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MillimeterAudio Restoration for River Kwai
Jan 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Mark Rozett, rerecording mixer at Burbank's Chace Productions, compares the 5.1 audio remastering done for the DVD of David Lean's World War II epic, Bridge on the River Kwai, to a "Jurassic Park scenario."
In 1957, River Kwai was originally released in mono, and Sony then rereleased it in the 70mm, six-track stereo version in 1991. This year, Chace engineers used the company's proprietary Chace Digital Stereo (CDS) technology to produce a discrete, multichannel 5.1 surround version for the DVD release. "In a sense, it was like Jurassic Park: We had DNA elements from the original show, and now, we have the technology to take those elements and manipulate them in ways they couldn't back in 1991," explains Rozett.
The CDS process relies on a PC-based processor that utilizes special algorithms to recreate the acoustical principles of stereo, thus permitting the processor to convert and combine multiple stereo and mono audio elements into 5.1, multichannel mixes. For River Kwai, Chace technicians used the technology to combine elements from the original 1957 mix and the 1991 restoration. "We wanted to pay allegiance to the 1957 mix," says Bob Heiber, Chace president. "The 1991 Sony restoration was crucial because that team preserved and catalogued all the original dialogue stems and much of the other material from 1957. They also added new sweetening techniques, effects, and Foley sounds, however, that weren't originally there. So our challenge was to go through those elements and find the kernels of original material. The Sony guys in 1991 did bring the audio track up to the modern standards of that time, but in so doing, some of the intent of the original mix was lost. So we had to deliver a mix that was similar to 1957, but with the modern characteristics of a 5.1 mix."
Chace inventoried 104 reels of four-track DME (dialogue, music, effects) pre-dubs that Sony had preserved in 1991. Engineers then loaded mostly mono dialogue elements and music stems into a Sonic Solutions NoNoise workstation to be synchronized and cleaned. The actual stereo 1991 mix was also separated so that effects, background elements, and Foley elements could be synchronized to digital tapes.
Meanwhile, Chace stereo programmers designed CDS cues to run all available elements in all available formats - mono, stereo, LCRS (left, center, right, surround) - through the CDS processor, in order to combine them. The company likewise captured backgrounds from the original 1957 tracks and added them to the remastered track.
"There were a couple of places where we had to leave things alone in order to maintain the original ambiance," notes Rozett. "The audio track has one major flaw in which there is a double ADR line from one of the actors, but we had no alternative material, and the actor was dead, so there was no way to rerecord it. We decided to leave that in because it has been there since the beginning, and David Lean himself decided to leave it in. Likewise, there are jungle sounds from where they filmed on location in Ceylon in 1957, but those recordings also captured sounds of generators in the jungle, used to power their equipment. That sound is mixed with the jungle sounds and is quite unique. They have always been part of this movie, so we left them in."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
