Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
except for The Motion Picture. They actually started 10 to one going in reverse order. It did make business sense at the time; I understood. And then when they started with one, they went back up again and we were in the same position we are now, which is, 'Wow, The Motion Picture comes out and you know what? It sounds better than all the others.'" The 4K Atmos Restoration Mike Matessino shares, "The response (to the 2000 revision) was really positive by today's standards. It's very clunky to me now. I was very happy that we were able to go back and finally do it properly. But again, the tools have become easier to use, less expensive. Your skill set improves and, over time, you're able to get something done much more efficiently and technically more complex and polished than we were able to do even back then. "The conversations started almost immediately about revisiting it. But then Bob passed away, management changed, and you had the Viacom/Paramount/CBS split up, which created some stumbling blocks of its own that needed to be resolved. So, it just took this long to come around to finally having sort of all the ducks lined up in the right row to finally get it finished the way we had wanted to initially. And we were actually blessed with better technology [and greater] ease of going through the process this time than [we had] 20 years earlier. "We were coming back for the latest version and Daren was hunting down some of the people that had been at Foundation Imaging and re-recruit them. [He] called them back to handle shots that they had handled in the first place. The technology has moved on, so it was a big undertaking to open up some of those files again—and some of them just wouldn't open. You had to find retroactive technology to open it and then save it in a new format just to see what you had to work with. That's a whole very big, complicated part of the project. We had all these audio sessions from 2000 and there were two stages of converting and opening and saving so that all those sessions could actually open again, so someone could work with them. Remarkably, it all was there. "The audio masters from the original six-channel release were a starting point and we were told that [mix] never really got heard in the initial release. A six-track print master was made, but in the initial release, even if some newspaper ads said they were running 70mm, there were no 70mm prints at the time. They did do the blow up, but there was absolutely no time to run 70mm at the lab and make that release date. So, one or two prints later, I think, it got made and they used it. But the initial release was all 35mm. "The surround effects are there even on the four-channel Dolby mix, so it did come through, but I don't think the six- track was even used for any video master until Blu-ray. I think even the old VHS and LaserDiscs were all from the four-track. The original mix in terms of the content of what was actually there was very lacking. The original sound team was forced to focus on some key sequences to get those to be as polished and as elaborate as they needed to be. And a lot of the rest of it was just dead. Tons of library sounds were created, but sound effects editors can't really work efficiently until the cut is locked. And it never was until the thing had to go to the lab. So there had never been time to just lay in room tone. They would just roll off the EQ so that you wouldn't hear the funky edits and things like that. It was a very, very kind of dry mix overall. "We went back to the multitrack music, and I believe that this is probably the oldest recording of a film score in which the multitrack has been used for the immersive Atmos mix. I L-R: Producers Mike Matessino and David C. Fein with scoring mixer Bruce Botnick