Author Topic: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?  (Read 8694 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline BeaminTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1567
  • Country: us
  • If you think my Boobs are big you should see my ba
How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« on: December 07, 2018, 02:32:18 pm »
Magnetic tape didn't come out until the 60's for wide spread use, so how did they get sound in the 40's and 50's when they would record things like interviews of people for the news and other broadcasts where they didn't have a studio, had to be portable and had to make it to broadcast the same day?

I know with projectors the sound was made from blowing air through holes on the side of the film, but you can't record like that. If you recorded by a light onto a film track you could only measure amplitude since they didn't have lights that could pulse at 15k hz. All the home movies I have such as my grandparents wedding after WWII had no sound. Even if you could pulse light that fast how would you record more then just a single tone since the light can't make two separate pulses at once? I also imagine that even when having a separate sound recording syncing up the sound to the picture was hard. Is that why they have that black and white thing they snap down when they start a scene they start the sound when they hear the snap line up with the frame that the top part snaps down? What is that thing called? I think they use an ipad for it now a days. When did they stop using actual film in the 90's? I liked the way film looked, you could see this best on dr who where dr who had the afro, the indoor shots were on video tape and the motion looked sharp. Then outdoor shots were more smooth with a soft focus and bright lights not over exposed leaving trails.
Max characters: 300; characters remaining: 191
Images in your signature must be no greater than 500x25 pixels
 

Offline Gromitt

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 145
  • Country: se
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2018, 02:39:02 pm »
They used optical sound, and they still do today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sound

 
The following users thanked this post: amyk, Beamin

Offline woodchips

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 590
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2018, 06:02:24 pm »
If interested look at the article "A Phototube for Dye Image Sound Track" in Electron Tubes Vol 2 by RCA. Can download these books.
 

Offline dmills

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2093
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2018, 07:07:18 pm »
Air was never blown thru the film for audio (At least not in any of the common systems).

The every early talkies used long playing records, cut in the usual way driven by a geared spindle from the projector, quite the trick to cue them up to get good lip sync.... Since in the carbon arc era you were limited to about 20 minutes per reel before changeover by both the length of the carbons and the desire to not have too much of the very flammable nitrocellulose film on the projector at any given time, this worked. It is worth noting that (particularly in the US) these were seriously patent infested waters.

Then came variable density sound tracks, recorded onto the side of the print by modulating a discharge lamp at audio rates and recording it thru a slit, very limited frequency response, and noisy but it sort of worked.

The big advance (that gave us 40 years or so of movies) was variable area where the width of a slit is modulated electrically at audio rate and records what amounts to an "AM Envelope" onto the side of the film, this is read by imaging a single heated wire filament onto the emulsion and using a photocathode to produce electrical output. This gave us stereo, then Dolby phase matrix gave us limited surround capabilities. Modern prints use a cyan dye instead of silver for the track and so require a red laser source instead of the heated filament.

For film production once electronic recording became a thing, first wire recorders then 'Sep Mag' were used and remained in use up until the 80's. Sep mag was essentially magnetic tape with perforations in the same manner as film that could be run on a follower in sync with the print when reviewing rushes and once you had the film put together the spliced negatives of the film plus spliced together sep mag reels would go off to be combined into a set of common optical masters for printing.

There was also a com-mag format used in some home movie gear which had magnetic audio track on the film so home movie gear could record the sound to it like a tape machine.

The board you are referring to is a 'Clapper Board' and provides both a sound reference time and the details of what this reel of film is, important when you have dozens of the things to pull together when editing.

Yep, I worked as a projectionist for a while.

Regards, Dan.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki, newbrain

Online vk6zgo

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7563
  • Country: au
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2018, 03:30:47 am »
Magnetic tape didn't come out until the 60's for wide spread use, so how did they get sound in the 40's and 50's when they would record things like interviews of people for the news and other broadcasts where they didn't have a studio, had to be portable and had to make it to broadcast the same day?

You are asking two quite different questions, so I will answer this bit first.
During WW2 they were having a pretty serious war, so TV, in particular, took a "back seat".
Even the TV transmissions in the late '30s in the UK & Germany were pretty limited, as were those in the USA a bit later.(both the UK & Germany shut down their transmissions on the onset of War in 1939).

Sound broadcasting of outside events was pretty much established, usually by providing "programme lines" hired from the "telephone company".
If you listen to old broadcasts, you will notice a variation in sound quality between when the Radio station had the luxury of proper "broadcast programme lines" which had to meet quality specifications, & when they needed to just grab an ordinary "phone standard" line.
If the event sound needed to be recorded, there were machines at the studio, where it was done onto conventional discs you could play on a "quite large" record player.

