Loud movies:- What have we achieved?

 

Whenever one explains what the TASA Standard is all about, one usually gets the reaction that nothing seems to have changed. The trailers and adverts are still horribly loud and obnoxious so what has one really achieved? The answer is curious. In terms of trailer and advert loudness in the theatre, the answer is actually “nothing”.  What we HAVE achieved is to make dialogue in features easier to understand. There is an interesting article about the birth of TASA here.

To understand how this can be, we have to look at what happened before TASA and the way in which cinemas these days are built.

In the old days we had an auditorium, a projection booth with two projectors and a projectionist whose job it was to present the whole program in its best possible light. In modern times, the projectionist is often not even in the booth.

Background. How movies were exhibited in The Old Days.

Reels of film as they come from the distributor are a manageable size - usually about 20 minutes of picture and sound. We had two projectors in the booth so we had continuous presentation. As soon as reel one started to run out (you saw two little blotches in the top right of the frame), the projectionist started up the second projector and prepared for the “changeover”. The so called “douser” (A sturdy metal flap in the light path from the lamp) was closed in the first projector and the same flap was opened in the second projector and the first scene of the second reel was displayed. This process continued with reel three being loaded up on the first projector and changed over to when reel two ran out and so on for all six to eight reels of the feature. The projectionist had to be on hand and on his toes to make sure that the show never stopped because of a bungled changeover.

Loading up a new movie – the “platter”

Well that was how things were. Very labour intensive with one person actively managing each show, including making sure the volume level of the soundtrack was always appropriate to the audience and the movie. Then about 20 years or so ago, things started to change radically. Owing to the work of Dolby Laboratories, the ability of the movie soundtrack to carry really quiet sounds clearly advanced out of all recognition. As an added bonus, the sound could also be made much louder in total in the auditorium, though for most purposes it was more than loud enough already! (Think Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example). The other thing that really changed how films were presented was the “platter”. This is an amazing contraption! We have two or three aluminium disks about six feet in diameter mounted one above the other on arms mounted on a substantial pillar. The platters have about two feet of open space between them. Each disk has a motor to drive it round at between 3 to 60 rpm. The movie is “put up” onto the platter. Putting up consists of winding each reel in turn onto a central removable core clipped onto the centre of the platter. The core is about a foot in diameter and we wind on the trailers adverts and any other material which is ahead of the feature first. When that is in place we splice reel one’s head to the foot of the trailers etc and continue winding on reel one. At the foot of reel one we splice on the head of reel two and so on.  The process is repeated until we have the whole movie spliced tail to head as a continuous pack lying on its side on the surface of the platter. The central core is then unclipped and removed.

Showing the movie.

To show the movie, the head of the trailers is carefully eased out of the centre of the pack while the platter is rotated. It is passed around a sprung loaded pulley on an arm which places the pulley just above the take-off point in the pack. The spring loading has two purposes. One is to take up any irregularities in the wind of the pack and also to tell the motor how fast to rotate the platter to keep the film unwinding at exactly the right speed to feed the film into the projector. The film passes from the spring loaded pulley on more fixed pulleys up and over the top of the projector, through the gate and back to the platters.

The “take-up” is simply another platter with the core from the original pack clipped to its centre. The second platter motor rotates it to wind the take-up film onto the second platter’s surface.

Showing the feature therefore transfers the pack from one platter to the next. The next showing simply consists of unclipping and moving the central core back to the first platter and repeating the whole process.

The effect of the platter on the job of the projectionist

This method of presentation had one very important effect. The projectionist could now start the show and then either sit reading the paper or, and this is the most vitally important point from the loudness perspective, leave the booth altogether and maybe bicycle down the street to munch on a hamburger at the local diner or even start another show at another theatre!

