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]

The Batman's 3-D Sonar System

It seems that, just like a real bat, the The Batman of The Dark Knight uses sound to visualize the world, and Hamilton Sterling is the man behind that sound. Sterling, who is listed in the credits as "Additional Sound Designer" but who also cut hours of sound FX for the film, was in the throes of editing when lead Sound Designer Richard King came into the studio and asked him for a temp sound to go with The Batman's sonar vision device before they sent it off to the picture department. Given fewer than two hours to come up with a unique sound for a crucial plot element, Sterling turned to a library of Kyma Sounds he had designed for his AI Opera (an ongoing composition project that he works on between film gigs). He found an appropriately swirly sonar-ific sound, cut it to the right length, added some additional processing in ProTools, and then he and King sent it off to the picture department. Everyone loved the sound and thus it survived to become the sound of The Batman's sonar vision in the final version of the film.

[via Kyma Tweaky]

[Real-World Counterparts - via wired.com]

[don't miss the post 'The Voice Amidst the Noise' - via aspectratio.wordpress.com]

The Pioneers Of Sampling [part 1]

Before digital sampling, sound manipulation was seen as a subversive and avante garde activity. Composers were ostracized for experimenting with found sound sources and a belief that music could exist outside the strict confines of the classical or popular domain.



[via sonicstate.com]