[Proposal] Halloween 2020 pipefan413 preservation: THE EXORCIST (1973)

[ac3]

Aye OK so I think +9 dB is probably about right to my ears in 2.0 mode but +6 dB isn't terrible. I had previously boosted it +12 dB (!) and had to turn down my AVR from my usual preferred volume so that makes sense to a degree, though the +12 dB was 1.0 going to C, but this is +9 dB going to sides instead, because... well...

I found something interesting, which I was curious about: I wondered if the AVR would actually decode it as dual mono (routing everything to C) given that the 2 channels are non-identical. Turns out it doesn't quite! It did something quite amusing, in fact: it basically put all the analogue noise in L+R and the majority of the actual audio in C! So perhaps the "dual mono" approach is not the best way to go after all, and I should stick to my original plan: 1.0 all to C by default unless intentionally putting AVR in "stereo" (which appears to apply a -3 dB cut and duplicate, which I think would be correct to avoid it seeming too loud due to the channel coming out if 2 speakers instead of 1). Alternatively, I imagine I could discard 1 channel, duplicate it, and encode as 2.0 as I just did and it theoretically should be more successful in routing the whole thing to C in surround mode or to the sides in stereo mode, but that seems inefficient storage-wise (I'd reckon that's only worthwhile at all if doing it to preserve both channels, but I'll be doing that regardless for archival purposes). Since the video source is a DVD and I'm trying to be efficient with file size for this particular project, I think I'll stick to 1.0 DTS-HD MA but I'm not sure if it'll sound most appropriate at +9 dB or +6 dB (+12 dB was definitely too loud but maybe not by so much that 6 dB less would be correct). Will need to test that next and report back. Of course, part of this is reliant on how my particular AVR behaves, so YMMV!

K.

[pipefan413]

K.

Problem?

[ac3]

No sir.

[pipefan413]

Long post alert! Ignore if desired, or cut to the chase by skipping to the TL;DR if you like. Otherwise, if you actually want the detail, read on.


LEVEL/GAIN:

OK so I actually think the right level for the NJEL-01007 mono, if being played back as 1.0, is probably about +9 dB compared to the recording level of the capture card, but the version I put in the video wasn't all that much louder than that at +12 dB so that in and of itself might not necessarily be worth updating on its own. But there are some other things I'm checking out now that may be more significant. (Note: the capture card cannot record at a higher level than this, or at the very least, it can't do so through the video capture software and that's important to ensure the audio sync doesn't drift. Otherwise, I'd just boost the level at recording stage, making sure it wasn't so high that it caused clipping.)


SUBTITLES:

Firstly, somebody asked for subtitles, which I'd only missed out because of time (wanted it watchable for Halloween). I've just about finished sorting those now. The DVD ones were a bit iffy (missing lines, wrong lines, etc.) and the Blu-ray ones aren't perfect but they're more complete, so I started with the Blu-ray subs, which I babysat the OCR on very carefully. I've since been going through and editing stuff that's wrong in the actual subtitles rather than the OCR. Once I've done that, which shouldn't be very long, I'll sync them to the new video frame structure and either just leave 'em as SRT or export to a Blu-ray/AVCHD-compatible .sup file, I'm not particularly fussed which (let me know if anybody cares about this and has a preference, may as well do what folk want seeing as this isn't really for my benefit anyway).


HARDWARE CONSIDERATIONS:

Second thing is that I've now got 3 LaserDisc players. They are all better than each other at different specific things. 2/3 are single-sided, which was a very conscious decision, but it's handy having one double-sided for convenience; 2/3 are PAL, the other is NTSC only; the oldest 2 seem to have better video performance than the newer one, although the very oldest one struggles to play certain discs and is more susceptible in general to minor issues that don't bother the other 2 (e.g. in some captures the oldest player will show dropouts in the image that neither of the other players do, or it'll just lock up and start looping a short section of the video over and over again). So I think moving forward what I'll most likely do is make the NTSC-only player my video-and-audio capture workhorse for everything that isn't PAL, with the PAL video captures being done on the oldest player, and falling back to the newest player (which is also PAL/NTSC) only if absolutely necessary for the sake of avoiding playback issues on the other player(s). To balance the workload, I'll probably keep using the newest player (the double sided one) as my digital audio workhorse, since the video capture quality doesn't matter for that, it just has to be frame-accurate and nothing more than that. I also have two different sound cards that can do bit-perfect audio capture at this point, so I can theoretically run two to three simultaneous captures on the same machine: one with video and analogue audio + two with digital audio only, or one with video, analogue audio and digital audio + one with digital audio only. This could theoretically speed up my capturing productivity, although in practice I will still generally be capturing digital audio with analogue audio and video to determine the correct sync, so it might not really do much. That said, it could be handy for discs that I'm less fussed about syncing myself but others express an interest in, which is being exemplified right now by me running a digital audio capture on THE SEVENTH SEAL because somebody wants it and I haven't actually seen the film before so I'd rather watch it before kinda spoiling it for myself by doing the resync (and given that @sertoli only wants the audio, as far as I know, the video probably isn't required for the time being). I'm simultaneously capturing THE EXORCIST discs on the NTSC-only player to test its analogue audio output.

