Dolby Digital Print ID and Automation?

[Sam Chavez]

Another issue that affected CDS is it had to play at exactly 24 frames/sec. This was a problem with the Ziegfeld's projectors originally. Dolby built some flex since European projectors tend to run at 25fps. It could play up to 11% fast and 7% slow if I recall.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I worked at USL with the late Roger Hibbard who had been an engineer with CDS. One of the many problems he commented on was a very shallow depth of field on the imaging lens. The system could not deal with less than perfect focus off the film. Little chads from splicing tape would stick to the sound drum and lift the film off the drum. That was all it took to crash the system.

CDS sounded spectacular, better than anything else off 35mm film before, but it was doomed from the start by a number of showstopping issues with no graceful fallback.

I can remember the Demo they did at the Dome theater out in Vegas, I also remember someone saying that Dan Taylor took them to the booth and that the demo came off a hard drive because the film reader was not yet completed.

[Sam Chavez]

[QUOTE] I can remember the Demo they did at the Dome theater out in Vegas, I also remember someone saying that Dan Taylor took them to the booth and that the demo came off a hard drive because the film reader was not yet completed. [QUOTE]

Mark is confusing SDDS for CDS. That year, we were introducing SR.D at the Gold Coast. Showest tried to block Dolby from holding an "unauthorized" event by attempting to deny our buses access to load at Bally's. They had intended to use Gold Coast for SDDS demos until Gold Coast management threw them out, leaving them with no close-by cinema.

Ultimately, we reached a settlement with Showest by giving SDDS a 45 minute head start for their demo across town at a Century location. Of course at our own demo, our ORC based slide projector caught fire during Ioan Allen's intro, setting off the casino fire alarm; but that's a story for another day.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Sam, you are correct on that one...

[Kyle Mikolajczyk]

Are there any CDS readers out there still? Has anyone even ran a print since the 90s?

[Joe Redifer]

The manual called for 10 GAUGE WIRE which was ignored by the installer.

Jesus! How bright was that lamp supposed to be? I remember the Cat 699 lamp got pretty hot in and of itself.

Are there any CDS readers out there still?

Yes some still exist.

Has anyone even ran a print since the 90s?

Successfully? Likely not. I imagine the capacitors have since leaked. These were manufactured in a time when many/most electronics had very bad quality capacitors and would be prone to leaking after a decade or two. If not removed/replaced immediately the leakage will eat through the traces of the motherboard(s). The unit might still power on and maybe even light up the front display, but actually decoding and playing audio is an entirely different story.

[Michael Coate]

IIRC, the co-existence of CDS and SR•D was limited to the 1991 holiday season. One movie, Final Approach was released in 35mm CDS during that period. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the first movie to get an unadvertised test run of Dolby Digital. Newsies would be another one early in 1992.

CDS logos appeared in some of the pre-release advertising for the movie For The Boys, but I'm pretty sure that movie had no CDS prints and was released in 70mm Dolby mag and 35mm Dolby optical instead. Apparently there were plans for Steven Spielberg's Peter Pan film Hook to be released with CDS prints, but testing went badly and those plans were scrapped. It's no wonder Spielberg would later invest in DTS' dual system approach.

Universal Soldier reportedly had a one-time screening in 35mm CDS at the Kinepolis in Belgium in March 1992. That very much seems like an "asterisk" release. I wonder if the CDS track played successfully. By the time Dolby Digital made its official debut with Batman Returns the CDS format was dead.

There was an attempt to release “Universal Soldier” in CDS in the United States (so Joe is correct about there being a period of CDS and Dolby Digital co-existence during 1992). UA Riverview in Philadelphia was one of the venues slated to play it in CDS until it was discovered they no longer had their CDS gear. (The Philly newspaper advertising was soon thereafter revised to reflect the presentation of the quickly-deployed Dolby replacement print.)

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[Lyle Romer]

The SR•D track had a total of 550 kilobits per second of data. Only 320kb/s of that was the actual audio track, the rest of the data was for error correction. How did they decide on that 320kb/s data rate? Did they try printing and testing DD audio tracks at higher data rates? The standard AC-3 codec at that time had a max bit rate of 640kb/s. Or did they just err on the side of caution after seeing dumpster fire incidents with CDS?

IIRC, they determined the minimum spot size that could be reliably printed by the normal high speed printing workflow process and then went from there. They had already determined that between the perfs was the least likely area to be damaged that was outside of the normal picture and soundtrack area. One of these days I'll have to count how many dots they determined they didn't need by making a Dolby logo in the middle of each block. AFAIK that was not used for alignment or anything. The alignment blocks were in the corners.

It's amazing with DSP technology from 1990 that AC-3 was able to sound as good as it did at such a low bitrate. The engineers that came up with that algorithm deserve some major props.

[Sam Chavez]

The very center of the perf was the most scuffed and abraded area of the perf. So it was decided to to place the logo there and save the area for some other use later. I recall there were some tests done with peoples faces printed in that area as tests to see if it printed correctly with the eyes in the right place etc. The test film ended up at CDS due to an error at the lab and Barbara Stokes there called us and let us know. It was a more polite time than now.

[Alan Lyman]

re. the Dolby logo in the middle,I have also suspected it to be a way to avoid others to do the same,and play through the SRD units,because it would be illigal to print a Dolby logo,without permission,and maybe the Dolby processors will not play SRD if it dpesnt see the logo.at least some times.Just my idea.

[Sam Chavez]

Nope, it was just Dolby engineering being cute.

[Steve Guttag]

re. the Dolby logo in the middle,I have also suspected it to be a way to avoid others to do the same,and play through the SRD units,because it would be illigal to print a Dolby logo,without permission,and maybe the Dolby processors will not play SRD if it dpesnt see the logo.at least some times.Just my idea.

Since the Double-D is a trademark...there is no way that the Dolby lawyers would allow it to be "functional." Trademarks are not allowed to be functional. So, if the double-d in the middle were to be "required" for the system to operate, it would probably skate over the line of functionality.

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

[...]Trademarks are not allowed to be functional.[...]

I suppose that the intention there is to secure that if something is functional, one can't claim the (intellectual) property of its likeness (and functional characteristics deriving) by making a trademark out of it. (?)
But that wouldn't always apply backwards.
Would it be legally questionable for Dolby to use double-D as the shape of supporting elements (like feet) of a chair, a table, or a branded series of stands for speakers? Or is it that -as long as one can cut them out and replace them- it's O.K. to have them there?

That realm of law stands like a fairy tale's dark forest.

[Steve Guttag]

Trademarks can be ON function devices...that is done all of the time. The mark itself cannot be functional. In your chair example, let's presume a double caster for each leg with a plastic housing that held the two casters and then someone put the double-d on the housing. The double-d still isn't funcional, the wheels are...the ds are just just ink on plastic that if rubbed/filed/ground off wouldn't change anything. The shape of the plastic also wouldn't do it. Conversely, if the double-d pattern were required for that soundtrack to playback...THEN you have a functional mark as it is actively doing something.