Film newsreels (the ones they used to have in theatres when I was a kid) were, again, mostly scheduled events, & the newsreel cameras, either had synchronised disc cutters, or optical recording, & later on, tape, either synchronised, or a magnetic stripe on the film)

You really have your timeline "out of whack" on tape recording, though, "reel to reel" tape machines were pretty much mainstream by the mid 1950s, being widely used in Radio station studios.
I had heard horror stories by "old timers" of having to lug the first portable reel to reel machines around.
(They were made to much stricter standards than the "home" ones which were available, & quality meant "heavy"in those times).

TV Studios usually, if they could, (scheduled events), set up an Outside Broadcast van, set out lots of microphones, & conventional studio cameras, send the video & audio back to the studio for recording, either by conversion into either sound film, or in the later 1950s, recorded on a studio Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Unpredictable events were either covered silent, with an accompanying commentary, or using a sound camera.
Quote
I know with projectors the sound was made from blowing air through holes on the side of the film,
No! No! No! The holes on the side of the film were to fit onto sprockets to accurately transport the film, & sync it with the shutter.
The air blowing was to suck the film into position as it passed the gate.
There is a whole lot more to film projectors than meets the eye.
Quote

but you can't record like that. If you recorded by a light onto a film track you could only measure amplitude since they didn't have lights that could pulse at 15k hz.
dmills has already covered this admirably, but I will go over it a bit, too.

The lights didn't have to "pulse", they just varied the light output at an audio rate.
It wasn't "rocket science" even then (1920s),-- people had been playing with "light beam communicators" for decades, so they really just had to split the system so instead of a transmitter & receiver, there was a recording medium in the middle.
I say, "all", but to actually do that, standardise it, manufacture equipment & supply it industry wide, was a
marvel of both engineering & organisation.
The film industry was big enough to do that, so when TV came along, there was a solid engineering base to work with.
Quote

 All the home movies I have such as my grandparents wedding after WWII had no sound.
Only the very rich could afford sound home movies until magnetic "stripe" tracks became available.
Quote
Even if you could pulse light that fast how would you record more then just a single tone since the light can't make two separate pulses at once?
:palm:
Quote
I also imagine that even when having a separate sound recording syncing up the sound to the picture was hard.
Covered well by dmills
Quote
Is that why they have that black and white thing they snap down when they start a scene they start the sound when they hear the snap line up with the frame that the top part snaps down? What is that thing called? I think they use an ipad for it now a days.
There is a very large crew at a "film shoot", all of whom need to be aware that the "shoot" is underway.
The filmed image of the "clapperboard" also signals the film editor that all before that is not valuable material, & can be removed, if required.
They used clapperboards back in the days of silent movies, so, although it is useful for the sound people, it is not the original purpose.
Quote
When did they stop using actual film in the 90's?
For TV, as soon as they possibly could!
Trying to incorporate film into a studio produced programme was always horrific, with the difference in picture quality, gamma, etc, being glaringly obvious.
When I worked in a TV studio in 1965, we were still trying to do this, but by the time I worked in another such studio, in 1988, it was long gone.
Quote
I liked the way film looked, you could see this best on dr who where dr who had the afro, the indoor shots were on video tape and the motion looked sharp. Then outdoor shots were more smooth with a soft focus and bright lights not over exposed leaving trails.

To each their own---- I hated it!
« Last Edit: December 08, 2018, 03:33:49 am by vk6zgo »
 

Offline dmills

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2093
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2018, 01:09:31 pm »
The telecine machine was not exactly a much loved bit of kit, big, mechanical, very sensitive to dirt, usually slightly unreliable and just generally annoying.

Once video got genuinely good enough for broadcast (which to be fair took a while, and the early VTRs had most of the same issues the telecine rigs did, find a picture of a Ampex Quadruplex VTR sometime), the telecine was dropped like a hot rock from day to day use, they lingered for a long time because the library was all on film..... 

Regards, Dan.
 