Once the platter system became widespread, another factor came into play. Older single auditorium movie houses could only show one movie at a time which meant that only the really important releases got presentation. Only smaller “art houses” would show the more specialized features. If the big auditorium was split into smaller spaces each with a single projector and a set of  platters, then the cinema could show several different movies at once. This gave rise to the “Multiplex” approach with several small theatres inside the old building and was the original of the later “Megaplex” purpose built structure.

In each case we had one projectionist whose job was to run the presentations on several screens. In multiplexes the booths were often separated by long corridors and the projectionist would start the first show then leave the booth altogether and walk to the next booth to start the show there. In Megaplexes there was usually a single central booth with projectors pointing out onto screens arranged side by side with walls between each presentation space.

Setting the sound level.

The critical problem of the volume of sound during a presentation has its roots in the simple fact of the absence of the projectionist. When any new feature is put up, the projectionist would start the put up with whatever promotions, trailers, adverts etc. the distributor wanted showing before the head of reel one of the feature and then go down to the auditorium to check that the reels were in the right order and the splices were correctly framed.

 At that point the projectionist would check the level of the soundtracks and note where things were obviously louder than the public would tolerate. I.e. the level of the presentation was determined solely by the loudest sound in the whole pack. This was almost inevitably found in the trailers and adverts. The projectionist would, usually by ear, adjust the volume control so that the loudest passage would not cause public complaint, note this on the running schedule for that projector, set the volume at that level and leave it there.

Right smack in the middle of this already precarious method of setting sound levels, along came Digital Sound on Film. Optical soundtracks have a pretty hard limit to how loud they can actually be. There is only so much emulsion area dedicated to analogue sound on film and since all the optical systems use variable area modulation, once that area is modulated to the max, there is no more room to make things louder. The low level performance of movie sound however is absolutely dependant on noise reduction. The emulsion and surface of the film are excuisitely tender areas. Film always gets static electrical charge and picks up dust wonderfully. Every spec comes out as a click, every scratch as a tearing sound very like a scratch on a vinyl LP. The wonderful way in which noise reduction allows the most subtle sounds to be clearly heard is nothing short of miraculous. The scariest bits of horror movies are those very slight almost unheard hints of something really nasty's being about to happen. The most beautiful sounds of the rustle of clothing or leaves sets the ambience so characteristic of a really well recorded movie. The sudden onset of a really loud effect built up to with complex low level hints is the true mark of a master film mixer. The seemingly endless assault of completely gratuitous audio onslaught is the true mark of a really bad sound mixer. Especially when he leaves himself no audio room to make dialogue comprehensible. Battles are loud brutish affairs but the master will somehow always find ways to get the level of the soundtrack down so the dialogue can come through and be completely heard.

And then along came digital. When deciding how to allocate the additional range between just audible to just inflicting actual pain, which a digital track allows, it might have been better to have left the upper limit where it was and give all the extended range to the low level end. Sadly most of it was given to the ability to make movies louder rather than more subtle. If all sound mixers were masters then that would have been a wise choice. Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of profoundly deaf people mixing movies today. The deafest of them seem to work for the trailer and advert houses.

The roots of TASA.

So now we have the root of TASA. The soundtrack for trailers for coming features are usually mixed by different studios to the original sound track. Adverts are also mixed by completely different studios to any of the features. Adverts especially are striving to get “impact” and be noticed by the public who see them. For an action feature, the trailer studio will almost always select clips from the loudest passages of the production. Suppose we have come to the cinema to see a beautiful, romantic comedy. Before this starts, we are subjected to several two minutes and thirty second blasts of the loudest bits from the upcoming gory space adventures or shoot’em’up spectaculars. The projectionist has taken note of the likely audience for the romantic comedy and has adjusted the volume to tone the trailers WAY down. But… that is where the volume control stays for the rest of the presentation.

Remember the projectionist may have twenty screens or so to manage. Let’s imagine a typical scenario with projector number 13 acting up this evening and mangling the film. The middle platter on Projector 4 having a bearing problem and may not being usable at all. The splice between reels 4 and 5 on platter 8 has opened AGAIN and MUST be fixed pronto. You are in screen 10 and cannot hear a WORD of the dialog during the romantic comedy you have come to see.