Which brings me to the main point here: I have three players with, I think, three different sets of analogue audio circuitry (they're all slightly different ages, though not all that far apart). I do not know for certain, definitively, which is best at analogue sound reproduction, if there is even a discernible difference at all. If I had to guess, I would wager that the two older players probably have slightly better analogue performance, as I've found the newer player to have more video noise and suspect that it may have a generally less clean signal path, which could theoretically also affect the analogue audio quality. But I might be wrong, and I have no idea which of the two older players is more likely to be the stronger performer in this respect. The capture I included with the Halloween quick project was done from my CLD-1750, the oldest player I own, as it appeared to be the best quality-wise before I got the third player; I'm now running a new capture from the "new" player, which is NTSC only and otherwise contains very similar hardware to the CLD-1750 except that it's a teensy bit newer and does not appear to have as many tracking issues (e.g. the CLD-1750 locks up on ERASERHEAD side 2 and starts looping a couple of minutes in, but this one has no such issue and seems to sound about the same, at least at first listen).

I'm going to try to compare analogue audio captures of NJEL-01007 from all three players but it seems most likely I'll end up using either the original capture that I included with this project or the new capture from this most recent player if it's significantly different in some way or another. There were quite a lot of wee crackles and pops on the original capture but I'm reasonably sure that's more to do with the source most likely being a 35 mm optical track than it is to do with my CLD-1750, to be honest. I also recorded the original pressing (10JL-1007) on the newer player, but as I mentioned before, that one sounds quite a bit worse in terms of noise (there are way more crackles and pops than on the newer pressing, which may be less to do with the disc mastering/manufacturing and more to do with its age and the fact it's most likely beginning to suffer from disc rot).


MAKING THE FINAL MONO AUDIO RESYNCS:

Once I'm happy that I'm using the best recording I can currently get, I'll begin the process of comparing the stereo soundtracks to work out which is the most viable to use as my primary patching source, then I'll start actually cutting out the patches I need to sync it with the unedited widescreen DVD as well as (with one additional patch) the Blu-ray and @The Aluminum Falcon's theatrical restoration based on it. When I have all my wee patch chunks, I'll start messing with mixing the crackly analogue/optical noise floor from the mono capture(s) into the patches to blend them better with the rest of the mono capture, as well as tweaking the gain and EQ if necessary. That, finally, should give me a fairly "definitive" version of the original mono audio that isn't missing any frames compared to the HD master, and doesn't have noticeably cleaner sounding patches compared to the rest of the track. Incidentally, I took a close look at the capture TAF used for the mono (which was done by somebody else, on a player much better than mine) but it sounds significantly worse to my ears despite having been recorded from a much higher end player. I suspect this is probably because of a combination of different factors, but one of them is probably that the capture was of the first pressing rather than the second, so the disc may have been deteriorating as mine appears to be (whereas my NJEL-01007 second pressing seems to be doing just fine for the most part). Apart from that, I can hear a lot of low-end hum in that other cap that isn't present in any of mine (even my first pressing captures) so I wonder if that's something to do with the capture device's signal path / power supply or something along those lines.

If the new capture sounds much the same as the previous one, then there's  probably not much point updating this project (other than maybe to add subtitles) until I've resynchronised the audio completely to allow the DVD video to be used without any re-encoding whatsoever. Once that's done, I'll probably just make the audio available as a standalone since the DVD is already available elsewhere anyway but we'll see how it goes. As is generally the case with anything I make, I'd expect anybody who wants this to have bought the Blu-ray or at the very least a DVD copy or two.


TL;DR:

1. Level in the original project is maybe a little too high but it's not too far out (it could probably do with being -3 dB, which would put it +9dB compared to the actual recording level)
2. Nearly finished subtitles
3. Capturing analogue audio again from different player to compare
4. Will then compare stereo sources to decide where to draw my patches from
5. Finally, will make patches and mix in noise from mono track (and adjust EQ and gain if required) to blend them better with the rest of the audio

I'm waiting on one last LD copy arriving from the US, but that might take a while so I'm not going to rush into making patches until I've heard and assessed that as well.