Offline JohnPen

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 240
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2018, 03:29:06 pm »
In the early 60s BBC TV news was using several different recording techniques.  For the visual output it consisted of a valve based Ampex and transistor based RCA video recorders as well as valve based 35mm and 16mm telecine machines.  Any incoming film to news, either optical or taped sound,  was transferred to 16mm magnetic film for ease of editing.  The final versions of edited film and sound were synchronised and then magnetically locked together (Selsyn) for transmission.  There was also a small sound recording room set up which had a 15 in /sec tape machine plus a consumer twin track tape machine and 2 disk cutting machines (Talysurf).  The sound room used to take copies of important incoming radio news from Broadcasting house sources for inclusion in the News.  When occasionally using the disk cutters, having run out of sound recording capacity, you had to remember to empty the bag of swarf otherwise it flowed across the floor.  Sometimes these disk recordings were played live into the news.  A particular memory was the data sound from the Telstar satellite.
 

Offline IanB

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11790
  • Country: us
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2018, 03:42:35 pm »
Trying to incorporate film into a studio produced programme was always horrific, with the difference in picture quality, gamma, etc, being glaringly obvious.
When I worked in a TV studio in 1965, we were still trying to do this, but by the time I worked in another such studio, in 1988, it was long gone.

Early VTR machines had relatively poor image quality, so at the BBC recording to film was always the marker of high production quality. It may be that digital recording technology today has relegated this to history, but in the past the difference between film and VTR was glaringly obvious.
 

Online vk6zgo

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7563
  • Country: au
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2018, 03:02:13 am »
Trying to incorporate film into a studio produced programme was always horrific, with the difference in picture quality, gamma, etc, being glaringly obvious.
When I worked in a TV studio in 1965, we were still trying to do this, but by the time I worked in another such studio, in 1988, it was long gone.

Early VTR machines had relatively poor image quality, so at the BBC recording to film was always the marker of high production quality. It may be that digital recording technology today has relegated this to history, but in the past the difference between film and VTR was glaringly obvious.

My experience with quality VTR- v- film was opposite to yours, even comparing across the same system.
Even before I worked in Television,  the 1962 Commonwealth games were held in Perth, providing hours of live coverage using the very good 4.5" Image Orthicon studio cameras.

The live pictures were excellent, & watching the News coverage later, you could see the small drop in picture quality between live & VTR, but some recorded coverage had been done with 16mm news cameras.
These were very obviously degraded in quality compared to both other sources.

The original requirement set up for BW Television was to "have equal quality to 16mm film" .
An obvious problem is, if you start with "equal" then degrade one source by an intermediate process, you will have a lesser quality result. VTRs degraded quality less than Telecine.

When the Tokyo Olympics were held, in 1964, the coverage was mainly from VTR tapes flown in from Japan.
As there were no standards converters at the time, the host broadcaster, or a consortium of 625 line countries (I don't know which), had supplied a machine for that standard, complete with a "slow motion" setup--- a Japanese innovation at the time.

The "Homicide" series produced in Melbourne from 1964, used studio TV cameras for all the internal stuff shot on studio "sets", but the external shots were all 16mm film.
This was then included into the final VTR tape sent out to the stations for transmission

Watching these gave a weird inversion of the normal light levels from inside to outside.
Nice & bright inside, good contrast, sharp resolution, the action went outside into a Summer day, & the picture became noticeably darker & softer.
Telecine strikes again!

"Homicide" was sold overseas, including to the UK, so their earlier version must have been Yuk! "kine'd"!

One Australian show made entirely on 35mm film was "Skippy", which was sold overseas in many markets.
Using film got around the "standards" problem which so bedevilled mass TV distribution before the BBC came up with the first standards converter.

I don't know if it was distributed overseas on 35mm, but in Oz, it was optically reduced to 16mm for use on the multitude of Telecines using that film standard.

Many of the  US & British dramas which were the mainstay of evening TV were done in the same way, & also produced very acceptable quality pictures using standard Vidicon based Telecine chains.
I particular remember the American "Quinn Martin" productions as taking a lot of pains to get the best quality they could.
Others, however, which had been "kine'd" from originally live TV were horrible.


 

Offline Brumby

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 12288
  • Country: au
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #9 on: December 09, 2018, 03:26:37 am »
I know with projectors the sound was made from blowing air through holes on the side of the film

Where did you get that idea from?  I think someone may have been winding you up.  They are sprocket holes and are simply a part of the physical film transport mechanism - and always have been that and only that.
 

Offline tooki

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11342
  • Country: ch
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #10 on: December 10, 2018, 04:27:36 pm »
Magnetic tape didn't come out until the 60's for wide spread use
It was already the standard in studios by the early 1950s. Before that, they also had things like wire recorders and record lathes. (I think you are confusing what was available for professional broadcast use and what was cheap enough to be available at home.)

so how did they get sound in the 40's and 50's when they would record things like interviews of people for the news and other broadcasts where they didn't have a studio, had to be portable and had to make it to broadcast the same day?
Portable recorders didn't exist. But this didn't matter, because they did have a studio with them: they'd have a production truck with all the recording and transmission equipment. So you might have a recorder on-site, with long microphone and camera cables. Or you might just air it directly to the studio and deal with it from there.


