Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
Century City, set it all up, put her on the speaker phone, and he proceeded to touch each item. And as he went along, she said, 'No, that's okay, that one's okay, that's okay.' And finally, we got to the end, she says, 'Try the other again,' I tried it. 'Abort it.' So, she said, 'What's the medium?' And I said, 'Well, it's U-Matic cartridges.' We took the player tape that I had done with Jerry earlier, and she said, 'It's fine.' I ejected the one I was recording to and he held it in his hand. She said, 'It's bad.' And sure enough, there was a timecode interruption exactly where the edit was to be! I put in a fresh roll, and it worked and we mastered." Bruce continued, "So let's go forward to about five or six years ago where we got the original 16-track, 30 IPS analog masters from Paramount. We resolve them with the 60 Hertz it was on because they weren't working with timecode in those days, it was all 60 Hertz, 35 millimeter film. We resolved it and we transferred everything analog to digital at 192 kHz/24-bit to Pro Tools. I had a specially modified A to D converter for the process. We got a really sterling representation—and these tapes had not been played since 1979, so it was great. We got back and mixed it for a new complete album release. "Our prayer always to the Star Trek god was that we would be able to restore the movie. And, thankfully, producers David C. Fein and Michael Matessino got Paramount to agree to do it. I had been fooling around with it anyway in Atmos, in my studio, because I do a lot of Atmos mixing. I invited them up to hear what I was doing and the one I played for them was the Klingon opening. And that really sounded great, with the Blaster Beam overhead and moving and all that. They convinced Paramount, who came to the fore and went in and edited the multitracks digitally on Pro Tools to match where the film was going to be when it was dubbed. They mixed the whole thing, [though] not through a Dolby Renderer or anything like that, it was all discrete, and built the sessions to take to the dubbing stage." The First Restoration (2000) Producer of the restored versions, David C. Fein, explained, "Many years ago, I started out my career doing special editions for LaserDisc. However, I was never quite satisfied with any special edition that I produced because, really, it was nothing more than just adding some extra materials. I endeavored to tell the story of a film from the beginning to end and was able to convince 20th Century Fox to do Alien and Aliens with Ridley Scott and Jim Cameron. Cameron wanted to do a long version of Aliens and proceeded to produce the most extensive documentary that anybody had ever seen on any particular project. We released this on LaserDisc and it was so successful. There was the Voyager Company and the Criterion Collection years ago; they were just putting some extra material on discs. It was so successful that 20th Century Fox realized they could make money with catalogue titles by doing this, and it kind of launched the studio special edition market. "I had met Mike Matessino many years earlier and [now] I finally had time to do my project of Alien and Aliens. I was originally focused on Aliens, and I was able to bring Mike Matessino on. With the success, we were to do a number of other projects, including The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles, and a number of other titles with Robert Wise. If you go out and buy the Alien anthology Blu-ray set, you'll find the LaserDisc extras reproduced because they had such an influence and value. "When it came time to do The Sound of Music, Mike took the helm on that with Bob [Wise]. Over the years, we watched Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters special edition come out and Lucas complete the 1997 special editions of the Star Wars films. We had tried over the years to talk to Bob about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, because the film really had difficulties being made. Producer Mike Matessino added, "Basically, I was sitting with him on transfers of his films, which were widescreen, Re-recording mixer Michael Babcock CAS with the Enterprise