Hi Steve:
I know a little bit about the Hollywood thing second-hand from one studio. They have a well-managed digital SFX library -- constantly backed up and churned. Believe me, Hollywood can afford it. More importantly, a lot of those old film loops sounded awful and just don't work in today's production environment. So this studio has been on a constant project -- with annual budget -- of recording just about any effect you can imagine in not just high fidelity (ie high-rez digital) but also in surround so it can easily be edited into a surround matrix. I read somewhere that the Oscar-winning sound mix for "Black Hawk Down" involved 1000+ individual effects and some sequences had 200+ "ambience" elements alone. Quite a long way since the days when the very biggest mixing consoles for Hollywood had 12 and later 24 channels!
Now, that said, it would be nice to preserve some of those antique effects. I have a few Major SFX 78's. Where today are you going to find an SFX loop "smashing a piano with a sledge hammer" or "biplane selections - taking off, taxi, idle, landing, flyover"?
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven Smolian" <smolians@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 10:37 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Ringtones, etc.
As annoying as today's product noises may seem to us more mature folks, they capture perfectly part of the aural essence of this time period. They will, in the future, be sonic time machines for those presently usung them until superceeded by the next thing that comes along.
There should be a Smithsonian library of everyday sounds.
When the Hollywood production companies were disposing of their huge tape libraries of analogically recorded sounds effects after converting them to or rerecording them again in digital sound, I couldn't find any institution interested in preserving the old ones. At that time I could have had the libraries of at leat three of the major film studios and a bunch of post-production houses. Preventing them from being discarded is one of the regrets of my life.
Steve Smolian
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