[pipefan413]

Right! Let's look at the stereo tracks while I wait for the final mono source (the sped up / time-compressed original US LD) to arrive.

I am thrilled to be able to report that the late JP "not Dolby but still stereo" LD does *not* have the same missing frames as the early JP mono LD, meaning it is a viable source in that respect. I'm also convinced that it actually is an at least slightly different mix from the Dolby Surround track seen on the US releases (which I presume are from the 1979 35 mm Dolby Stereo track off the theatrical re-release).

The first thing I did was flip the phase of the left channel and mix down to mono to cancel out anything that was mixed straight down the middle, in order to see visually on the waveform (and by listening to it) what was left after the "mono" bit of the signal was removed. I did the same thing with the US LD's Dolby track, and the US DVD's Dolby track, which I assume are the exact same track except that the LD is lossless 44.1 kHz PCM and the DVD is compressed 192 kbps 48 kHz AC-3 (they even have the same catalogue number, "1007"). They look nothing like each other, for a start. But rather than the "stereo" track being more or less mono with little stereo separation, and the Dolby Stereo track being more of a diverse sound field, it's actually the other way around; I suppose theoretically that might be because the Dolby mix is obviously matrix encoded with phase manipulation stuff going on to put all the dialogue and much of the other audio straight into the centre channel when decoded correctly, and the surrounds are more or less phase flipped from that too, so there might just be a lot of stuff that has less left/right separation because of that when the matrix is not decoded as intended and it's just treated like a plain left/right stereo track. Or it could just be that the stereo track is a new mix made for this particular release in 1996, whereas the Dolby Surround track is most likely the one mixed back in 1979, and they got a bit fancy with the stereo mixing in '96. Anyway, that's point 1.

Secondly, I just did a quick listen through bits of the tracks, comparing how they sounded against each other. This wasn't particularly scientific or empirical, I was just having a quick listen to see what seemed to be apparent to my ears (bear in mind I don't have studio headphones at the moment or anything like that, I'm just using a crappy "gaming" headset here, but it at least doesn't try to do anything fancy with fake "surround" or whatever). There's a moment about 9 mins or so into the film where somebody in Iraq just about runs Father Merrin over with a horse-drawn carriage. On the US Dolby Surround track, the cart sits mostly in the centre of the sound field (though when it rushes past it abruptly shifts slightly to the right briefly, presumably to give some impression of fast movement), but in this weirdo 1996 JP stereo track it starts off with the sound of the cart very noticeably pulled over to the left as it approaches from the distance, then it shifts toward the centre as it rushes past, and finally drifts slightly toward the right as it moves away. It's more gradual, there's better clarity, and you get more of a sense of the cart starting out way out in the distance then moving closer then bludgeoning your ears as it just about kills Merrin, before it moves away off in the opposite direction from whence it came. A short while after this, there are wee pockets of background excavation noises / general bustle that are pretty much perceptible as dead centre in the Dolby track but shift radically to one side or the other in the stereo track. The clarity and separation of the stereo mix just seems to be significantly better than either the mono or Dolby mixes. Wait, am I... am I *praising* a revisionist 90s remix here? I think... I think I might be! What's happening to me?!

So it would appear that I was perhaps half-right: this does indeed appear to be a unique mix presumably created for the 1996 release, but it's not got much of a resemblance to the mono mix because the level of clarity and stereo separation is quite impressive. Which is sort of good and bad, because it means I've found a whole new sound mix for the film that I actually seem to really enjoy, but it may not necessarily be the ideal patching source for the mono track considering the mono track sounds like what it is – a scratchy old 70s mono mix made for 35 mm optical tracks – and differs significantly in terms of clarity, dynamic range, and (obviously by definition) directional separation. I think what I'll probably do is sync the stereo track as its own thing entirely, but use the time-compressed mono for whatever patches I can and then the US LD version of the Dolby track for the remaining patches, with noise floor from the mono mixed in as initially planned.

[spaceboy710]

I love all this work you are doing, pipefan413. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know. I imagine you have every copy of Exorcist ever made but if there is one you are curious about, you let me know and I will try to hunt it down.

[pipefan413]

Finally got my copy of the very, very first LD, which arrived still sealed. But of course it's an ancient time-compressed analogue US LaserDisc from 1983, so I don't necessarily expect that to translate to a rot-free experience.

I'm currently converting some uncompressed captures to Lagarith but as soon as that's done I'll capture this. It might be pretty useless but I'm excited anyway.

[spaceboy710]

I wonder if it is uniformly time-compressed or if it varies across the film.