“The soundtrack was terrible”.

Your reaction? “The soundtrack was terrible, couldn’t understand the dialogue at all”. Who was really to blame? No, it was not the master who mixed the feature. If played at the level he mixed it, it would have been a fabulously moving experience with all the sheen and subtlety of real life. No the real criminal was the pinball wizard who mixed the two minute thirty second trailer for the utterly forgettable “Potatoes in Space” which may never actually get to be released anyway it is so dreadful.

The simple fact is that everyone will ask for the sound to be turned down. Nobody EVER asks for it to be turned up!

The start of TASA.

So TASA was born to sort out this horrid situation. Movie sound producers had started to deliberately mix movies “hot” to overcome the dropping of levels to suit the trailers and adverts. Things were rapidly getting out of hand. The Authority set a limit to the total weighted loudness of any trailer or advert. I.e. there can be a single short shot of Armageddon in a trailer but it has to be balanced by the rest of its being very quiet. Or the trailer can be tolerably loud throughout. The trailer producer cannot however have both.

The result is that the projectionist can now audition the presentation and note that the volume level can be a notch or two higher without running the risk of being dragged off the maintenance job on platter no. 6 to turn down the volume at screens 12, 14 and 20 every five minutes. So yes, the trailers are still obnoxious and still play at an uncomfortably loud level but the sum total of TASA’s work is to actually raise the level at which the beautiful romantic comedy is played so you can now understand the dialogue.

Is it working??

Is it working? Frankly... barely. There is a depressing attitude among some of the producers of trailers and adverts. The TASA standard was meant to place a limit on how loud soundtracks were. What is happening now is that producers are tending ask for ALL trailers and adverts to be mixed UP to the standard whether the result is appropriate to the underlying material or not. Often this is done by setting the voice-over level at a completely inappropriately high level. So much so that there are more complaints about the voice-over than pretty well any other part of trailers and adverts.

The TASA Curve.

The TASA measuring method stresses the mid-high part of the audio spectrum at the expense of the middle and upper bass. Male voice particularly falls below the main band of the TASA filter bank and thus can be set at a wholly inappropriate level without falling foul of the standard. What is so depressing about this is that a studio is trying to get people to watch a beautiful feature by shouting at them. Teenagers and twenty-somethings might just appreciate being shouted at, though that is vanishingly improbable. The target audience for a romantic comedy or period piece certainly does not. While it has been found that people remember annoying adverts, this may well not hold for assault on the public’s hearing and insult to their sensibilities this in-your-face yelling represents.

The other factor which gives TASA a failing grade is that the standard was meant to reduce the average level of adverts and trailers to about a sixth of its peak in the bad old pre-TASA days. Sadly we are still a long way from that target. The standard level has only been lowered twice and the direct result of this is that properly mixed dialogue is still more difficult than it should be to understand.

Recent work on the Year 2002 productions.

More depressing still is the findings of some recent work on measuring 2002’s most popular movies. Two of these have soundtracks which are obviously mixed “hot” to counteract the dropping of the volume control by cinema staff. This stupid battle of the soundtracks is precisely what the Academy and SMPTE have fought for years to prevent. There are standard levels at which dialog should be presented and these lead to peak sound levels which are safe. Deliberately raising the level on the film will inevitably lead to governments’ deciding to legislate to have the levels reduced. This process has already started and a few people in the industry are fighting to convince the harder of thinking and harder of hearing sound producers to keep control of the soundtracks they mix. In 2003 and 2004, there were yet more examples of movies being mixed "hot" and in 2005 I witnessed a movie where an entire reel was so loud, it overflowed the averaging circuitry of a special feature meter I was working on. The circuitry was designed to have enough averaging capacity to measure a four hour movie. This one filled it in just ONE reel! And yes, played at about a quarter power it was still disgraceful. Played at the calibrated level I could barely stand ten seconds of it!

