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Re: [ARSCLIST] Recording Innovations
... And it would be interesting to establish how many of these
supposed "Hollywood" developments were kick-started by the
early-1930s technical and artistic diaspora from Berlin studios such
as UFA, where, say, lip-synching to a backing track for musical
numbers was fully in place by 1931.
Tony B
On 25 Jun 2009, at 1:04, Tom Fine wrote:
What they were doing in Hollywood, from the early days, was
recording different aspects of the final soundtrack on different
bits of film and then mixing together from motor-sync'd playback to
a final sound master. There were crude mixing consoles from early
in the electronic recording days, too. One specific example I was
told about, and I'll ask the guy for the film title because I don't
remember it, was the final music was mixed from three optical
elements, one made from each microphone, with each microphone
focused on a different musician or group of musicians. This would
be very similar to live-in-the-studio multi-tracking. They were
also able to pre-record music tracks very early, so a singer on
film would be singing against a playback. And lip-sync'ing and
indeed orchestra play-sync'ing were developed early on, too. By the
early 1930's, Western Electric (and probably others) had developed
amplifier and mixer-network systems allowing for mixing many
different sound elements into a final soundtrack. Also, the whole
idea of "stem" mixes came out of Hollywood, a way to reduce many
elements to a few logically organized stems for final mixdown. By
the 1940s, the major studios' sound departments had big 3-person
consoles for final mixing (dialog, music, sound effects). Those
guys were aces, too. Think of the mono soundtracks for some of the
big musical pictures, that's a very complex sound universe to fit
into one channel.
-- Tom Fine