[pipefan413]

Finally got my copy of the very, very first LD, which arrived still sealed. But of course it's an ancient time-compressed analogue US LaserDisc from 1983, so I don't necessarily expect that to translate to a rot-free experience.

I'm currently converting some uncompressed captures to Lagarith but as soon as that's done I'll capture this. It might be pretty useless but I'm excited anyway.

Holy crap, this is way more significant than I expected... woah!

1. Anybody who actually heard the Japanese analogue mono will know that the audio fairly abruptly pops into existence in the middle of a section of music (compared to the Dolby Stereo, Dolby 6-track, and later home remixes). I was not certain whether that was because of missing frames at the start or because additional music was added into the later mixes. I'm now pretty damn sure that it was originally there but there were a crapload of frames missing from the mono audio source used for the Japanese LaserDisc in 1985... because that audio is NOT missing from this 1983 US LaserDisc! Which means *this is from a different source entirely*. I now have two unique sources for the mono mix!

2. This one's to do with how it looks: remember how, based on other home video releases, @The Aluminum Falcon's theatrical restoration regraded what appeared to be erroneous warmth back out of the Blu-ray Disc restoration in the Iraq sequence? Well...



However, the film in general looks pretty noticeably yellow here, so that could just be this particular print. I wasn't around in '73 and I dunno what stock this was released on, but I've certainly seen this kind of yellowish push on multiple other film prints (I think it's an Eastman thing, could be misremembering). So that'd make sense.

3. It is *not* missing the same amount of audio at the reel changes as the 1985 Japanese transfer either; it has significantly less missing at the "Here it comes... there!" moment, for example, although it's arguably worse because it cuts in halfway through the word "here" in the "Here it comes" part of the line rather than just cutting right before "... there!" like the JP LDs (1985 and 1989 reissue)

-

Significantly, this means that it can at the very least be used as a significantly more authentic patching source than my custom Dolby Stereo downmix, and at best, as the *main* source moving forward instead of the 1989 JP LD.

So... is this the same as the mono mix from the 1985, but from another print? Or is it a different version of the mix entirely? It could conceivably be mixed down from the Dolby Stereo track or something, since the theatrical 70 mm / 35 mm re-release was in 1979. But that seems like giving themselves work for no reason; why release a mono LaserDisc if you have a stereo track you could use?

I don't remember *that* much about CED, but as far as I can tell it was originally a mono-only format with the audio side of things, and this was also released on CED as RCA 03126 in 1982. My guess would be that the "LV" in the catalogue number for this original LaserDisc version is presumably there to signify that it's the LaserVision version of, presumably, the master used for the CED release. I think 1982 was pretty early for CED, so it might be that this film had to be mono to CED, which might *theoretically* mean they may have made a mono downmix for CED then simply used that for the LaserVision release later. But... if you have a perfectly valid original mono track already, why bother, right? I can't imagine they hated the original mix *that* much.

In any case, I'm thrilled that it's different and has less missing audio than the Japanese releases. I am however not particularly looking forward to trying to reverse the speed-up with a series of experimental, incremental resampling operations. I suppose the logical thing to do is try to find a short sample with an easily identifiable wave form pattern that looks similar in the Japanese track, crop it out, resample it, and try to match it as closely as possible. If I manage that, next would be to try to scale it up to the whole track and cross my fingers that it is indeed consistent from start to finish. What I will say is that it does feel likely that it's consistent because there is a noticeable upwards pitch shift that sounds very similar, I think, to PAL speedup. It'd vaguely entertain me if it turned out the speedup was equivalent to PAL speed...

Another thing: until now I've been doing my analogue audio captures through my Blackmagic Design Decklink Studio 2 because, although it's limited to 20-bit depth (SDI) and 48 kHz, it means capturing the audio in sync with the video. But... in this case, that doesn't honestly help me all that much, I don't think, because the video is also going to be screwy due to the speedup. So it probably makes sense to capture this one separately at a higher bit depth and sample rate, given that I'm going to have to resample regardless to get it to the right speed. That way, I can capture at 24-bit instead of 20-bit and start at 96 kHz before "tag only" resampling to whatever bizarro rate is required to fix the speed, then finally resample to 48 kHz for delivery once edits are done, theoretically giving a *slightly* nicer result. So once this is done and I've got the audio with the video, I'll run another capture of the audio on its own but through my sound card at 24-bit / 96 kHz which will most likely be the one I end up actually using (the video/audio cap will still be useful for figuring stuff out).

[The Aluminum Falcon]

Interesting observations! Appreciate the depth of your work, it's practically forensic.

Cool about the warmth. I remember I once got a laserdisc of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and found out that some title cards were the wrong color!