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35mm mag


Joseph Konrad

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Hi all,

I am budgeting a movie and am trying to find out what companies in the US still do 1/4" to 35mm mag transfers (on-set audio from Nagra), and also what companies could do 2"to 35mm mag transfer (music soundtrack editing and mixing).

 

I hope this is still possible and not too costly. Thank you very much.

Edited by Joseph Konrad
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Hi all,

I am budgeting a movie and am trying to find out what companies in the US still do 1/4" to 35mm mag transfers (on-set audio from Nagra), and also what companies could do 2"to 35mm mag transfer (music soundtrack editing and mixing).

 

I hope this is still possible and not too costly. Thank you very much.

Hi all,

I am budgeting a movie and am trying to find out what companies in the US still do 1/4" to 35mm mag transfers (on-set audio from Nagra), and also what companies could do 2"to 35mm mag transfer (music soundtrack editing and mixing).

 

I hope this is still possible and not too costly. Thank you very much.

 

Are you editing on a flatbed or moviola?

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A flatbed, Steenbeck or KEM type was the preferred way to edit films with sepmag tracks when film was still being physically cut. I have an 8 plate (2 picture 2 sound) Steenbeck and a sixplate 35mm KEM in daily use. They work just as well as 25 years ago. Picsyncs are a UK local phenomenon, never caught on in the rest of Europe.

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Line up the clapper board on the picture, unlock the sound track, search for the clap sound on the sound track, make a mark on the sepmag with a grease pencil, align sync marks, relock pic and sound, add spacer to picture or sound as required. After syncing, the picture and sound for each scene may be put on a shelf for later assembly in edit order.

During playback with picture and sound locked, you can 'trim' and shift the sound by whole frames or fractions of frames to fine-tune sync, while continuing to view picture and sound in real time

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I have an excellent book from the 1970s by Ernest Walter that describes the old workflow in painstaking detail- my main effort has been to locate where all of the old equipment and facilities are located in 2013 to be able to reproduce it.

 

Along that same line, would anyone happen to know which (if any) dubbing stages in the US still use the recorders and rerecorders from the magnetic era? All that is required is a projector interlocked with analog tape rerecorders, an older analog mixing board, and a recorder using either tape or magnetic sound. It seems like the kind of setup you could recreate privately, but I have to imagine the equipment would be extremely expensive and I would love to rent use of a dubbing stage for a designated time...

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Line up the clapper board on the picture, unlock the sound track, search for the clap sound on the sound track, make a mark on the sepmag with a grease pencil, align sync marks, relock pic and sound, add spacer to picture or sound as required. After syncing, the picture and sound for each scene may be put on a shelf for later assembly in edit order.

During playback with picture and sound locked, you can 'trim' and shift the sound by whole frames or fractions of frames to fine-tune sync, while continuing to view picture and sound in real time

I did try it once but got lost and went back to the pic-sync. it just seemed a lot easier to mark up but each to his own.

OP, your sync sound is transferred to mag film along with all the other tracks and the dubbing theatre runs them all in interlock with picture. One imagines the firms mentioned wearlier would be able to do it.

I got the Steenbeck and the pic-sync a few years ago but the dubbers were still too expensive. They've probably all bee scrapped by now, I haven't had an ebay alert for a long time. One German company still makes them, or at least lists them.

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I would only do the picture and sync sound on the flatbed, then do a telecine from the cutting copy with the sync sound, add music and effects etc on a dedicated audio workstation. I doubt very much that you will find a working sepmag mixing studio anywhere on this planet.

I still run a magnetic film recorder but only for archiving old programs. We used to do lots of Nagra tape to 16mm sepmag transfers but that was 15 years ago. Now almost all location sound is recorded digitally on Cantar or Nagra D. Last year we synced a 35mm feature (dailies) and used Premiere since the picture was a Quicktime transfer from the negative.

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I doubt very much that you will find a working sepmag mixing studio anywhere on this planet.

Thank you very much, that's what I was afraid of.

 

It is too bad because I feel like the process of several techs sitting in a room rehearsing the sound mix and then doing a live take gives everything an excitement/energy/imperfection that I really wanted to see if I could recreate.

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The mag film was all on 'rock and roll' machines. So you could go back and forth and drop changes in as required. Watching a good BBC dubbing mixer at work (better still, sitting next to him as dubbing editor on tracks you'd laid yourself) was like watching God do a sunset. He made students look (well, sound) like professionals.

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It's more difficult to sync on a flatbed which is one of the reasons the old guys sync using an upright Moviola, but the problem with the Moviola upright is they're hard on the sprocket holes. I've got 2 of the KEM flatbeds (one for 16:9 and one with a switchable academy/'scope), 2 ACmade coding machines, a flatbed high speed rewind and most of the accoutrements needed for old school editing except a synchronize which I still want to get, that and a Moviola upright. I had one lined up WITH the 'scope bubble attachment but I got out bid by a sniper that got me in the last few seconds of the auction! Pissed me off. :D I even have a SuperSmplex dallies projector that will switch from mag reels to optical. It's really cool. I love the tradition on film so at some point, I'll budget for traditional editing on a feature. It's been said that there is a difference in a film simply because of the method that was used to edit it. A film edited digitally will be different that a film edited traditionally and even one edited on an upright will be different than one edited on a flatbed.

Edited by James Steven Beverly
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  • 11 months later...

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