Sound Of Music Special



			by Guido Henkel


	Some time ago, before the DVD was officially announced, I was invited by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and THX to take a look behind the scenes of the DVD production of The Sound Of Music, especially the transfer process which included substantial corrective work. This beloved musical is based on the real life story of Maria von Trapp, a young nun in Austria who is sent on a mission by her Mother Superior as a governess to seven children in order to find her own place in life, has long been awaited for release on DVD. I was very pleasantly surprised by the attention the film received by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment when I got the chance to get a first-hand look at the plans the studio had for the then-unannounced release. Blending a heartwarming story, with spectacular panoramic photography of the Austrian Alps and the Rodgers and Hammerstein music, this film is very unique for American audiences and thus deserves only the best. On a side note however, you may be interested to hear that in Germany and Austria there used to be an endless flood of films like this one during the 50s and early 60s. Sadly most of them are obscure to American audiences as they never left the German speaking markets, although many of them actually do challenge the scope and beauty of The Sound Of Music.


	My field trip to explore the work on The Sound Of Music started at the offices of THX in Burbank where I was introduced to a general outline of the entire project and THX’s involvement in the entire process to create this THX-certified DVD. The involvement of the specialists at THX is very high in these projects to make sure that the highest possible level of quality is maintained every step of the way. (For all of you interested in another discourse on the THX Certification Program please read this article that I wrote earlier for the industry trade publication “MediaLine.”) From there I went on to see how the actual transfer of the film is handled.



	Colorist John Sellars at his telecine bay where he does his magic to bring back the full glory of “The Sound Of Music” and countless other films. On the left monitor you see a downconverted NTSC image from the film, while the other monitor shows the high definition image that comes directly from the telecine.

The Sound Of Music was originally shot on 65 mm negative film and the DVD was planned to come from a 65 mm interpositive print, rather than an optically shrunk 35 mm print. While it may seem a trivial difference, for a studio this makes a significant difference in cost and time allocation. At the time of this writing there are only two facilities in Hollywood that can do high definition transfers of 65 mm film, which limits the studio’s capabilities to chose quite a bit. Since telecine equipment and operators are booked on an hourly basis for such projects, this also forces the project into a timetable where either of them are available. THX, Fox and the disc’s producer, Sharpline Arts’ Michael Matessino decided to take the project to High Technology Video (HTV) and use John Sellars as the telecine colorist for the project.

I went to visit John in his darkened suite at the HTV headquarter in Los Angeles where he works endless hours every day, preparing transfers of films that will then be used for DVD releases and television broadcasts. The Sound Of Music is quite a whopper of a project, as John tells me. Running almost 3 hours, with source material for the project in

various stages of decomposition, the film requires much more time in the transfer stage than most others. The procedure during which a film is converted from film into the digital domain is commonly called telecine. It is achieved through specially designed machines that take the film and basically scan it frame by frame for use in the computer. What sounds like a fairly easy undertaking becomes quite complicated considering how many different film formats there are in existence, and the different technologies that are used to create color in films, each with their own little idiosyncrasies. Add to that various negative and positive formats, the size of the actual film cel itself and the resolution required for the scan, and you start to get an idea how complex and flexible telecine equipment has to be. Current high definition transfers are made in a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and the average transfer of a movie takes about 2 weeks.

However, with The Sound Of Music a much longer schedule - and as result a bigger budget - was required. “We are looking at 24 reels of film for this project,“ John Sellars tells me, “Each of them with 1000 feet of film.”

Such a reel contains roughly 7.5 minutes of footage that needs to be digitized and since the entire movie - every movie by the way - is split in such short pieces out of necessity, each reel can challenge the colorist anew. The biggest problems arise when these reels come from different sources, as was the case with The Sound Of Music. Shot in 1964, over the years a large number of prints have been made of the film for various occasions and of course for the movie’s theatrical presentations. Eventually reels are lost, damaged and replaced. After 35 years, as in this case, you end up with a mix of reels coming form a variety of sources and of varying age. While some of these reels may be in perfect condition, others may show signs of serious deterioration and discoloration, and John decided to show me some of these problems right there on the screen of his telecine bay.

