Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1952)

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328 Notes from magnetic notebooks: 1 "Movie Makers" presents the first of a series of round-table reports from pioneer users of magnetic sound on film HAVEN TRECKER, ACL DURING seventeen years of movie making I believe I have used every known method of adding sound to my movies, from dual turntables to tape recorders. Thus, I am sure that the greatest thrill I've ever experienced was the purchase and subsequent use of my Bell & Howell 202 magnetic projector. In the few short months that I've had the 202, I have already made two films with magnetic sound — both on singleperf original stock. One is a Community Chest publicity film running 900 feet of black and white; the other is a 1500 foot Kodachrome story of the gladiolus industry in this Illinois area, called Bulbs and Beauty. During the course of adding sound to these films, I naturally encountered many little problems that eventually were solved. And in their solutions I may have information which will be helpful to other experimenters in the magnetic film medium. KEEP THE EQUIPMENT CLEAN My experience thus far indicates that a bit of magnetic coating seems to rub off or wear off every time a large reel of sound-striped film passes over the magnetic heads. So, keep everything clean and free of dust. Clean the gate, the magnetic heads and the rollers before each projection. Also clean the film regularly, since this reddish-brown dust is a mild abrasive and certainly shouldn't be allowed to accumulate anywhere. And, in passing. Kodak film cleaner does not affect the striping. As for the Vacuumate film treatment, which protects against excess wear and scratches, there seems to be two schools of thought — depending on whose striping service you employ. Bell & Howell has advised me that Vacuumating should be done after Sound-Striping, when it will have no effect on the magnetic coating. Reeves Soundcraft, on the other hand, prefers that Vacuumating precede the addition of their Magna-Stripe — particularly if it is applied to a duplicate. MAKE A TEST STRIP As you prepare for sounding your first full picture, make up a fifty foot test strip with a full 100 mil wide stripe. Use this to get your equipment adjusted, to establish the distance from lips to mike and to do all your preliminary testing. This will save wear and tear on your feature film. Put lots of splices in it before striping to check the effect of your splices on acceptable recording and reproduction. I find that a good flat splice, made before striping, passes by the magnetic heads with no noticeable noise. Splices made after a stripe has been added make a very faint "plop" as they pass over the heads. Thus, splices that break after sound has been added can be respliced with no appreciable loss of sound. Take care, though! For film cement quickly loosens any striping it impregnates! 16 FRAMES VS. 24 FRAMES? Your magnetic projector is actually nothing more than a tape recorder of top quality, and, like a tape recorder, voice can be successfully recorded on it at either speed. But, also like a tape recorder, music of the kind you'll use (soft, background music, usually from strings) will record better at the higher speed. I think you will find, as I have, that it pays to shoot everything at 24 fps and record it at the same speed. However, I am now about to convert many of my old 16 fps travelogs to magnetic sound, since Bell & Howell has announced that the 202 (with only slight modification) will record acceptably on double-perf film. How that sound will be remains to be seen — or. rather, heard. USE THE B&H MONITOR HEADSET This is the greatest aid you can have in creating balanced recordings. Its small cost will be repaid soon in time saved, better control of your medium and hence better films. Fitting your ear as does a hearing aid. it plugs into the HAVEN TRECKER, ACL, of Kankakee, III., with two magnetic sound films completed. speaker line and has a separate volume control. With this monitoring headset you hear everything that is going on your film. Every word, every note is clearly heard as you record. RECORD AT LOW VOLUME LEVEL Your 202 projector has a small lamp that flashes as you record. This lamp, says the B&H instruction book, "should flash on the peaks, or high intensity sounds." Now, I found that if you record without the monitor headset there is a tendency to have the recording volume too high, so that the recording level light flashes almost continuously. When such a recording is played back, the distortion is very noticeable and the background noise is distracting. With the headset as a guide, you'll find yourself recording at a much lower volume level, and the indicator light will flash only rarely. But you'll have a better recording. My best results now are obtained with the 202 volume control set so that the white dot is at 11:00 o'clock on a clock-face reading. IT'S A SENSITIVE MICROPHONE My first attempts at magnetic recording were pretty bad! Projector noise, microphone noise from the handling of the mike, uneven volume level and other difficulties plagued my fledgling experiments. For I soon found that the B&H microphone is a pretty sensitive one. It will pick up projector noise unless you position it at its full cord length ahead of the projector. We finally built a cubicle of blankets around the machine to deaden the noise. Then, with the mike at full cord length ahead of the machine, I suspended it from the ceiling with a soft rope and rubber bands and anchored it below to a card table with more heavy rubber bands. With this rig, the mike never needed to be touched, and yet the seated narrator found that he could keep his lips at the same distance from it at all times. Voice-wise, we were now getting somewhere; but the music didn't sound just right. If we piped it from our dual turntables direct to the phono jack provided on the 202, it was necessary to adjust the projector volume control constantly — raising it for the music, lowering it for the voice — and the playback proved to be a wavery, unstable recording. So, I took my P. A. amplifier, ran the dual [Continued on page 341]