Hi Steve:
A couple of points.
First of all, Everest pioneered 35mm recording and their original belief and marketing tack was that it was a superior medium to tape -- greater s/n and greater dynamics due to no saturation problems plus no print-thru problems (which apparently many labels had trouble with with classical recordings made on Scotch tapes in the 1950's -- Mercury always used AudioTape and I don't recall hearing a lot of print-thru stories). I have heard many reports beyond yours about the poor quality of Everest vinyl. Indeed, one of the marketing hooks used by Vanguard when the Everest classical recording were first remastered to CD in the early 1990's what that finally fans could hear what they _really_ sound like vs. the poor-quality records. There was an interesting if somewhat fact-challenged article about the Everest remasters in Mix magazine in 1994. Lonn Henrichsen recently completed a 2-part history of Everest being published in a British audio/music magazine, name of course escapes me when I need it!
As for editng 35mm masters, it's not as difficult as you might think. Remember the film moves at what amounts to 18 inches per second, so lining up sprocket holes was doable even to insert a percussion beat. The splices were straight-across so they were slightly more audible than angled tape splices, but some editors may have done custom cuts on an angle and the much lower background hiss mitigated most of the audibility. The original Everest studio setup used a Moviola table with 3-track magnetic heads according to Frayne's article. Mercury had an interesting custom rig -- an Ampex 300 transport with 2" custom guides and 3-track film-width heads and a custom-machined capstan motor "puck" so the thing moved film at 18 inches per second. The editor (Harold Lawrence) could then edit the film just like he was used to with 1/2" tape, the only difference being that splices need to line up vis-a-vis the sprocket holes -- and even in that case it didn't need to be super-precision because the Westrex film drive had small-diameter sprocket wheels and small sprocket teeth so it was forgiving on not-perfect splices and also on shrunken film. I'm not sure how Command did their editing, they might have inherited the Everest Moviola table.
As I said in my original post, the number of music-recording studios was limited. As far as I know, aside from perhaps movie soundtracks not marketed as superior-sounding because they were made on 35mm, no Hollywood film soundstages were used for this recording fad.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven Smolian" <smolians@xxxxxxxxx> To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 10:15 PM Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] The 35mm fad and record ageing