As I watch he begins the transfer of a single shot, no longer than 5 seconds in length and then brings up the first frame of the sequence on the monitor. He then does an A/B comparison with the last frame in this sequence and I have trouble believing my eyes. What initially looked like a rather natural looking sequence to me, turned out to fade unnoticeably during the shot’s short 5 seconds. The blacks in the last frame have a brown tone and the colors themselves appear washed out. “This is the main problem I am having on The Sound Of Music,” John explains. Although the interpositive itself is in good condition, the negative from which its was created shows signs of problems and discoloration.



		This is a telecine. A reel of film is fed through an optical apparatus that scans every single frame of the film, step by step. Control monitors help setting up the machine correctly, while computer hardware at the bottom is inserted and removed, depending on the material scanned and the desired resolution and formats. This is one of the few telecines that is actually capable of handling 65 mm and 70 mm film formats.


	As a result, John has to examine every single frame of the film - about 10.000 of them - and see if they show these signs of almost unnoticeable color shifts, which become visible only through constant A/B comparison with other frames of the same shot. He then manually adjusts the colors for each one of these frames and stores the correction parameters in the computer. Since the original image is not changed and only instructions for the change have been stored in the computer, he can go back easily at any time and slightly alter his corrections to create an overall consistent look for the entire film.


	Here are some direct comparisons of images from the movie, taken from the DVD and the Laserdisc box set, which used to be the quality reference for the movie in the past years! Notice how the colors have been corrected for the DVD version, giving the grass a lush green look, while the Laserdisc rendered it in yellow and brown tones. It is also noticeable how soft and fuzzy the Laserdisc transfer looks by comparison, making it obvious, just how superior DVD’s capabilities are.


		In the example below you can once again see the increased level of detail in the DVD version, but also notice that the DVD has a slightly different aspect ratio than the Laserdisc image, matting the image slightly more at the top and bottom. In this shot it is also nicely visible how red and blue have been overemphasized in the Laserdisc transfer as opposed to the very neutral looking new transfer.


		This shot of Christopher Plummer also shows nicely how sharp and well-defined the new transfer looks - check out the level of detail in the texture of his jacket - and how natural the colors are reproduced. The Laserdisc by comparison is once again without definition and has a very strong blue tinge to it.


		In case you are skeptic still, please be advised that all Laserdisc screenshots were prepared for us by David Fein at Sharpline Arts from the original transfer materials they used to create the Laserdisc, using high end equipment! We did not soften or otherwise meddle with these images. The difference is really that striking!

“The film itself is not in really bad condition,” John tells me. “There are a few emulsion stains, some scratches and dirt, but that’s about it. It is mostly the color correction we are dealing with here.” To get rid of dust and slight scratch marks, John could apply some video noise reduction and dirt removal (DVNR) on the high definiton master but on Fox’s request chose not to do so in anticipation of better noise reduction and dirt removal technologies in the future. “I do not pay much attention to anything else though, other than taking notes, if certain frames are seriously damaged.” These frames are then cleaned up in the computer in the next stage of production, completely unrelated to the actual telecine process.

“We had one reel that caused some headaches, though,” John remembers with a laugh. “Reel 5b had timing problems and was off by 2 frames throughout the reel. Obviously someone screwed it up in the lab.” As you certainly know, film is developed through a process in which light and chemicals create a reaction on the film strip that causes it to have a different density depending on the amount of light it had been exposed to. Since motion pictures are a very elaborate process, every single shot in a movie is carefully massaged to achieve the best possible look. Did you ever wonder why your home movie footage looks nothing like a movie, although you tried to work with different lighting set-ups? The reason is that the look of a film is often refined in the labs where with different exposures during the positive-negative print, each scene gets the desired look. (And you thought filmmaking stops when you pull the film out of the camera...)



