70mm Oppenheimer

[William Kucharski]

If the fader is at the proper 7.0 and your house has good speakers and you can’t understand it, it’s intentional.

Think North by Northwest and the scene at Midway airport when Roger and The Professor are walking to the plane; it starts it’s engine while the conversation continues and you can’t hear what they were saying.

I don’t think people complained at the time about the audio mix.

[Sam Chavez]

Most of the dialogue was inaudible. i.e. Unable to detect it behind all the other soundtrack elements that drowned it out. What was audible, sometimes barely so, was unintelligible. i.e. Unable to understand.

Whoever it was that mixed that soundtrack needs to learn the meaning of "vocal formant."

The team that mixed Chris Nolan's films is among the best and the equipment and facility are top notch. So the solution is not a simple "the mixers are deaf" sort of flip dismissal. The industry has been dealing with the issue of perceived and actual loudness since before there was stereo.

[Randy Stankey]

I was talking about the range of frequencies that characterize the average human voice. Compare that to the sound of a musical instrument like a piano. A piano has its own characteristic range of sound frequencies. A singer can perform to piano music because their characteristic frequency ranges are different enough that a listener can tell them apart and interpret them. That same singer performing in a windstorm might be completely unintelligible because the range of frequencies that characterize the sound of wind are basically white noise that blots out the sounds of almost everything else.

In the same way, the vocal formant of the dialogue must be discernible from the rest of the sound track's instrumental formant and sound effects formant so that the audience member's ear can hear and interpret them.

You'd probably never understand a soprano singing accompanied by a sousaphone. Pavarotti would sound weird if he was accompanied by a pan flute. The vocal formants don't match with the intruments' formants. Either the voice drowns out the instrument at the wrong times or the instrument blots out the voice because their characteristic frequency ranges overlap in the wrong places.

The famous composers wrote operas with this in mind, if not explicitly, intuitively. If they didn't, their music couldn't be heard. They had to write the music in a way that the voices of the performers could be heard. Opera singers spend their careers learning to sing within the frequency gaps in the orchestra's music so that they could be heard.

In the case of "Tenet," whoever gave the final approval on the soundtrack mix didn't pay attention to the vocal formant and the way it blended with the rest of the soundtrack.

It's not the loudness. It's loudness in the wrong places, at the wrong times. If the director wanted to make it seem edgy to have the audience straining to hear important dialogue, I think he's a butthead. If he was trying to be experimental, he picked the wrong movie. You shouldn't go 'round pissing off your audience like that.

I thought Tenet was a good movie if it wasn't for the shitty soundtrack. I would have given it "Two Thumbs Up" if not for that.

[Sam Chavez]

I'm sure Chris Nolan will try to do a better job the next time in order to earn Randy's two thumbs up.

Seriously though, the same team and the same post facility have made any number of films together and separately. So the answer is elsewhere and elusive.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

There are a lot of explanations of Interstellar on line via google and youtube. I can't say which is the best, but watching one and then seeing it again can help a lot.

[Jim Cassedy]

I've now gotten 300% confirmation that we're running OPPENHEIMER
in 70mm at my venue here in San Francisco.

I'd like to see the math on how that percentage was derived

> Easy! I got 100% confirmation from three different people!

[Leo Enticknap]

One of my service contract customers was recently asked if he had 35mm capability, with a view to playing Oppenheimer on film. He does - they kept a projector (Christie P35GPS) and platter in one screen after the conversion to digital. They occasionally thread it up and roll it with a couple of thousand feet of old trailers, to verify that the system still works, but it hasn't been used "in anger" since 2012. If this goes ahead, we'll likely get our 35mm expert in for a day to give it a once-over and re-do the A chain. It'll be great to see it running again.

[Brad Miller]

One of my service contract customers was recently asked if he had 35mm capability, with a view to playing Oppenheimer on film. He does - they kept a projector (Christie P35GPS) and platter in one screen after the conversion to digital. They occasionally thread it up and roll it with a couple of thousand feet of old trailers, to verify that the system still works, but it hasn't been used "in anger" since 2012. If this goes ahead, we'll likely get our 35mm expert in for a day to give it a once-over and re-do the A chain. It'll be great to see it running again.

The problem you will find is quite possibly that the digital audio readers are dead (or at least needs to be re-calibrated if it can still meet level). Most booths I've been into that kept a screen of 35mm never bothered to disconnect the DTS or SRD reader, and what I saw at every single one of them was the led was on and just burning it's life away.

[Jim Cassedy]

Does anyone know the actual running time yet? I've seen several numbers floating around.
( It makes a difference if we might have to bring in another projectionperson so I that have
some time to eat, sleep, & do laundry some time during late July / early Aug)

[Scotty Wright]

Does anyone know the actual running time yet? I've seen several numbers floating around.
( It makes a difference if we might have to bring in another projectionperson so I that have
some time to eat, sleep, & do laundry some time during late July / early Aug)

Nolan was quoted in an interview saying “It's slightly longer than the longest we've done (Interstellar). It's kissing three hours.”

[Allan Young]

I wonder if the IMAX prints will be produced directly from the negative again? It happened with Dunkirk which I believe had a similar number of prints made.

[Tony Magallanes]

I wonder if the IMAX prints will be produced directly from the negative again? It happened with Dunkirk which I believe had a similar number of prints made.

Yes, some of the IMAX prints are being produced from the camera negative.

[Scotty Wright]

Yes, some of the IMAX prints are being produced from the camera negative.

Does that mean finished with a DI like Tenet?

[Tony Magallanes]

No... everything was finished on film optically.... With Tenet there was a time constraint and had to use some DI, but "Oppenheimer" is film to film throughout.

[Sascha Roll]

Hi Tony,
thanks for the insights. We (Berlin venue) will screen a 35mm version of OPPENHEIMER alongside the 4K DCP.
How where the Black&White sequences realized in the final release prints? Optically printed onto color positive stock? Or a whole reel printed on B&W positive stock, like with DEATH PROOF / Planet Terror?

Also, I am REALLY hoping the 35mm prints will feature a DTS timecode, as the DTS mastering / discs are already present for the 5perf/70mm. I really don't understand why for example LICORICE PIZZA only featured SRD on 35mm. Is there a problem creating an optical sound negative with DTS in 35? Seems to work fine for 70, though.