The Dolby Dilemna

I'm probably the only one that cares about this, but I guess that's the point of having a blog. It's all me, all the time.

Our story begins in the fabled era of the 1970s when I started making films at the age of 11. I began by shooting regular 8mm film with my parent's Kodak Brownie, then moved up to Super-8 in the days when you could get a little Super-8 viewer and edit your film by physically hacking it apart and splicing it back together with scotch tape.

Later in the 1980's I made my first 'proper' 16mm film. I shot it on negative stock, spliced the workprint with tape, got a neg cut, and made prints with optical sound. It was an amazing feeling to hold this film print in my hands that was just like the scores of 16mm prints I had seen over the years.

The only problem with 16mm was that I found it almost instantly limiting. I never liked the squarish aspect ratio (1.33:1), and no matter what you did it never looked like a 'real' movie because they were always shot on 35mm film. The old 16mm optical sound track was also legendarily poor, but there was a certain warmth and consistency that you learned to enjoy.

16mm film strips with optical sound track (those squiggly lines on the left side)

It took me until the 21st century, but I finally made the move to 35mm film. I love the widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio that I've been shooting with, and I also love the huge bump-up in sound quality. An optical sound track in 35mm sounds way better than 16mm because the film is much larger and moves through the projector more than twice as fast, allowing for much more detail and fidelity in that little squiggly line.

The problem with optical sound lies in the 'progress' of technology. The great thing about 35mm film is that the standards and systems for it have been in place for over a hundred years with very few changes. This is a mature technology that is a universal standard all over the planet. I love that you can ship a 35mm print to any cinema in the world and they can play it.

Even though I'm working in 35mm I have kept most of the production techniques I established back in my 16mm days. I'm a hands-on filmmaker and I like to keep it simple and hand-crafted. I also like to keep it cheap, because if I want to keep working in film I have to watch every penny and develop a production model that is sustainable.

When I made my first 35mm film there was no question for me about the optical sound track. Lots of people were doing Dolby SR and Dolby Digital or DTS, but I knew that a normal 35mm optical track sounded a thousand time better than 16mm optical, so that was all I needed. Simple, cheap, and really good quality. I also liked the idea of it from an archival standpoint, since the standard for optical tracks goes back to 1927.

After making a couple of 35mm films without any Dolby encoding, I have found that the results are simply too unpredictable. As new sound standards have evolved, every cinema on earth has a different kind of 'decoding box' to handle all the possible kinds of encoding on optical tracks. In some theatres my 'normal' optical track sounds fantastic, in others it sounds terrible. It just seems to depend on what 'box' they have, and whether the projectionist understands the different settings and how to adjust them. The trend in most 35mm projection booths is to entirely automated systems. This is great when it works, but when it doesn't the projectionist usually has no idea how to change the settings.

35mm film print with optical sound track

Extreme close up revealing different 35mm optical/digital sound systems. Dolby managed to stuff their digital system in between the sprocket holes, and also managed to stuff their logo in there, which I have to admit is kind of cool. I believe the DTS time code syncs the film up to an external sound source, like a CD player. The normal optical track looks like stereo, but is also somehow encoded with Dolby magic to produce surround sound effects that are not as precise as Dolby Digital.

So with my new film I decided to bite the bullet, go Dolby and pay a license fee for something that used to be a free, universal standard. I do like the quality of Dolby Digital, and I do get 5.1 surround sound out of it, but I wish I didn't have to pay a license fee to get sound on a small, hand-crafted film. The other issue is that you have to mix in an 'authorised Dolby mixing facility' or they won't even give you a Dolby Digital license. The 5.1 mix sounds great and if money were no object I would always choose to mix with the pros in a high-end mixing studio, (big thanks to Talking Dog Studios in Regina who really came through for me) but I'm sad that the options for independent filmmakers are shrinking.

The great iconoclast Woody Allen still mixes and releases every one of his films in mono sound. To paraphrase what I've read about this on the web, he's a purest who just doesn't like the distraction of sound coming from anywhere but the screen in front of you. The film is the thing! I like surround sound, but he's certainly got a point. Every time there's some new advance in filmmaking technology I always go back to the history of cinema and think about all the great films that were made with the simplest analogue technology and standards dating back a hundred years. Filmmaking at its best is simply one shot after another, and everything else is just window dressing.

Ironically, Woody Allen's sound tracks are currently mastered in Dolby Digital. That's Dolby Digital MONO, of all things. To go through all of that digital encoding and licensing fees to end up with one mono sound track that probably sounds only marginally better than good old mono optical seems a little odd to me, but I suspect that's really the only practical solution in the age of The Dolby Dilemna.

I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about this, or if anyone knows of any other optical sound options for independent filmmakers. I think one of the problems is that labs who do optical tracks without Dolby encoding still use something like Dolby SR encoding, which plays well on some systems but not others. These modern projection systems will play back vintage optical tracks from the 1950's just fine, I'm just not sure where one goes to get a vintage 1950's optical track made.