What exactly is it that Twentieth Century Fox is afraid of with their tag? Lately every film that comes in has the audio recorded so soft that it's embarrassing, then on comes the feature and the level is where it should be.

I made up a program in the computer to get around it on Moulin Rouge because I love the film and the Fox tag needed some grunt which was (unfortunately) not provided...so when the opening began the volume went up to 8.6...then 44 seconds later (at the end of the tag) it dropped to 7.0.

I fixed it that time, but I am not going to do it for everything. Dr. Dolittle is the latest softy...you go from the dts tag or the SRD tag to the fox tag and you'd swear you had somehow reverted back to an old badly aligned CP50 the fox audio is so quiet. Then along comes the feature proper and voila!...it's all OK again.

WHY?

Are they embarrassed by the tag?

Do the people at Fox think that if they turn down the tag...the operator will turn it up and thus the feature will be louder? Who knows?

I do know this...I'm tired of it. Either someone at Fox realizes their error and rectifies the situation with their release print volumes or she's going to be left in the trunks with the leaders.

It's a fantastic fanfare...be proud of it and give it some grunt!

That is all.

Sexy Beast has the fanfare 1 second out of sync. If you're running Sexy Beast in SRD the fanfare starts before the first searchlight! I saw this movie on the Fourth of July (UA Union Square/NYC) and thought the film had been misthreaded. Luckily everything was in sync after the logo.

Agreed, The Fox fanfare is the best intro ever.
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There are several nice graphical ones, but none has the
INTRODUCTION effect of the 20th Century Fox fanfare

However as we dicussed ages ago that Fox seems to modify
the how they use the tag. Eg Abyss, Aliens, Alien etc,
I understand that mainly applies to Jame's movies, but there
are times where there it is missing the first few drum rolls,
and other times were there is no sound at all.

Agreed also about the sound level of the tag lately.
I went out and listened, you right the tag is very low level
compared to the rest of the level in Dr.Dolittle 2.

That said, I simply love the FULL SCOPE FANFARE, LOUD !!!

In fact...it's best sounding on those amps that go up to 'eleven'.

Universal knows how to pull out one of its old logos, like the plane flying around the globe.

And what's up with MGM? Why does their lion always look so grainy?

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I suspect the original color negative of the current roaring lion was shot decades ago, when film stocks were much slower and grainier. It's also likely the MGM Lion is spliced in as a duplicate negative, since there is probably only one "take" of the original negative. The original B&W roaring "Leo the Lion" MGM trademark dates back to 1927.

Some links to lion stories:
http://www.animalfair.com/petpourri/archive_leolion.html
http://www.cinerhama.com/jewish/goldwyn.html
http://www.mgm.com/corporate/
http://www.seeing-stars.com/Studios/MGMplaza.shtml
http://www.seeing-stars.com/Studios/MGM.shtml

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

By the way, speaking of studio logos, my buddies and I always thought that Universal Stiudios' opening logo from circa 1995 was much better than the current one (I think it debuted with "The Lost World"). Anyone agree?

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quote:

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The original B&W roaring "Leo the Lion" MGM trademark dates back to 1927.

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And that's just the version where you can *hear* him roaring.
There was an earlier, silent-era Leo, too.

There's a famous publicity shot of the MGM folks re-shooting the intro & recording sound for the talkies. The photo is staged, but it's still famous.

I think the publicity photo you are referring to is in one of the links that I listed:
http://www.animalfair.com/petpourri/archive_leolion.html

Before, Leo just flapped his jaws & didn't even get a subtitle
[roar]

Just so we've veered completely off-topic, that site is not
completely up-to-date on Leo's final dispostion:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/leo.html

For the 80th anaversary of the big boat going to the bottom.

On test runs the sound would drop out for a few minutes
just after the the ship hits the ice berg.
So we set up to have a DVD player and monitor running in in bio
in tandam with the movie so we could hit A/V (on the Panastereo thingo) in case the sound dropped out.
We ordered new disks (Internation 'Titanic') and they worked fine.
But kept the DVD for backup.

The thing that amazed me was how hard it was to keep the DVD in sync
with the film, we had to pause it all the time because it kept
getting well ahead of the movie on the screen.

Clearly in Film we run at 24 FPS, Video/DVD (pal) run at 25 FPS
(US 60Hz use some kind of frame skipping) so I know thats the problem

But how do you (they) state the running time of a movie.
I have not timed it but I'd say the the video/dvd would be an easy
20 minutes shorter than the film version.

Bill.

These days we dont get to run too many 70mm prints.

I've got to tell you it was tempting to steal the DTS
and 20th Fox off the 70mm Titanic, but we have respect for the print.

I never got out there to hear what the DTS and 20th Fox logo's
sounded like as the speedco platter needed me there to run back
to it, to get it up to speed (the payout) is heavy!