Post Magazine

November 2012

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RESTORATION [ Cont.from 25 ] than jumping to other devices to check certain tracks to picture. Lacey usually does a number of passes on shows, addressing one aspect at a time because "removing one problem often reveals another one that had been masked before." With the Sesame Street episodes, "when I was dealing with low-frequency issues I started to hear some harmonics — they went up and up as I removed hum and buzz." One particular track proved challenging because "the number of bands of hum were pretty significant," he recalls. "If you tried to remove them with a $200 tool you'd get a comb-filtering effect and horrible hollow- sounding audio. But Cedar excels at dealing with really difficult stuff. For me the real issue is always ,'What does the result sound like?' Any program can remove hiss and crackle to some degree, but what will it sound like afterwards? I tried a low-cost approach as a comparison and the results would have been awful. But Cedar did not degrade or damage the sound in any way while trying to fix it. I was very confident that what I'd get at the other end would be clean." While the Sesame Street restora- tion was relatively straightforward, Lacey says he's "learned to no longer say that something is impossible to do — Cedar has proved me wrong too often. They tend to pioneer new developments and come up with new ways to solve problems. Over the past 24 years they have invented nearly all the aspects of modern digi- tal audio restoration." ANNIE In real life, the orphans have reached middle age by now but the cast of the original Annie movie is newly preserved in all its hard-luck innocence with the 30th anniversary release of the musical on Blu-ray. Chace Audio by Deluxe (www.chace.com) in Burbank saw to the audio restoration of the now-classic feature. The project "points to what I like to call the three 'Ps' of significant sound film restoration: passion, persistence and providence," says Bob Heiber, VP of audio at Deluxe Media. "It takes on the high aesthetic of the client, Sony Pictures Asset Management, led by Grover Crisp with Bob Simmons and Maria Blanco, who go to great lengths to uncover all the pieces that go into restoring motion pictures." Sony's ongoing "thorough inventory process for all archived soundtracks, particularly as they relate to score," has yielded hundreds of cartons of music material from an underground vault in Kansas, he reports. That's the passion part. "We've been cataloging and evaluating it, and sometimes we find absolute gold," says Heiber. "We knew that Annie had a stereo legacy and a standard Dolby stereo release with a small 70mm stereo release in 6-track and a Dolby Stereo track. So we should have been able to find multi-channel stereo material." Here comes the providential part. Eight cartons with some 50 reels of material were unearthed for Annie, noisy mag edits." Young was careful not to overly enhance the 5.1 environment to make the music "overpowering," Heiber notes. "You want it to sound very much like a live Broadway show with the orchestra upfront in the pit and the reverbs in the surrounds. You don't want iso- lated instruments in the surrounds." Persistence also paid off in ensuring that the final audio "was authentic" for legions of Annie fans who would speak up if they found discrepancies. "A lot of the vocal stems we found had vocal parts that didn't make it into the final mix," says Heiber. "Jim used the mono track as a guide. As he rebuilt the track he matched its authenticity going back to the original elements but never including any that hadn't been there before and not forgetting what had been flown in at the last minute at the predub stage. Fans will be the first to tell you if you've made a mistake!" An "ancillary benefit" of Sony's ongoing underground vault inventory process is a "new focus on film score music," he notes. "Catalog releasers are putting film scores on DVDs to accompany the picture. So now we have a newly preserved Annie sing-along score that accompanies the picture and score elements preserved in Sony's digital asset management system." including a 6-track stereo music score and 4-track ste- reo isolated vocals, plus a complete mono dialogue, music, effects, vocal track. "So we could recombine the vocals and score, and use the score and dialogue to underscore sections of the film," he explains. A 4-track stereo (LCRS) M/E with vocals and without vocals also enabled many of the movie's original stereo sound effects to be used. Senior restoration mixer James B. Young applied persistence in restoring the sound and creating a new 5.1 mix, which has garnered rave reviews. "There was a modest amount of audio restoration required," says Heiber. "Some restoration was done in the early 2000s, so Jim didn't have a super heavy lift." Young worked primarily in Pro Tools using WaveArts' Master Restora- tion Suite and Izotope RX to remove the "usual minor hisses, ticks, pops, stage movement noises and a few Classifieds HELP WANTED ADVERTISING SALES REP. Ad Sales Rep needed for advertising sales in the Post Production and Computer Graphics World. 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