We have just secured our Dolby Digital licence for the 35mm version of Gone Fishing. When we screened the film at BAFTA, it was presented on HDCamSR with full 24bit uncompressed six track sound. For 35mm prints, we need a Dolby encoded version, and for that, every short film needs a Dolby licence.

So tonight at Videosonics, one of the things that we will be doing is a DA88 six track version (onto tracks one to six), with a stereo ‘fold down’ mix of all tracks mixed into two (onto tracks seven and eight). This then goes off to Dolby where an engineer transfers that DA88 and encodes it onto an MO disk, which then goes to the labs and is converted into a 35mm optical track which can then be read by a projector. DA88 is an older tape based 8 track digital sound mastering format that has been around for ages, so it works and is very robust (actually it uses Sony Hi8 video tapes!).

For those of you more interested, I have printed one page from The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint as a PDF and you can view it here – it explains exactly how sound is encoded onto a 35mm print.

Onwards and upwards!

Chris Jones
My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com
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