Phew! Okay. Thanks to our forum member Stephen from the Great White North and his unbelievably astute memory for dates , I have been able to track down the American Cinematographer article from February 1991 concerning the restoration of the FANTASIA soundtrack.
Here are some excerpts from the article by David Heuring and George Turner:
On how the original tracks were recorded.
Quote:
| Eight push-pull RCA ultra-violet variable area optical recording channels were utilized with as many as 33 microphones. Close pickups of violins, cellos and basses, violas, brass, woodwinds and tympani were recorded on six separate channels. A mixture of these channels was recorded on the seventh channel, and a distant pickup of the entire orchestra was registered on the eighth channel. These channels were combined to produce three push-pull tracks. A special optical printer was developed to print the three tracks side by side along with a fourth track on sound track film. The fourth track, which was made after the final recordings of the three program tracks had been made, was an automatic control device consisting of a composite recording of three different oscillator frequency tones. Each control tone was rectified and provided a gain-controlling element for the amplifiers. |
On the speaker setup.
Quote:
| Three separate multi-speaker systems embodying a total of 36 loudspeaker units were placed on the stage at left, center and right. Each consisted of four large high frequency baffles fed by eight low frequency speakers and one large cellular high frequency horn fed by four high frequency speakers. The additional untis used at the Broadway Theatre consisted of two additional 50-watt power amps, each of which drives 22 small speakers mounted on the sides, back and ceiling. The installation was varied according to the needs of the various auditoriums. |
On re-mixer Terry Porter's restoration efforts.
Quote:
Source material was woefully deteriorated. The performances, conducted and overseen by Stokowski, were finished to nitrate optical playback beginning in 1938. Because of nitrate's inherent instability, a transfer was made in 1955 to magnetic tape. This 35 year-old transfer was Porter's source -- so far, so good.
There was a problem, however. After the Fantasound roadshow toured the country, much of the equipment had been dismantled and contributed to the war effort. By 1955, the only available Fantasound playback system was being stored at the RCA building in Burbank, which had yet to be equipped with the new 35mm magnetic recording equipment. Disney, however, was so equipped.
"It was someone's decision at the time to make the transfer from the RCA building to Disney over phone lines," says Porter, incredulous. "So the source I had to deal with came from a disintegrating nitrate optical that was in poor condition, was made with magnetic recorders -- a technology in its infancy -- and was transferred over phone lines! So we had a lot of problems with the three-track master. It's easy to see why in 1981 they said it was impossible to restore." |
Porter on the panning aspects of the sound.
Quote:
| "My partner (Mel Metcalfe) and I were tempted at times to do a little 1990's work to some crude forms of panning that they did," he admits, "but we stayed away from that. This is a piece of history, something that they did 50 years ago. Our goal was to present it in 1990 like an audience would have heard it in 1940. And we stuck by our guns on that." |
It seems that Porter did sweeten things just a bit.
Quote:
"One of the criteria (Disney and Stokowski) set up for the road show presentation of Fantasound was that the auditorium must have hard walls and a long reverb time. This would result in a natural reverb decay in the room that would soften all the pans. While the left speaker was coming in, you still could hear the right one trailing off.
"Of course, in 1990, theaters are constructed to be as dead as possible. So I added back what I thought was a suitable amount of natural reverb, using a concert hall program on my 480. It works well -- the sharp pans are kind of rounded out a little bit. That was the only thing that I felt justified in adding to the original." |
On recreating the surround effects.
Quote:
The three track magnetic transfer told Porter how the music panned across the front of the screen, and the dynamic range -- where it was loud and where it was soft. But there was no recorded example for the three-way speaker system positioned in the rear of the roadshow auditorium.
"I found a real coup in the music archives," he recalls. "I found Stokowski's original score sheets, with handwritten notes on them explaining note by note, phrase by phrase, where the music was to go. It would say, 'Left wall, rear wall, kill the fronts' for a certain passage. It was a complete map to exactly what they did in the auditorium." |
Most of the remainder of the article is technical details about the software and equipment used for noise reduction, etc. I guess the main points that can reasonably be made from the information in this article are
- The original sound stems are lost or simply missing.
- The 1990 restoration was indeed made from a copy of the 3-track master that had been transferrered over telephone lines to magnetic film.
- The magnetic copy was indeed multichannel and not mono.
- The surround information was recreated from notes as opposed to a physical represenation.
As far as the current dvd is concerned, I'm not sure how much of the 1990 restoration is utilized. There is obviously a new mix as the Deems Taylor narration has been re-recorded and the orchestra segments use footage that was not present in the 1990 version. Was the additional orchestra sound remixed in 1990 or was that done for the dvd? If so, did they start from the same magnetic source as the 1990 restoration or another source? Things to ponder, I guess.
I have a friend who manages the pre-1950's Disney negatives. I'll email him and see what original material still exists for the film. If I hear anything, I'll be sure to let you all know.
