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Author Topic: What are the sound formats on 16mm film? Michael Brown Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1522 From: Bradford, England Registered: May 2001 posted 11-30-2002 06:16 PM                     Probably a really basic question that might cause you to want to beat with a dead mouse but anyway. We have a couple of 16mm projectors in storage and it might be an idea to dig on of them up to see if we can get any cheap films to run. Being a student venue it would be nice to see if there is anything out there on the 16mm format that it might be good to hire for an occasional performance. Anyway we currently run 35mm with a Dolby cp-55. We run a mixer into the non-sync with runs a cd player, radio, microphones etc. Would a 16mm projector run through the 2nd projector input of the Dolby unit or would I be better putting it through the non-sync via a channel on the mixer? I'm assuming that 16mm doesn?t carry a Dolby soundtrack?  |  IP: Logged Ian Price Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1714 From: Denver, CO Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-30-2002 06:23 PM                     Standard 16mm has a veriable area mono shoundtrack. You can usually wire it in to the second projector input of your Dolby unit. Or wire it in to a preamp and then in to your Non-sync input. Be careless, some 16mm projectors have a line level output, some have a mic-level output and some just bare solar cell wires. Although I have never seen it, there are rumors that 16mm can have a DTS timecode and thus, 6-track digital sound.  |  IP: Logged Michael Schaffer "Where is the Boardwalk Hotel?" Posts: 4143 From: Boston, MA Registered: Apr 2002 posted 11-30-2002 06:28 PM                        16mm knows magentic and optical soundtracks. As far as I know, there is no stereo format, but I am not 100%sure. I worked with 16mm on a Kinoton FP38-E which has a combined optical and magnetic reader and a digital delay which can be configured to different film-speeds and picture/sound offsets. The sound unit provides a mono line level output. In the theater where we played 16mm during the Berlin Film Festival, we connected the output to a patchbay and patched it to the CP500 Non-Sync 2 input for which we had configured a customised format based on Non-Sync settings (i.e., without noise reduction, if I remember correctly) in mono. Of course it may be possible that there are 16mm tracks which are Dolby NR encoded, since that can be used with all analogue sound formats.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 11-30-2002 06:42 PM                        quote: Standard 16mm has a veriable area mono shoundtrack ...and density, too. I've shown/handled/archived loads of 16mm elements with density tracks going into the '70s. In most case, they've simply been photographically reduction printed from 35mm track negs. Not that this makes much of a practical difference with most 16mm setups, but if you're passing the output of a typical 16mm portable projector (e.g. Eiki or Hell & Bowell) through a sound mixing desk, you can boost the HF and back off the bass to help VD tracks a little bit.  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-30-2002 09:32 PM                        I've seen a 16mm DTS print; the optical track carries the timecode and has very distinctive "pulse-like" wave forms. Although I've seen a print, I haven't seen the full setup, but I assume it uses a normal DTS player. [TIP TO FILMMAKERS: if you are submitting your film to a festival, DO NOT send prints with weird picture or sound formats unless you KNOW FOR SURE that the venue can play them!]  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-01-2002 02:13 AM                     16mm 2-track has also happened. In the form of stereo and bi-lingual. Witness the ELMO LX-2200....every single one of them has a stereo cell. They allow you to play either/or/both cells. Steve  |  IP: Logged John Hawkinson Film God Posts: 2273 From: Cambridge, MA, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 12-01-2002 02:27 AM                     In DTS 16, you just plug the optical preamp output of your 16mm projector into the timecode input of your DTS processor (6D or whatever). DTS can provide a special impedance matching board, but you don't really need it, just hack the levels so they're compatible... Disclaimer: the above is not from personal experience, just from what I picked up along the way. I admit I've thought about hooking up our 16mm projector to our DTS 6D, but given the rarity of DTS 16mm prints, I figure we'll "bridge that gap when we come to it." --jhawk  |  IP: Logged Lionel Fouillen Expert Film Handler Posts: 230 From: Belgium Registered: Nov 2002 posted 12-01-2002 04:07 AM                     Michael Brown said: quote: Being a student venue it would be nice to see if there is anything out there on the 16mm format that it might be good to hire for an occasional performance. Not a bad idea (provided that distributors make prints available). I remember the first time I saw DePalma's BODY DOUBLE was in 16mm at a second run cinema club. The picture quality was excellent.  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 12-01-2002 11:33 AM                        When Kodak's Ron Uhlig first presented the concept of stereo tracks with noise reduction at the SMPTE Technical Conference in the early 1970's, the demonstration was done with 16mm optical sound, just to show how effective noise reduction could allow the use of a narrower track. Ron suggested both stereo tracks and dual-language tracks. His two papers were published in the April 1973 and September 1974 SMPTE Journal. Several years later, Dolby commercialized Dolby Stereo.  |  IP: Logged Jeff Taylor Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 601 From: Chatham, NJ/East Hampton, NY Registered: Apr 2000 posted 12-01-2002 12:20 PM                     Despite the existence of DTS and mag/optical analog stereo, the overwhelming preponderance of 16mm prints will be standard optical mono. The biggest improvement in a theatrical venue, if you want to take the trouble, is the use of a dbx subharmonic synthesizer, together with appropriate eq, and then a bi-amp'd stage / subwoofer configuration. Not as simple as straight into the non-sync, and probably not worth it for a single show, but it does make one heck of a difference.  |  IP: Logged Ken Layton Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1452 From: Olympia, Wash. USA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 12-01-2002 12:33 PM                     And don't forget that some 16mm prints had Mauer soundtracks!  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-01-2002 12:51 PM                        For what it's worth, there's also an airline format that usually has a narrower-than-normal English-language optical track and foreign-language mag track. I've never seen one of these prints, but apparently the sound quality on both tracks was pretty lousy. 