Governmental interference in the levels of theatrical presentation.

On this subject, there is one serious problem which the involvement of governments raises. Historically, sound levels of annoyance for places like building sites and airports have been made using the same averaging technique as TASA but with a different filter bank. The TASA standard filter ignores a lot of the bass and artificially boosts the upper mid frequencies. It was found to have very close correlation indeed to the amount test audiences would like adverts and trailers turned down by to be comfortable. (See here for an interesting report from Australian TV about adverts, which comes to a similar conclusion).

Weighting filter comparisons.

The so called “A-Weighting” filter used for noise abatement programs takes in a bit more bass but does not boost the upper mid band like the TASA filter. The A-Weighting filter’s characteristic is desirable when we are dealing with building sites and airports or overhead aircraft annoyance. Bass travels much further than higher frequencies. The target of this sort of noise abatement is, after all, to make it as close as possible for the noise from the offending source to be imperceptible. This is not the situation in the movie theatre. Explosions accompanied by massive bass rumbles are part of the normal stock in trade of the big movie. Hearing damage from extreme bass is virtually non-existent. Taken to extremes one can see that flying in an aircraft or simply climbing a very long hill in a car both place immense stress on the eardrum. The “level” of this stress, were it to be applied repetitively at a higher frequency, would destroy hearing almost instantly. However because the frequency is nearly zero, hearing is not damaged. Hearing damage typically starts with the highest frequencies and slowly creeps lower as the subject ages. The classic scenario of the person who takes a sound level meter into a theatre hoping to launch a lawsuit against the studio or cinema chain owner for damage to hearing always uses the filter on the meter which gives the largest deflection. They probably have little or no idea what the selections on the meter actually mean, all they know is that sound pressure levels above certain thresholds cause hearing damage.

So far, not one of these suits has been successful and even the most grasping of lawyers, seeing the success rate of the precedents, usually looks for easier targets. If however legislation does start to happen anywhere in the world, this will give new life to the racket and the film industry will then find that they have a really serious problem on their hands.

So what can be done about the battle of the soundtracks?

I can only see three solutions to this problem.

1. TASA drops the published level three full points and enforces the move. Movies then have to have limits on their average level over say any ten minute period to force back down the producers who have been matching the bad trailers and adverts. These limits are however measured using the TASA standard filter. It is vitally important to remember that the trailer level in the auditorium will NOT change because of the shift in standard. (The thing TASA forgot when the standard was written) Trailers and adverts will still be obnoxious and loud but the following feature has a much better chance of being appreciated for its subtlety.

2. All cinemas have to install a microphone in the auditorium and the signal from this microphone is then used to control the volume sent to the amplifiers such that the average level in the auditorium is kept within a strictly controlled limit.

3. Governments legislate that the level of the soundtracks on features be closely controlled such that in any theatre playing the movie at the standard volume setting, the level cannot rise above a fixed sound pressure measured with a single microphone placed at an arbitrary point in the auditorium using A-Weighting.

Government imposition of maximum levels?

If solution 3 is imposed, the result will be that movies get a LOT quieter. A great deal of the experience of the big movie will be lost. Movies will tend to sound a great deal more similar to each other. The primary reason would be because the theatre owner or the owner of the chain of theatres would tend to err on the side of caution and further turn down the volume to make sure nobody can possibly claim he is hurt by the sound.

Acoustic considerations.

