theaters, and that it
Speaker 1: hurt the film Dick Tracy a little bit more so
Speaker 1: than the actual content of that terrible movie. Um, I
Speaker 1: was wondering if you were going to take a shot
Speaker 1: at that. Yeah, Now, what's interesting, also interesting about the
Speaker 1: the digital pixels, the little pixels that provide the uh,
Speaker 1: the information needed to transmit sound through film. All right,
Speaker 1: these little pixel they have to be somewhere, right Where
Speaker 1: do you store them if you've already taken up space
Speaker 1: on one side with the optical tracks. I don't know.
Speaker 1: In a box under the bed. No, that's where the
Speaker 1: ambiguity is. It's over there in a box. Uh No,
Speaker 1: the it depends on the system. But one of them.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't put the dots in between the holes in
Speaker 1: the film, right, you know where the holes are where
Speaker 1: it would fit on the rockets, right right, Okay, so
Speaker 1: you've got those little strips of film between the holes.
Speaker 1: That's where the dots would be stored for digital sound. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then so it's not continuous. It would be with
Speaker 1: the traditional but with the with it being digital, you
Speaker 1: didn't have it have to have it be continuous as
Speaker 1: with the optical strip. It's kind of neat. It was
Speaker 1: the Dolby Digital track that's that's for the double digital track.
Speaker 1: That's the one that will be between the little holes
Speaker 1: and the the film, so where the sprockets would go.
Speaker 1: And you can actually see a picture of that in
Speaker 1: the movie Sound article on the Dolby Digital page. You
Speaker 1: can actually see what Jonathan's talking about there. It's a
Speaker 1: little odd to think about, though, how they could do
Speaker 1: that and have it not be continuous. Yeah. I I
Speaker 1: assume that it's because of the digital nature of it.
Speaker 1: We're talking, you know a little. It's different than analog
Speaker 1: where you have to follow along in real time with
Speaker 1: the picture. But there's also the Sony Dynamic digital sound
Speaker 1: system s d d S. Yes, SDDS. Now, if you
Speaker 1: were looking at a piece of film, uh, the s
Speaker 1: dds would be on the outer outer edge of that film. Yea,
Speaker 1: so on the outside of the sprockets, right on the
Speaker 1: outside of the sprockets, you would find the um, the
Speaker 1: the the little digital dots for the sdd S system,
Speaker 1: and then in between the sprockets you find the Delby
Speaker 1: digital and then you find the optical tracks. And of
Speaker 1: course with the Adobe system, which I believe uses an
Speaker 1: l e ED, the Sony system uses something else to
Speaker 1: read the sound. Are you talking about the laser. I
Speaker 1: was trying to give you the opportunity to lasers. I
Speaker 1: was hoping that was the one. I was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I've gotten to the point. The reason why
Speaker 1: I'm I'm hemming and hawing a little bit is because
Speaker 1: my notes crashed, so I'm going a lot from memory.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I was like, yeah, I think that is
Speaker 1: the laser system that. Yes, the light apparently goes through
Speaker 1: UH is magnified um and passes and you know, goes
Speaker 1: through the film and it's magnified and an array of
Speaker 1: photo cells picks it up and it's able to read
Speaker 1: it that way. So yes, it is running with a laser,
Speaker 1: which I won't try to say, like you, The cool
Speaker 1: thing about this is going back to, you know, the
Speaker 1: whole idea of combining the sound and the images into
Speaker 1: one UH format so that you you don't have to
Speaker 1: depend on multiple devices and you don't have to synchronize them.
Speaker 1: Like if you do have two different devices, you have
Speaker 1: to worry that they both are working properly and imperfect
Speaker 1: sync with one another, or else you know, your sound
Speaker 1: is not going to match up with the the what
Speaker 1: you're seeing. A video, of course, has a totally different
Speaker 1: set up. Video is not the same as film. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so you can find like especially if you watch
Speaker 1: streaming video online, you will occasionally see streaming video where
Speaker 1: the the sound and the video are not synchronized properly,
Speaker 1: and it it gets looks like it's a really poorly
Speaker 1: dubbed foreign film. But film does not have that issue
Speaker 1: because of course it's all there. I'm assuming that your
Speaker 1: your projectors working properly. It's all right there together. So
Speaker 1: it's really an ingenious approach to matching that sound up
Speaker 1: with the movies. I mean, if we had not come
Speaker 1: up with that optical approach analog and digital both, uh,
Speaker 1: we would probably not have as many talkies out there,
Speaker 1: I mean, just because it'd be such a pain in
Speaker 1: the butt to have to match the sound up to
Speaker 1: the the picture. Well, it is fascinating to think about
Speaker 1: how these things go, and I think, uh back, I
Speaker 1: think we actually are seeing a uh, sort of an
Speaker 1: analog pardon the term an analog today in the three
Speaker 1: D boom because I have the feeling based on what
Speaker 1: I've read about the jazz singer and how it it
Speaker 1: really you know, took the audiences by storm and the
Speaker 1: I think it caught the movie industry off guard a
Speaker 1: little bit about how popular it really was. And I
Speaker 1: think three D movies are another situation like that, where
Speaker 1: they're going, Wow, people really want to do this, let's
Speaker 1: go one, so they're you know, in some cases, rushing
Speaker 1: them out the dwarf, as we mentioned on our three
Speaker 1: D Movies podcast, when they're trying to capitalize convert films
Speaker 1: that were not shot in three D to become three
Speaker 1: D right right, So it's stop doing that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's sort of a similar situation um to that.