	This is another look at the telecine bay at HTV. Regular NTSC monitors are complemented by HDTV monitors to see how the image downconverts to regular television sets. Inside the bay you see oscilloscopes and other equipment that is used to read the color balance of the pictre, among other things. The three round spots on the panel in front of the chair are used to actually correct the colors in a transfer, each one of them representing one of the component colors, red, green and blue.


	This whole procedure is automated of course, once the director and the director of photography have decided upon the look for each shot. Now imagine, someone puts the film in the developing machine and starts the computer’s program which determines the timing for each film frame, as outlined. If by accident the film strip and the computer timing are not identical and let’s say offset by two frames, suddenly the last two frames of every shot receive the incorrect exposure of light, because the computer thinks he has reached a new shot already. This is exactly what happened on this particular reel of The Sound Of Music. Two frames before every cut the colors of the frames were completely corrupted and needed repair. One way to fix the problem would have been to go back to the lab and have a new reel printed from the negative. With costs well over $20,000 for that single reel, the cost was prohibitive in this case and Fox opted to have John Sellars color correct these frames manually instead, which was cheaper although not necessarily easier for John. He found himself manually correcting all these frames manually in a painstaking process that will drive most people insane.

After having had his first run at the transfer of the movie, director Robert Wise and the DVD’s producer Michael Matessino were brought in to examine the results. “There was one scene in the movie right after the opening credits, where the colors began to fade,” John recalls an especially funny anecdote. “Frame by frame I corrected them and brought the level back to what they should look like. When the director came in to take a look at the reel, he looked at me and said, “No, no, what did you do?” It turns out that he actually wanted to have the shots turn to an amber look to show the Golden Age of the thirties, which I didn’t know. So I spend hours, fixing these frames by mistake.”

One thing that is immediately obvious when entering such a high definition telecine suite is the quality of the picture. At 1920x1080 pixels there is nothing the telecine eye doesn’t see, and even John Sellars agrees. “It is a pleasure to work in hi def,” he says. “Many times you end up seeing details in the transfer that are not even visible in the show prints of the film.” Since most transfers are taken from high quality interpositives or even the negative itself, the level of quality achieved by modern day telecines is simply staggering. Looking at the high definition screen with the imagery of The Sound Of Music, I only wished we all could enjoy these movies in such clarity and resolution. “Want to see what it looks like on a regular NTSC display,” he asks with a smirk, and I am almost hesitant to agree to his suggestion. After flicking a few switches, another monitor comes on and shows me exactly what the same image looks like on a down-converted NTSC screen, which features a meager resolution of 720x480 pixels. The experience is sobering, and made me wish even stronger that in the not too distant future we will all have high definition video platforms to enjoy our favorite movies on. Still, the pictures from the new transfer of The Sound Of Music that moved over the screen there were very impressive, leaving the laserdisc I had cherished for many years clearly in the dust. The clarity, color reproduction and level of detail is still impressive and with people like John Sellars or the folks at Sharpline Arts at the helm of such a project, little can go wrong.

Getting a taste of the amount of work that goes into the preparation of this movie for its new DVD release made it clear that nothing we see is as simple as it appears. Movies look phenomenally on these silver discs because many people spend countless hours to make them look phenomenal. It doesn’t happen by itself and the fact that many DVDs offer us presentations that are significantly better than the movie’s theatrical presentations ever were, should give everyone an appreciation for the effort that is put into these releases.

If you want to learn more about the creation of the supplemental materials found on the Sound Of Music DVD, please check out the Production Journal on Sharpline Arts’ website, which has been prepared by Michael Matessino when he initially created these supplements for release with the Laserdisc box set in 1993.


		Thanks go out to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and THX for inviting me to this intimate behind-the-scenes look. Thanks also to Sharpline Arts, especially Michael Matessino and David Fein for supplying me with additional valuable information on the production and of course the images from the Laserdisc. Very special thanks also to John Sellars, HTV, Chace, Complete Post and Crest International for their hospitality and support.



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