Audio Restoration for 'The Godfather Trilogy'

Mark Berger, Francis Coppola, and Walter Murch mixing Godfather II (1974).

POP Sound in Santa Monica, Calif. recently completed audio restoration work and 5.1 surround sound mixing for Paramount Home Entertainment’s release of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration DVD Collection on DVD and Blu-ray.

POP Sound spent nearly eight months on the project, working in concert with Walter Murch, the original re-recording mixer on The Godfather, Parts II & III. For the first two films, POP Sound worked from the films’ original mono stems, as well as the original multitrack recordings of their musical scores. POP Sound had access to the original stereo elements for The Godfather, Part III. The re-recording mixer on the project for POP Sound was the late Ted Hall. Much of Hall's attention was devoted to eliminating artifacts that had affected the soundtrack over the years and addressing audio issues that were impossible to address when the films were made.

“We had a lot of cleanup to do to make these films sound fluid in transitions—the original mono tracks were very rough, with hard transitions,” recalls POP Sound's Director of Home Theater, Moksha Bruno. “There was a massive amount of de-humming, de-clicking, as well as time alignment issues we had to deal with. The original laser disc mix had a constant hum that wasn’t apparent at the time, but with the better home theater systems of today you begin to hear things of that nature."

[read the full article - via mixonline.com]