Cinema Canada (Dec 1974-Jan 1975)

“It Might be Done With Mirrors” The Mirrophonic Story As a film industry grows in Canada, supportive technical resources must appear and grow along with it, and those resources must keep up with the state of the art to be of the ultimate advantage. There are filmmakers who contend, and I’ve heard it personally a number of times, that all those supportive services in Canada on which filmmakers depend, are strictly second-rate compared to what can be done in the Big Apple and all those places in the romantic Southwest. But let’s take a stand on that kind of thing right here and now and say that this is absolute crap. All of the professional labs, sound studios, optical houses, editing houses, and most of the rental houses maintain standards as high if not higher than those anywhere. They may not make as big a show of it, and those of us at Cinema Canada only wish that some day they will all decide to take advantage of our pages to run glossy colour ads showing us all just how well they do their jobs like the folks to the south do. But we are sympathetic that because we are in a young industry, much more of the time and money must be devoted to internal development, and there cannot be much left for tooting the old horn. It is always interesting to have a talk with the people that are making the attempt to develop something new. The example that I will deal with this time is the most modern, efficient and productive sound studio in North America, Mirrophonic Sound, a division of Quinn Laboratories. Quinn Labs is another story in itself, and while that story should make good reading, let’s just have the backgound as Findlay Quinn spending several years as lab manager at the National Film Board, then several more at Film House, and then branching out for himself and establishing an independent lab. Quinn Labs has become widely respected for the quality of work they turn out, and for the outspoken and well-respected reaction of Quinn himself to the state of the industry. The logical expansion for an operation like Quinn Labs was to become involved in a modern sound studio, one capable of providing a complete sound service, from transferring right through to mixing and ending up by making the 16 Cinema Canada TECHNICAL NEWS optical track. All this work is done under the strictest supervision of some of the most qualified and experienced film sound people in the world. And they work on the newest available equipment which allows them a superb creative capability. It started a few years back, when Ken Healey Ray was producing sound for The Neptune Factor and the first Ontario Place Imax film, North of Superior. By the way, Ken was responsible for the design of the sound reproduction system at Cinesphere, and although he has never been completely satisfied with the way it turned out, it’s generally recognized as a major achievement in the world of film sound. Both the above films required very special creations for their sound tracks, and Ken soon found that there was not a facility here to accomplish the effects he needed. Two years ago there was nowhere to get a variable speed dubber, no chance of finding sufficient mixing facility to put together the multiple tracks for North of Superior, short of phone lines between Cinesphere and Film House and a couple of other studios. There wasn’t a house that could provide the effects from a library. The variable speed dubber that was needed for Neptune Factor was eventually built as a breadboard operation by a staffer at Pathé, Bill O’Neill, the kind of guy who knows that nothing is impossible, especially those things that most people think are impossible. It turned out to be the start of a most beneficial team. Healey Ray and O’Neill got together with Quinn, and the idea of a sound studio was born. Magna-tech had in the very first stages the plans for sound mixing system that uses computercontrolled dubbers that can run in sync at 6 times sync speed, or 144 frames per second. (That’s 216 feet per minute in 16mm, or 540 feet per minute in 35mm). This is in either direction! The advantage of course, is that if an error happens during a mix be it the fault of the mixer, or of the sound editor, or if the director just doesn’t like what the thing sounded like, the roll-back to start, either of the reel or just the scene, takes almost no time at all. And the equipment is, of course, capable of making a pick-up in the mix with no audible difference in the track. The other capability of the Mirro Multiple floor surfaces under the carpet in Studio B, to replace the movement sounds.