I know with projectors the sound was made from blowing air through holes on the side of the film, but you can't record like that.
Where on earth did you get this idea?!?!?!

If you recorded by a light onto a film track you could only measure amplitude since they didn't have lights that could pulse at 15k hz.
Yes, they did have such lights.

All the home movies I have such as my grandparents wedding after WWII had no sound.
Home movie technology had to be many orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler to use than professional equipment. It's only very recently that home AV production equipment has gotten so close to broadcast gear.

Even if you could pulse light that fast how would you record more then just a single tone since the light can't make two separate pulses at once?
No idea what this means. For what it's worth, it's entirely possible to use just pulses (of light, electricity, etc) to encode audio, and we routinely do this with 1-bit DACs and more rarely with encodings like pulse-density modulation.

I also imagine that even when having a separate sound recording syncing up the sound to the picture was hard.
All manner of systems existed to do this.

Is that why they have that black and white thing they snap down when they start a scene they start the sound when they hear the snap line up with the frame that the top part snaps down? What is that thing called? I think they use an ipad for it now a days.
Already addressed in detail by others.

When did they stop using actual film in the 90's?
Never, to 100%. The switch from film to video happened at wildly different times depending on the use case. News and soap operas were among the first to switch to video. Dramas were among the last. (For example, Breaking Bad (2008-2013) was shot on film, but its prequel, Better Call Saul (2015-present) is shot in 4K digital.)

Moreover, it wasn't ever a clean switchover.
  • Originally, shows were shot on film, edited on film, and broadcast direct from film.
  • Later, they were shot and edited on film, but then transferred to videotape and then broadcast.
  • Then later, they were shot on film, but edited on video and broadcast.
  • Then they were shot and edited on video.
  • And alongside these changes, digital effects came in on the video side. And then HD and 4K...

Let's take the Star Trek TV franchise as an example:
The Original Series (1966-69) was (1) or (2). This made it (comparatively) easy to go back and re-scan the film at 2K for the HD restoration and release.
The Next Generation (1987-94) was (3). To make the HD remastering of TNG, Paramount had to re-scan all the original negatives and re-edit every scene, including recreating every single special effect, because all of the editing and effects were originally done in standard-definition video. (This remastering was enormously expensive and time-consuming.)
Deep Space Nine (1993-99) was (3), and Voyager (1995-2001) was (3) but for the first time, used no physical models of ships, only CGI renderings. Neither of these series has undergone an HD remastering. :(
Enterprise (2001-05) was actually made in digital HD (so technically (4/5)), but oddly, much of the CGI was done in standard-definition, and then upscaled into the final video.
Discovery is pure 4K digital (so also (4/5)).

The same applies to cinema, though comparatively little cinema was ever filmed on video, at least outside amateur and art-house stuff. (The Blair Witch project being a notable exception, having been shot almost entirely on Hi-8 video.)

I liked the way film looked, you could see this best on dr who where dr who had the afro, the indoor shots were on video tape and the motion looked sharp. Then outdoor shots were more smooth with a soft focus and bright lights not over exposed leaving trails.
Early video cameras sucked, which is why film didn't displace them originally. So you might ask, why doesn't the old filmed material look bad on TV, too? Well, because it wasn't converted to film with a video camera. Instead, a device called a "telecine" was used to scan the film to tape, and a telecine was much higher quality than the cameras. (IIRC, you can even do a slower-than-real-time conversion to improve quality.)
« Last Edit: December 10, 2018, 08:07:57 pm by tooki »
 
The following users thanked this post: newbrain, Wan Huang Luo

Offline Wan Huang Luo

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 137
  • Country: us
  • 顽谎骆 from the Shenzhen Market
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #11 on: December 10, 2018, 07:28:32 pm »
This thread delivers. Although the original post was a complete disaster  :-BROKE I did enjoy reading the responses. If it weren't for the original post, these quality responses would not have been made. So thanks to all.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki, Beamin

Online David Hess

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 16549
  • Country: us
  • DavidH
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #12 on: December 10, 2018, 08:48:38 pm »
One of the big advantages of 70mm film was that it had a 6 track magnetic sound track and many films recorded in 35mm formats were distributed in 70mm just for this.
 