16mm optical tracks _can_ sound OK, but usually don't because the projector alignment is off or some other part of the reproduction system is sub-optimal. The low end is fine, but the high end always seems to be lacking.  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 12-01-2002 01:49 PM                        Ken said: quote: And don't forget that some 16mm prints had Mauer soundtracks! OK, I'll bite. A quick Google search yielded several German-language sites that, despite my Bavarian-sounding name, I cannot read. Scott's FAQ makes no mention of these. So, what are Mauer soundtracks?  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-01-2002 02:31 PM                        We use 16mm in two venues, both Eastman 25B projectors. This projector has a slit lens assembly that can focus for the two kinds of emulsion orientations that are found on 16mm prints -- one with the emulsion toward the lamphouse (the only orientation used for 35mm) and the other with the emulsion toward the lens. The two possible orientations presents a problem for projectors that don't allow for refocusing the slit lens. Most portable 16mm projectors have their slit lenses prefocused by the factory inbetween these two positions. This is why most folks think 16mm sound has lousy high end response. While the best high-end response for a 16mm optical track tops out at about 9kHz, that isn't exactly terrible. But when you lop off another 3k because of a slit that is not focused precisely on the soundtrack emulsion, then you are really down in the dumps as far as decent sound is concerned. The good news is that most commercially released 16mm prints from the studios are not contact printed, so their soundtrack orientation will always be the same or at least 90 percent of the time. If you are serious about the frequency response of your 16mm projection, you can have the lens assembly refocused at the position of most studio prints, which is (I THINK) the emulsion toward the lamphouse (but I can check that for you) -- perhaps John P knows the SMPTE standard for 16mm emulsion orientation. In any event, the point is, refocusing the slit lens so that it is precisely on the emulsion, getting the best soundtrack accuracy, will make a BIG difference in the fidelity of a 16mm track. The downside is, if you run festivals, you will get quite a number of contact prints -- those soundtracks will then be out-of-focus and they will really sound bad. Bottom line is, decide what kind of prints you will mostly likely play and then tweek the equipment to get extract the best out of those prints. If you have two projectors, you can have them tweaked for each orientation -- use the correct one for that type of print. Modern 16mm prints can be very impressive in both picture and sound. With screens of moderate size (many, many multiplexes have screens well within the optimum optical capability of 16mm) and modern Eastman print emulsions and a good xenon lightsource, the average movie-goer would be hard-pressed to tell if a print is 16mm or 35mm. I recently ran MICROCOSMOS. The print was razor sharp, 1.66 matted; and I was literally in awe of the image quality. Naturally, the sound was only mono, but as mentioned, pumping it thru a dbx bass enhancement processor makes a world of difference. I also would opt for putting the sound through a mixing console and Non-Sync input rather than rigging it up to the second projector input. The mixer will give you more flexibility in tweaking the sound. You would be surprised how much a good eq section will allow you to enhance a 16mm mono track and give it a little extra punch. As for stereo, well, I know for a fact that the Army used to get special prints with Dolby stereo tracks going directly into CP50s at the Fort Hammilton base here in Brooklyn, or so a licensed projectionist who I trust told me. Evidently these prints were only for the Armed Forces. I had some discussions with Ray Swank and the people at Films Inc. at the time about the possibility of their getting together to see if the same prints couldn't be made available for their non-theatrical releases. No go. But other than the studios' obstenancy, there really is no reason why 16mm couldn't have Dolby stereo tracks, especially given today's finer grain emulsions. There was also John Mosely's Colortrak process that used the color emulsions to get multi-track stereo recordings. With that process, since each track used the full width of the standard mono track, suposedly there was no decrease in signal-to-noise ratio as is the case with splitting the track into two separate L/R tracks for Dolby stereo. But that technology went nowhere, as has DTS so far. From what I've heard, DTS really was applied to 16mm, not as a way for non-theatrical prints to play 6 channel digital sound, but really as a alternate way for filmmakers on limited budgets to get decent sound on their projects. Unfortunately with the continual move away from 16mm as a non-theatrical format in favor of DVD and video projection (gag me with a spoon), it is unlikely that studios which have now openely proclaimed that they are cutting BACK on the number of releases for which they will supply 16mm release prints, it is unlikely that there will ever be any serious move to upgrade 16mm's standard mono track even though it is quite easily done with DTS code or even Dolby bilateral. As pointed out, there are even existing projectors that can play bilateral stereo tracks without any conversion at all -- sadly, they probably will never play a real Dolby stereo print. Frank  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 12-02-2002 03:12 AM                        Getting back to one of Michael's original points, 'is there anything out there?' (on 16mm), the answer is, not much. There used to be three main non-theatrical distributors of 16mm (and several much smaller outfits): Filmbank (which released mainstream Hollywood product on 16), Glenbuck (which specialised in foreign/arthouse stuff) and the British Film Institute (rep/archival rereleases). Glenbuck was taken over by the BFI in 92 or 93 if memory serves me correctly. I really don't know if Filmbank still exists, and if it does whether they still rent 16mm. The last time I had anything to do with them would have been in 94 and 95 running a student film society, when we would occasionally get one of their prints. But even at that stage we were showing 99% 35mm. The BFI decided to stop striking new 16mm prints a couple of years later, though AFAIK they still hire the ones they've got (and for which they still have distribution rights). Needless to say, the quality of most of them is pretty dreadful by now. The last one I showed was a reduction print of their 35mm Sunrise restoration which would have been in 98 or 99, and it was barely watchable. We only showed it because the 35mm print had already been booked somewhere else.  |  IP: Logged

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