Early stereo movies-directional dialogue

A little update. Just watched Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor and listened to it through headphones (it was late at night). The DVD has a designation of 5.1, and it sounds great. The music, by Les Brown and his band of Renown, is in widely separated and nice sounding stereo, and there's a few directional sound effects, such as a door closing, but not in the Perspecta style, as you can hear activity in the other channel at the same time.

 

I'll have to check, but IIRC 'A Star Is Born' has some directional dialogue. Of course this film from 1954 does have some real stereo for the musical numbers.

 

After I bought The Day The Earth Stood Still on VHS and started watching it, I was surprised to realize it was in stereo! Haven't watched it in a couple years but do remember the scene where I first heard this was when the Army tanks were being mobilized and the sound moved from one side of the screen to the other.

 

Day the Earth Stood Still was one of the first titles remixed to stereo by Chace for 20th Century-Fox. I'm fairly certain in this case they had a 3-track mono mix to work with, plus some stereo music masters. The Bernard Herrmann music-only tracks were later released on CD as a limited edition with a boxed laserdisc set, autographed by director Robert Wise.

There's a great outtake on the CD where Herrmann berates some of the orchestra for screwing up a part. Whew!

 

Just to update this 7-year-old thread: I have behind-the-scenes photographs of the sound crews on The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire where they have a 3-microphone boom set up for left, center, and right dialogue at the same time on the set. I know it's crazy -- it looks like a pitchfork pointing down at the actors -- but they literally used this for capturing 3 tracks during production. I'll ask Matt Lutthans if he has any of those pictures.

I think wiser minds prevailed after a few years and the Fox engineers eventually realized that wide, moving dialogue did not work well for most films, and they began recording dialogue only in mono on the set. It's a creative decision as to whether this dialogue should move to follow the movements of the actors, but my impression is that it's kind of distracting and gimmicky a lot of the time. And yet, there are modern movies where they do this all the time. I saw a Dreamworks cartoon some months back where they did it quite a bit, following different characters in different directions.

 

That might be it! Absolutely bizarre: a triangular microphone arrangement where three mics record one person talking from different angles. What were they thinking?

I believe the reality is that from the invention of Cinerama throughout the 1950s, they went through CinemaScope, 3D, VistaVision, stereophonic (actually 4-track) sound, and all kinds of weird experiments to desperately try to pull people away from TV. I think it took the engineers some time to slowly figure out what worked and what did not work, and clearly multiple mics on a boom was not a good idea.

What is true today is that there are many sets where every actor is on an isolated (concealed) wireless lavaliere mic, and they sometimes do use multiple booms to pick up different people on different sides of the set. Multitrack recorders keep everything separated just to assist the sound editors and mixers in keeping all the actors' levels consistent... plus, if one actor is too bassy, while another is overly crisp, they can EQ each of them separately without affecting the other. It's a very interesting sonic process.

 

I confess to being old enough to have seen the original roadshow of the Fly. Have no recollection of the sound mix, but do recall a booth outside the theater where you could "shake hands with the Fly." It was a toilet brush behind a curtain.

 

Digging through the world of DVD Dolby 5.1 Quadra Mag Perspecta Dimension 180 DDS and RSVP.

 

That's outdated information, but it is interesting to see the state of movie remixing in the late 90's.

 

From Matt's photo's - that looks like a Decca Tree configuration.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decca_tree

For those that don't know - general idea is you get three omni-directional mics in a triangle formation (like in the picture). When assigning the microphones to a mix - you would have the centre most mic panned centre, left in the left side and the right in the right.

This is from Sound On Sound:

https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/mar97/stereomictechs2.html

"Although combining the central microphone with the two edges is potentially risky in terms of comb-filtering effects, the hazards are far outweighed by the advantage of a very stable central portion of the sound stage, avoiding any possibility of a 'hole in the middle'."

The technique is mainly used for recording orchestras in stereo and is still used for orchestral recordings today. Since it was one if the earliest stereo microphone configurations, I'm not surprised they adopted this method for recording dialogue in the 50's for stereo films. It's an interesting idea to record an ambient recording of a live sound stage performance in stereo, rather than the traditional way of recording the dialogue in mono and creating the stereo mix in post (I'm not sure when the industry started using shotgun mics, but were the early mono mics used on set omni or directional?).

I suppose they would have seen it, at the time, as making the recording as stereo as it could be. Trying to show off the technology. But with that ambiance, you get less control or ability to manipulate the mix in post - so you always have an ambient (or w-i-d-e) sounding recording.

 

No, Matt above is correct: they've used directional microphones for motion picture dialogue for many years.

 

Early stereo movies-directional dialogue

I enjoyed reading this now closed thread [MODERATOR COMMENT: Thread reopened, merged with this one] about 1950s films, because I have a lot of these DVDs (and some on Blu-ray) from the late 90s-2000s. I agree these soundtracks were a gimmick to lure people out from in front of their TVs, but I imagine they were most effective at the time with the huge CinemaScope screens, which could be 60+ feet wide in the larger theaters.
I grew up in the pre-surround sound era, and heard most films in mono until I was in my late teens. I remember the (resurgent) surround sound promotions of the late '70s-early-'80s vividly. My closer friends and I were big fans and sought out the area theaters that could play films in surround. I distinctly remember the opening of our first area theater that had THX certification, a new General Cinema mini multiplex around 1983 (I think they originally had 4 theaters, and later expanded).

In the home, I've found these directional stereo films work best with speakers behind a projection screen, because speakers next to a TV, even close, are distracting because the sound is outside of the picture frame, and this becomes obvious. Also, all three screen channels should be full range, and identical (same model), like cinema speakers. Even timbre matched smaller center speakers reveal their differences, from larger L & R speakers, with directional stereo tracks.
Anyway, I had some questions for the experts on a couple things: I've seen a couple films listed as originally 3-channel stereo, such as the 70mm blow up of Doctor Zhivago (1965), which was apparently presented via 5 screen channels (5.0); how would that have worked with the left extra and right extra channels?
Also, I've seen some mid '70s films listed as simply stereo; this would've been pre-Dolby Stereo; how would these tracks be presented in the theater, 2 channel, 3 channel? Did anyone here ever attend a "Quintophonic" showing of Tommy (1975)? Thanks.

 

I was at the premiere of Tommy in quintaphonic, in NYC.

 

When the film "Orchestral Wives" (1942) with the Glenn Miller band was released on DVD the band is in true stereo as they had multiple crews filming from different angles.

 

This was recorded in stereo on set?

 

Yes.

 

Kind of like the "accidental stereo" 1932 Duke Ellington recording.

1932 DUKE ELLINGTON STEREO: WAS IT UNHEARD-OF EXPERIMENT OR ACCIDENT?

 

Exactly. Really gives you a new perspective.

 

Sounds fantastic!

 

As was most of the music in "Sun Valley Serenade" from 1941. Here's the entire film....if you jump ahead to
around the 48:00 mark, you can hear the entire "Chattanooga Choo Choo" sequence in true stereo. Amazing. (Use headphones). (However, the dance portion is in mono).

Comments from youtube about the original recordings:
"Fox recorded these soundtracks on two strips of film in proper 2 track stereo, when the two strips were played it produced the gorgeous stereo we hear today, when the film was released the soundtracks were mixed down to mono, the theatres were not wired for stereo sound, WW2 postponed development for the duration and it was not until the early 50's that theatres played movies in multi-track stereo. The soundtracks heard here sat in the vaults for decades until rediscovered and married up to the film again this film and Orchestra Wives were released with the experimental wartime stereo soundtracks first on VHS of the highest quality I have both of them then on DVD."