Online vk6zgo

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7563
  • Country: au
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #13 on: December 11, 2018, 03:00:45 am »
Early video cameras sucked,
On the contrary, Studio Image Orthicon TV BW cameras, as used in Australia produced excellent pictures, with sharp resolution & contrast.
They did have a slightly weird gamma curve, but this could be corrected.

Much is made of  dark "haloing" around bright objects, but that was mainly an artefact of unfamiliarity with the use of these devices, or in some cases, incorrect adjustment.
( it was not easy to learn how to set them up).

Those who are too young to have ever seen live transmissions using IOs base their impressions of TV of the period on "kinescope"recordings
These were made with a film camera "looking at" a picture monitor showing a live TV signal.
To avoid visible "strobing", the picture monitor normally used a phosphor with longer than normal persistence, which helped to degrade the picture quality.
Some of the early ones like Groucho Marx's Quiz show "You bet your life", looked like they had been filmed in a snowstorm.
Quote
which is why film didn't displace them originally. So you might ask, why doesn't the old filmed material look bad on TV, too? Well, because it wasn't converted to film with a video camera. Instead, a device called a "telecine" was used to scan the film to tape, and a telecine was much higher quality than the cameras.
Nope!---- In fact,that was exactly what most telecine chains were.-----
A vidicon camera, illuminated by the light from a pretty much standard 16mm projector.
Vidicons weren't too bad in such service, because they were well illuminated, reducing noise which occurred in such devices under low light conditions.

They also, conveniently,  had a complementary gamma curve to that of a TV display tube.
The "storage effect inherent in their operation, made it easier to avoid "strobing effects, but that same characteristic sometimes made them prone to "trailing lines" when objects moved fast.

But, better quality than a Studio camera?
In your dreams!

There were other, much more complex versions of Telecines, using flying spot scanners, which could produce better results than the simple vidicon type, but they were expensive, & fairly rare, outside the BBC & it's like.

The reason programmes originally made on 35mm film were reasonable quality is that great care was taken in optically transcribing them to 16mm.
Quote

 (IIRC, you can even do a slower-than-real-time conversion to improve quality.)

The very last generations of telecine chains used non synchronous line scanning, followed by a line store, & even later, full frame stores to remove the necessity for synching the film & video rates.

They could definitely do such things.


http://www.vtoldboys.com/tk_06.htm
« Last Edit: December 11, 2018, 03:04:50 am by vk6zgo »
 

Offline JohnPen

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 240
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #14 on: December 11, 2018, 10:33:41 am »
The other extreme was in the early 60s BBC News used a slow scan telecine set up to send high interest news items to the USA.  Each 16mm frame was scanned twice, taking 8 seconds per frame, and transmitted down a telephone line to reach the States via the undersea cable link. It took a long time to transfer a usable film sequence. :) Both ends needed to be synchronised and often the there were no technical staff present at the USA end because of local time differences and a few times the cleaning staff were talked through the equipment line up from the UK.  It worked but was very boring to keep watching to ensure that the transfer was successful. :(  There was also an Image Orthicon/telecine set up for doing an optical standards conversion from USA sources. Very rarely used though.
 

Offline CJay

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4136
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #15 on: December 11, 2018, 12:02:06 pm »
They used optical sound, and they still do today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sound

First 'proper' job I had was as a television repair tech, the guy that owned the company was a cinema projectionist and he had a full 35mm projector in the basement of the telly shop (I'm pretty sure he was pirating films but never caught him out)

He showed me the optical track and the pickup for it, beautiful old tech and the amplifiers were using KT88 valves IIRC
 

Offline BeaminTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1567
  • Country: us
  • If you think my Boobs are big you should see my ba
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #16 on: December 11, 2018, 01:09:09 pm »
Air was never blown thru the film for audio (At least not in any of the common systems).

The every early talkies used long playing records, cut in the usual way driven by a geared spindle from the projector, quite the trick to cue them up to get good lip sync.... Since in the carbon arc era you were limited to about 20 minutes per reel before changeover by both the length of the carbons and the desire to not have too much of the very flammable nitrocellulose film on the projector at any given time, this worked. It is worth noting that (particularly in the US) these were seriously patent infested waters.

Then came variable density sound tracks, recorded onto the side of the print by modulating a discharge lamp at audio rates and recording it thru a slit, very limited frequency response, and noisy but it sort of worked.

