Jessenia Colon's List: TV & Film Audio

• a high-fidelity audio/visual reproduction standard for movie theaters, screening rooms, home theaters, computer speakers, gaming consoles, and car audio systems
• created in 200
• developed by Tomlinson Holman at George Lucas' company, Lucasfilm, in 1983 to ensure that the soundtrack for the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, would be accurately reproduced in the best venues
• it does not specify a sound recording format
• not a recording technology,
• THX is mainly a quality assurance system.
• THX-certified theaters provide a high-quality, predictable playback environment to ensure that any film soundtrack mixed in THX will sound as near as possible to the intentions of the mixing engineer

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• Born out of the Star Wars legacy
• To begin the project, Lucas gave Holman one year to examine film audio throughout the entire production chain—from the set to the theater, and everything in between
• Holman’s goal was to find a way to improve cinematic sound production and create specifications to design the state-of-the-art audio mixing rooms that would eventually house Skywalker Sound.
• Dolby Laboratories had made significant contributions to how sound was recorded and played back on film
• no one had control over what happened on the production set or in the theater itself.
• Bringing the THX Experience to Moviegoers
• Lucas and the soon-to-be THX team designed a certification program to go beyond the walls of Skywalker Ranch
• THX was born
• By creating a set of standards for theater design and enforcing performance levels of presentation equipment, THX was ensuring that the film experience would translate from studios to every theater
• THX Cinema Certification specifications consolidated presentation technologies from various sources into one set of design standards
• an even distribution of sound throughout the auditorium
• allow sound designers to extend the dynamic range of sound effects and create a more enveloping presentation
• sets guidelines for room acoustics, reverberation time and background noise, and noise isolation to ensure that every detail of the sonic presentation is accurately delivered the way the filmmaker intended
• THX sets standards for viewing angles, projectors and onscreen lighting levels, to make sure that the best possible image is always displayed

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• By introducing an additional rear audio channel to the cinema, Dolby Digital Surround EX increases the realism of movies and brings the action behind you to life
• adds a center rear audio channel to the Dolby Digital 5.1-channel cinema setup,
• allows content encoded in Surround EX to be played in any cinema equipped with 5.1-channel Dolby Digital decoding.
• giving filmmakers greater control over the placement of sounds in the theatre
• Rear-wall surround speakers located directly behind the audience reproduce the additional Surround EX channel, while speakers located on the side walls reproduce the Left and Right Surround channels
• Greater Cinema Realism
• S

  ound surrounds you in real life, and Dolby Digital Surround EX ensures that it surrounds you at the movies
• introduction of a rear surround audio channel—
• and new speakers on the back wall of the theatre—Surround EX takes the Dolby Digital 5.1-channel setup one step further
• audio experiences we take for granted outside the theatre now sound true to life in the theatre
• you'll hear the footsteps of the pursuer approaching from behind, growing louder as the distance between the two characters diminishes.
• Moments like these define the cinema experience
• The additional rear surround channel clarifies audio effects that pan from front to back—an asteroid that narrowly misses hitting your spaceship, for example—and gives sound designers more control over the placement of sound in the theatre
• Not Just for Movie Theatres
• You can enjoy the benefits of Dolby Digital Surround EX at home, too

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• Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories.
• originally named Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994
• first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints
• is now also used for other applications such as HDTV broadcast, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and game consoles
• Dolby Digital cinema soundtracks are optically recorded on a 35 mm release print using sequential data blocks placed between every perforation hole on the sound track side of the film
• Batman Returns was the first film to use Dolby Digital technology when it premiered in theaters in the summer of 1992
• All film prints with Dolby Digital data also have Dolby Stereo analogue soundtracks using Dolby SR noise reduction and such prints are known as Dolby SR-D prints
• The analogue soundtrack provides a fall-back option
• also provides compatibility with projectors not equipped with digital soundheads
• converting existing projectors is to add a so-called penthouse digital soundhead above the projector head
• Dolby Digital is the common version containing up to six discrete channels of sound
• Dolby Digital audio is used on DVD-Video and other purely digital media, like home cinema
• Dolby is part of a group of organizations involved in the development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), part of MPEG specifications, and considered the successor to MP3
• Dolby Digital Plus (DD-Plus) and TrueHD are supported in HD DVD, as mandatory codecs, and in Blu-ray Disc, as optional codecs