Speaker 1: But it's it's amazing how simple the solution was to
Speaker 1: to add that to the film, how advanced it has
Speaker 1: become in their variations on the it's pretty original. Agree,
Speaker 1: I agree it, agree entirely. So let's wrap this up
Speaker 1: one little aside. I'm gonna point out one other thing
Speaker 1: that really made movies sound possible. The boom mike. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's true. We didn't talk about that, Yeah, because because
Speaker 1: they used to blimp for a while, right, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: earliest Yeah, the blimp was essentially a soundproofed chamber that
Speaker 1: you had to put your your camera and sound equipment
Speaker 1: and when you were filming these early early uh sound films,
Speaker 1: because the equipment made so much noise that it would
Speaker 1: drown out the sounds you were trying to capture. Yeah, initially,
Speaker 1: in the very very early movies where they tried to
Speaker 1: do this, they the cameras were stationary anyway, and so
Speaker 1: were the mics. So it's almost like it's almost like
Speaker 1: sitting in front of a stage, Yes, exactly. You weren't
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot of you weren't gonna have any
Speaker 1: panning or or anything like that. You might have a
Speaker 1: little bit of a zoom, but Sorkin would have been
Speaker 1: so out of his element. He had no walk and talk.
Speaker 1: Let I'll tell you that. So, so the microphones often
Speaker 1: were stationary for the early films as well, which meant
Speaker 1: that you had that even further limited the movement the
Speaker 1: actors could make, because if they moved too far away
Speaker 1: from the microphone. You couldn't hear them anymore. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: totally reliving Singing in the Rain in my head conversation
Speaker 1: exactly because there's there. It was satirized in Singing in
Speaker 1: the Rain. If you watch that film, they have entire
Speaker 1: scenes where they're showing the problems that they have as
Speaker 1: they try to find places to put microphones and pick
Speaker 1: up the sound without picking up unwanted sound. And it
Speaker 1: was a problem. The boom mic was a brilliant Uh,
Speaker 1: thank you for illustrating. That's not that's not unprofessional at all.
Speaker 1: But let you're fired of the the can't fire that's true,
Speaker 1: the I don't have that authority, the no. But the
Speaker 1: boom mic really allowed actors to move around within a
Speaker 1: scene and you just kept the microphone out of frame
Speaker 1: and it solved a lot of problems. But it took
Speaker 1: a while to come up with that solution. Really, we
Speaker 1: don't truly know who invented it. There's some kind of
Speaker 1: guesswork about it being um there was a female director
Speaker 1: who was given that that kind of um uh, she's
Speaker 1: she's credited with creating it, But we don't truly know,
Speaker 1: so I can't really say who it was that came
Speaker 1: up with that idea, but it was a brilliant one.
Speaker 1: Good job whoever you are. Anyway, that wraps up this
Speaker 1: discussion about sound on film, and we'll probably do more
Speaker 1: movie making technology podcast in the future. We still have
Speaker 1: to talk about special effects and digital effects and the
Speaker 1: difference between the two. Maybe we'll do an entire show
Speaker 1: about Foley because we didn't get into that either, which
Speaker 1: is another element of sound. It's creating the proper sound
Speaker 1: effects for a film when and sometimes you have to
Speaker 1: use stuff that you wouldn't you wouldn't imagine would sound
Speaker 1: like what you're actually trying to make it sound like. Again,
Speaker 1: my mind is drawn to Ben vert Ah. There you go, yes,
Speaker 1: master sound effect technician. We are going to wrap this
Speaker 1: one up. If you guys would like to know specific
Speaker 1: information about specific topics of movie making, you can let
Speaker 1: us know on Facebook and Twitter are handle there is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff hs W. You can email us. That address
Speaker 1: is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and
Speaker 1: Chris and I what talk to you again really soon,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Um. Actually this was just handed to me. It
Speaker 1: looks like how stuff works dot Com now has an
Speaker 1: iPhone app, Sweet and that's awesome. Yeah. Actually, um, I
Speaker 1: got to to take a look at this earlier, and guys,
Speaker 1: this is pretty cool. The iPhone app is a sort
Speaker 1: of a way to integrate all the cool stuff we
Speaker 1: do at how stuff Works dot com. So you guys
Speaker 1: may have listened to one of our podcasts and we
Speaker 1: talked about there's this great article on the site, but
Speaker 1: you're not at your computer, so you can't really check it. Well.
Speaker 1: The iPhone app actually lets you browse articles and blog
Speaker 1: post so even lets you interact on Facebook and Twitter,
Speaker 1: and you can listen to podcasts at the same time.
Speaker 1: And it has all the house stuff Works dot com
Speaker 1: podcasts on it, not just ours, but you know good
Speaker 1: ones too, so you can listen to those and look
Speaker 1: at the articles and and go on Facebook and Twitter,
Speaker 1: and it should work perfectly with your iPhones and iPod touches. Awesome.
Speaker 1: What's it looks like. It's now available on the iTunes store,
Speaker 1: so that's good to know. How much does it cost?
Speaker 1: It's freeze sweet Ah, brought to you by the reinvented
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you