The big advance (that gave us 40 years or so of movies) was variable area where the width of a slit is modulated electrically at audio rate and records what amounts to an "AM Envelope" onto the side of the film, this is read by imaging a single heated wire filament onto the emulsion and using a photocathode to produce electrical output. This gave us stereo, then Dolby phase matrix gave us limited surround capabilities. Modern prints use a cyan dye instead of silver for the track and so require a red laser source instead of the heated filament.

For film production once electronic recording became a thing, first wire recorders then 'Sep Mag' were used and remained in use up until the 80's. Sep mag was essentially magnetic tape with perforations in the same manner as film that could be run on a follower in sync with the print when reviewing rushes and once you had the film put together the spliced negatives of the film plus spliced together sep mag reels would go off to be combined into a set of common optical masters for printing.

There was also a com-mag format used in some home movie gear which had magnetic audio track on the film so home movie gear could record the sound to it like a tape machine.

The board you are referring to is a 'Clapper Board' and provides both a sound reference time and the details of what this reel of film is, important when you have dozens of the things to pull together when editing.

Yep, I worked as a projectionist for a while.

Regards, Dan.

Is a projectionist just the guy in the back of movie theaters that forgets to turn the sound on or is this a more prestigious position in a movie studio? The day you threw away your razor blade and slice block must have been like getting electricity for the first time. Movies still use film? When will they switch over to just getting the film on a hard drive or SSD? Does the audio come on a special DVD with all the sound encoding?

You know whats great about the internet? Someone can ask a question that you have never even heard of like "how does the magnetic coupling work when you shift to neutral on the turbo encabulator knowing that there is only 0.1" of tolerance?" Then you can look up the thing on Wikipedia and not even check the references then formulate how something works in your mind, what difficulties might arise from use then write an expert response on it making you look like an expert. Putting in an anecdote from "when you worked at XYZ company in the 19xx's" adds even more realism to it. When forums first came out as a kid I would get board and do this and people were none the wiser. Even people that worked in the field would sometimes say "Wow in 20+ years I didn't know that could happen" That was before the word troll was a bad thing that was used to meddle with other countries elections.
Max characters: 300; characters remaining: 191
Images in your signature must be no greater than 500x25 pixels
 

Offline BeaminTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1567
  • Country: us
  • If you think my Boobs are big you should see my ba
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #17 on: December 11, 2018, 01:30:12 pm »
I know with projectors the sound was made from blowing air through holes on the side of the film

Where did you get that idea from?  I think someone may have been winding you up.  They are sprocket holes and are simply a part of the physical film transport mechanism - and always have been that and only that.

My first grade teacher told us that when we used to watch all the reel to reel tapes since our school had laser discs and no VCR's so the laser disk was always in use. I asked why the sound was messed up sometimes while the picture wasn't. MRS JOHNSON LIED TO ME THAT WICKED CUNT! DAMN HER TO HELL!!! I WOULD NEVER GET MY DREAM JOB IN FILM BECAUSE OF HER! FUCK HER LIFE!!!!  :scared: Anyways… Seems like every rich school district got conned into buying laser disks and other stupid things like the magazine drive and milk that came in plastic bags. When I was younger and did sales I could have just cold/walked in to the school, or maybe given a grand or 500 bucks to the school board members and got those sweet contracts. If you sell a service plan on a VCR at circuit city you can close a deal with a school.

This thread is a wealth of info and I'm still not done looking up all the terms and technologies in it. This is why forums > google.
Max characters: 300; characters remaining: 191
Images in your signature must be no greater than 500x25 pixels
 

Offline dmills

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2093
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #18 on: December 11, 2018, 02:11:17 pm »
Projectionist is the guy in the back of the theatre, also the guy in the back of the dubbing theatre and the guy responsible for running the rushes during production, it is a highly variable job. I have on one occasion had to duck into someone elses projection room from the auditorium when I was trying to watch a film because the operator was awol and a splice had failed, I went in to drop the dowser and kill the take up torque motor to prevent equipment damage someone must have been confused when they got back, my sark was high when I wrote it up in his projection log book!

Back in the heyday of the cinema in the uk, it was a 4 year apprenticeship covering enough of all the aspects of the technology to be able to do repairs to the electrical, mechanical and optical systems. That had long gone by the time I did it, as had nitrate stock (No great loss, the job got MUCH safer once that stuff was retired).