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• 10/24/2014 @ 10:26AM
• Nick Messitte    Contributo
• the film features a panoply of scenes in which Hackman futzes around with his tapes: he cranks knobs to filter out unnecessary noise; he strains to make the conversation intelligible
• Hackman frequently uses hefty pieces of analogue equipment to meet this task
• Hackman’s job would be undeniably easier now, in 2014, than it was in 1974
• within the pro-audio industry, there has been a explosion of software innovation—a torrential downpour of audio plugins has brought about a sea change in the way professionals handle raw, unproduced audio before it ever hits the marketplace
• many facets of the audio industry have been affected by this explosion, from drum production to vocal tuning
• no nuts and bolts technology is more important these days than audio restoration software
• has also shaped the modern sound, workflow, and budgeting practices of film and television
• this technology has become increasingly more necessary in all commercial media–or at any rate, any such media with a soundtrack
• In the music business, the necessity of this software can be attributed to the home recording revolution, which has brought a whole host of changes to the industry—some positive (free recording time for any artist almost anywhere, so long as they have invested in their own rig), others negative (studios shutting down across the country)
• Raw audio—the stuff an engineer receives months before you hear the finished product—can often be quite dirty
• the sound of vocals and nothing else
• a “clean” audio track
• i

  n a home recording studio, a vocal track can often showcase other, undesirable sounds—the noise of an air-conditioning unit, for instance, or the electrical hum of a power supply, or street noise (cars, sirens, etc), or indeed, people talking in other rooms.
• In the halcyon days of recording, bands and artists alike would seek a proper studio setting in order to circumvent the problems of dirty audio
• also sports methods for regulating temperature; consumer-grade regulation units
• in these days of home recording—these days of shri

  nking budgets and declining payouts—one inevitably soldiers straight into land-mines of dirty audio
• your typical bedroom boasts a window, and windows are portals to extraneous noise
• Your typical bedroom probably hasn’t received the full complement of acoustic treatment
• a vocal sung in such a room will carry a specific ambiance, a bit of echo or reverberation which essentially makes up the sonic signature of your room
• Such sonic signatures often present difficulties when the usual techniques of mixing—equalization, compression, distortion, or spatial effects (reverb, delay)—are applied
• even the best audio engineers can find themselves in impossible situations
• This is where digital solutions come into play.
• all the dirty audio recorded in this new home-recording paradigm, you’d never hear it on the pop charts
• digital audio restoration plays a part of that
• Morrone and his peers have taken full advantage of this software boom in order to handle the twin problems of “tighter schedules and tighter budgets
• the proliferation of relatively cheap audio restoration software has had a democratizing effect on the sound of movies from the bottom up; cheaply made independent features looking for distribution deals on the film festival circuit now tend to sound just as good as big studio pictures—and for a fraction of the price
• While clean audio in the music industry has historically been obtained in perfectly calibrated studios, the same cannot be said for film
• the integrity of dialogue is paramount
• Capturing good location sound has always been fraught with peril, and audio captured on a soundstage often isn’t much better—such is the nature of the business
• the analogue way of doing things is full of confusing, jarring nomenclature
• Before digital, individual hardware pieces existed to whip such sound into shape, but as Tom Marks (a member of CAS and a Re-Recording Mixer for Warner Brothers) said, “Everything was a one trick pony
• Such equipment was expensive to own, and complicating the matter further, film/television audio could often sport problems beyond the boundaries of a typical hardware piece
• the recent digital revolution—of which Avid’s Pro Tools is a huge part—started to change standard operating procedures over the years; as Pro Tools rigs gained steam in film and television, software companies sought to streamline the process for post-production mixers and other markets in need of audio restoration (home studio recordings, for example)

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• for music
• counterbalance the noisy side effects of the home recording studio revolution
• For film and TV
• become a necessity in order to offset budget crunches and shorter production/post-production schedules
• which company is currently leading the field in audio restoration
• which company is held in the highest esteem across the film, television, and music industries
• which company holds the most amount of influence when it comes to making all consumable media sound the best that it can
• iZotope RX,
• you could take care of everything yourself, essentially in real time
• iZotope hired someone with a PHD in neuroscience in order to field these maters
• such care to detail has yielded successful results
• most lauded aspect of iZotope’s software continues to be its powerful spectrogram, which allows you to see every little bit of sonic detail in an extremely intuitive way.
• haven’t completely eliminated the horizontal strip of unwanted noise, for that would sound completely unnatural
• curtailed the noise—made it manageable, allowing the dialogue to stand out better

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