The second reason why this would be a disaster comes from basic acoustics. Suppose the level is to be measured with the standard A-weighting like all other annoyance matters. (99% probable that this would happen). One microphone measuring the level of a broadband sound source in an enclosed space measures vastly differently depending on where it is inside the enclosed space.  The reason is that reflections from the walls, floor and ceiling cause peaks and valleys in the frequency response of the space. If the microphone happens to be at a point where there is a lot of reinforcement by these reflections, it can measure two or three times the level a few feet away where reflections tend to cancel out. So where does the microphone have to be placed? Who decides where it is to be placed? The soundtrack mixer has to take into consideration the fact that his product can be played in any theatre and that the measurement accuracy is incredibly poor. He has to err on the side of caution and mix the movie so that even the worst calibrated theatre is not going to fall foul of the law. Subwoofers may as well be turned off because nobody will put much of anything through them. This is because the peaks and valleys problem referred to above gets worse the lower the frequency. The audience will slowly get used to the climaxes of movies where a couple of tons of diesel go up with a resounding pop. The public will slowly drift away. Romantic comedies and period pieces will be the only barely successful fare and the industry will wilt.

Automatic control of level?

Solution 2 is almost as bad. In the US, the television cable companies have a practice of “leveling” program material sound as it is placed on the cable. The result is usually unspeakable. The sound is so heavily compressed by poor setting accuracy of some of the sources as to be barely worth listening to. Controlling the auditorium level using a similar type of feedback has the same effect. Imagine the scene with a battle at nightfall. Crickets seem to get louder and louder and the “faint” dog-bark blasts through as though the dog should really be in shot. The first distant shot rings out and all ambience abruptly disappears. We see the combatants whispering to each other but we cannot hear what they say. One of them fires and now we see the officers shouting orders but we cannot hear clearly what they are saying. These are all the effects that badly designed automatic volume control suffers from. A few movies like our romantic comedy would actually come through relatively unscathed but anything involving action would be mangled almost out of all recognition. However this solution has been proposed as a way of controlling cinema sound.

TASA takes command?

Solution 1 would be the best of the bunch and it is one which is within the industry’s power to accomplish. Will it happen? Probably not. It will almost certainly be the weak response to the imposition of Solution 3 and will almost certainly not result in the repeal of the laws governing film sound levels. TASA itself will become an irrelevance and the curve and measuring technique which took so much work to devise and agree on will be quietly consigned to the annals of history. Remember more and more movies today are being mixed deliberately "hot" simply to counteract the fact that the trailers and adverts are STILL too loud and causing volume controls around the world to be set too low. This is a battle that can have NO winners!

The Home Theatre Experience.

Does it matter? Well I happen to think that it does a very great deal. Anyone who has bought a DVD player and hitched it to a small TV with a tiny tinny speaker knows that the video looks a lot better but the “experience” people speak of when watching DVD’s is pretty underwhelming. It is only when the DVD player sound output is finally hitched to the Hi-Fi system that the purchaser suddenly has the “Home Theatre Experience” everyone raves about. I was present at just this epiphany last Christmas. I bought a DVD player for my Sister and the only TV they had with a SCART connector was a small 15” set with pretty foul sound. Fortunately her CD player was wearing out and so it was an easy job to extract it and replace it with the DVD player. Putting the sound through some pretty good speakers suddenly gave the impression that the little 15” set had a really big screen even with full letterbox formatting. I.e transferring this to the cinema experience, as long as you have a really well tuned and balanced sound system, you can get away with some pretty cheap projectors and run that arc way past its rated life!

Does it really matter at all?

The fact is that film sound is so much a part of the whole moviegoing pastime that putting unnecessary rules and regulations on it will kill a large part of the point of going to the cinema. The awful fact that a few bad sound producers working on trailers and adverts can have a profound effect on the future of the entire film industry is both a shame and an indictment of the film industry itself for not stamping out their insatiable craving for “impact”.

Epilogue.

And we must never forget that we are now entering the age of digital film picture. Will it make a difference? Naturally. Now movies are just files on a disk. The Show Player can decide how loud each file needs to be played. And the billions of currency needed to finance this conversion will be mostly spent when governments around the world will enact draconian measures to stamp out over-loud movies. So the picture is going to look fantiastic and the sound will be pathetic.