The splicing block is actually still around because for film as opposed to video the film is delivered on multiple 2'000ft spools and that is a pain in the arse to project (A changeover every 20 minutes give or take, made sense in the nitrate era and with carbon arc sources), we tended to do a lot of one or two night showings so usually spliced up onto 6'000 ft spools for projection which generally meant one or two changeovers, but places that ran longer usually used either 12,000 foot spools on 'towers' or spliced up an endless loop on a 'cakestand' which had the advantage of not needing rewinding (But had some really amusing failure modes if you were not the one to have to untangle it). 

Most modern releases are setup for digital projection these days and just come on a (heavily encrypted) hard disk which takes all the fun out of it, but if you want to show older films, well most of it has not been transferred and you still need to do it the old way.

Well done 35mm in good condition run in a correctly set up rig gives 4k digital a very good run for its money and often stomps it for quality, but that same 35mm print, after it has been around a bit and had a few multiplex crews scratch the fuck out of it (they never seem to clean the plates), yea, give me 4k digital... 70mm is a rare treat when you get to see it, I have never managed to get to run it myself.

I don't see much trolling here, and the talk of early telly systems fits with my recollection more or less (Image Orthicon was before my time), but slowscan for international links, flying spot scanners, and optical standards conversion, yea, sounds about right. Annoyingly by the time I was old enough to try for a job that would have gotten me to Wood Norton John Birt had happened (UK telly types will know to what I refer).

Regards, Dan.
 
The following users thanked this post: SeanB, tooki

Offline CJay

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4136
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #19 on: December 11, 2018, 02:25:41 pm »
The splicing block is actually still around because for film as opposed to video the film is delivered on multiple 2'000ft spools and that is a pain in the arse to project (A changeover every 20 minutes give or take, made sense in the nitrate era and with carbon arc sources), we tended to do a lot of one or two night showings so usually spliced up onto 6'000 ft spools for projection which generally meant one or two changeovers, but places that ran longer usually used either 12,000 foot spools on 'towers' or spliced up an endless loop on a 'cakestand' which had the advantage of not needing rewinding (But had some really amusing failure modes if you were not the one to have to untangle it). 

I've done 'stuff' in the projection galleries of a cuple of multiplexes (we did the machines they played the ads and trailers on), it's an amazing sight, all the projectors in one gallery running from a single reel.

managed to watch quite a few films that way, sat drinking tea and eating the projectionist's biscuit stash.
 

Offline tooki

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11342
  • Country: ch
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #20 on: December 11, 2018, 02:38:09 pm »
Early video cameras sucked,
On the contrary, Studio Image Orthicon TV BW cameras, as used in Australia produced excellent pictures, with sharp resolution & contrast.
They did have a slightly weird gamma curve, but this could be corrected.

Much is made of  dark "haloing" around bright objects, but that was mainly an artefact of unfamiliarity with the use of these devices, or in some cases, incorrect adjustment.
( it was not easy to learn how to set them up).

Those who are too young to have ever seen live transmissions using IOs base their impressions of TV of the period on "kinescope"recordings
These were made with a film camera "looking at" a picture monitor showing a live TV signal.
To avoid visible "strobing", the picture monitor normally used a phosphor with longer than normal persistence, which helped to degrade the picture quality.
Some of the early ones like Groucho Marx's Quiz show "You bet your life", looked like they had been filmed in a snowstorm.
Quote
which is why film didn't displace them originally. So you might ask, why doesn't the old filmed material look bad on TV, too? Well, because it wasn't converted to film with a video camera. Instead, a device called a "telecine" was used to scan the film to tape, and a telecine was much higher quality than the cameras.
Nope!---- In fact,that was exactly what most telecine chains were.-----
A vidicon camera, illuminated by the light from a pretty much standard 16mm projector.
Vidicons weren't too bad in such service, because they were well illuminated, reducing noise which occurred in such devices under low light conditions.

They also, conveniently,  had a complementary gamma curve to that of a TV display tube.
The "storage effect inherent in their operation, made it easier to avoid "strobing effects, but that same characteristic sometimes made them prone to "trailing lines" when objects moved fast.

But, better quality than a Studio camera?
In your dreams!

There were other, much more complex versions of Telecines, using flying spot scanners, which could produce better results than the simple vidicon type, but they were expensive, & fairly rare, outside the BBC & it's like.

The reason programmes originally made on 35mm film were reasonable quality is that great care was taken in optically transcribing them to 16mm.
Quote

 (IIRC, you can even do a slower-than-real-time conversion to improve quality.)

The very last generations of telecine chains used non synchronous line scanning, followed by a line store, & even later, full frame stores to remove the necessity for synching the film & video rates.

They could definitely do such things.


http://www.vtoldboys.com/tk_06.htm
Your unnecessarily rude tone aside (which is why I won’t bother to indulge you with an extensive reply), your comments do not agree with my experience or research, so I respectfully submit that you’re... not entirely right — or that you completely missed the context of my comments.

But the main one is: EVERY source I’ve ever seen says that vidicon-type telecines were displaced by flying-spot telecines fairly quickly, and later by linear CCD models. (Indeed, in modern terminology, “telecine” tends to refer to the line-scan type of device, whereas “film scanner” is used to indicate the frame-scan type.)
 

Offline tooki

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11342
  • Country: ch
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #21 on: December 11, 2018, 03:05:39 pm »
Movies still use film? When will they switch over to just getting the film on a hard drive or SSD? Does the audio come on a special DVD with all the sound encoding?
Speaking of looking things up... this is ALL on Wikipedia. I do kinda wish you’d do basic research before asking questions, because your modus operandi is to ask questions based on a ton of misconceptions, which everyone has to clear up first.

Is film in use? Yes, but on a sharp decline.
When will they switch to digital playback? The overwhelming majority of cinemas already have. I think many keep some film projectors around anyway, in case they want to screen a movie that is only available on film.
“Getting the movie on a hard drive or SSD” 1. An SSD for this kind of application would be dumb as rocks, since it doesn’t need the performance of an SSD, but the files are enormous, so you’d be sending very expensive SSDs. 2. Hard disks are shipped to cinemas, but it’s moving to digital downloads via high-speed internet or satellite.
Does the audio come on a DVD? No. In 35mm, the stereo analog audio, Dolby Digital, and SDDS soundtracks are all recorded optically right on the film. Additionally, the timecode for DTS audio is also on the film, which syncs up the DTS equipment which plays the audio off of CD-ROM. 70mm IMAX also used CD-ROM based audio of some type. But in modern digital distribution, the audio is of course right in the digital files.
 

Offline tooki

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11342
  • Country: ch
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #22 on: December 11, 2018, 03:08:52 pm »
My first grade teacher told us that when we used to watch all the reel to reel tapes since our school had laser discs and no VCR's so the laser disk was always in use. I asked why the sound was messed up sometimes while the picture wasn't. MRS JOHNSON LIED TO ME THAT WICKED CUNT! DAMN HER TO HELL!!! I WOULD NEVER GET MY DREAM JOB IN FILM BECAUSE OF HER! FUCK HER LIFE!!!!  :scared: Anyways… Seems like every rich school district got conned into buying laser disks and other stupid things like the magazine drive and milk that came in plastic bags. When I was younger and did sales I could have just cold/walked in to the school, or maybe given a grand or 500 bucks to the school board members and got those sweet contracts. If you sell a service plan on a VCR at circuit city you can close a deal with a school.
LaserDisc was a great format. For schools, it had many advantages, including not needing to rewind, and random access to any segment of a video. It was hardly “stupid”.

This thread is a wealth of info and I'm still not done looking up all the terms and technologies in it. This is why forums > google.
Well... still, it’s somewhat disrespectful of others’ time to not do any homework on your own. Use google and wikipedia to get the basics down, then come to a forum to fill in the gaps.
 
The following users thanked this post: Beamin

Offline JohnPen

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 240
  • Country: gb
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #23 on: December 11, 2018, 06:27:27 pm »
Vidicon (Plumbicon)  telecines were on the way out in the early 80s in BBC TV news.  There was  a big changeover to ENG  ( Electronic News Gathering) in process then and the need for film facilities was declining.   Some facilities were still needed to cater for occasional 16mm film input. There was even a Super 8 projector telecine version with a special shutter and speed control to allow newsworthy home movie footage to be injected into the news.  News division did not use flying spot telecines they were normally used for the standard BBC programs only.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki

Offline james_s

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 21611
  • Country: us
Re: How did they record sound to film camera before magnetic tape?
« Reply #24 on: December 12, 2018, 02:33:26 am »
LaserDisc was a great format. For schools, it had many advantages, including not needing to rewind, and random access to any segment of a video. It was hardly “stupid”.

I agree, laserdisc was fantastic, we had some of them in my school and they offered great picture quality and the discs when properly cared for didn't wear out the way VHS tapes do. I knew a few people who had them at home too, nothing else was available that could match the audio and video quality, it absolutely blew away VHS. The big downside was run time and thus having to flip the disc halfway through a movie. DVD solved that while offering nearly as good a picture and it was much cheaper.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf