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Re: [AMIA-L] Audio question
Greg writes:
Crystal sync was great - too bad Bulova was too stupid to cash in on it.
As I recall the first use of "wireless" crystal sync was the documentary
PRIMARY by Drew and Assoc. for Time Life. Drew used crystal sync units
made from the guts of Bulova watches. I have been told, by one of the
inventors, that Bulova had no interest in the project, though they were
approached after the fact. For those of you too young to remember, prior
to the advent of using a "clock" to synchronize the audio to the film, a
wire that ran from the camera to the tape recorder was required. And then
when you recorded the 1/4" (or whatever) to fullcoat you needed a resolver
(the Frezzolini unit I mentioned) to keep media A in synch with media B
during the transfer process. Judging from the number of online videos with
"out of sync" soundtracks it would seem that little at least some folks are
going backwards rather than forwards :)
--g
Um, not exactly.
Primary was shot with a combination of non-sync cameras (which explains the
look of the film) and a couple of early cable sync rigs -- an Arri 16M with
a 5.7 Kinopic that Al Maysles used for that famous shot of JFK parting the
crowds) and an Auricon Cine Voice (100 foot loads) with a Perfectone
recorder and odd prototype Sennheiser shotgun mic that was nearly 3 feet
long. Some material was shot with non-sync cameras and recorders and sunk
in editing -- including Ricky Leacock's scene of Humphrey in the car talking
nonsense about fertilizer. Ricky shot the Auricon sync footage too. Of
course, the sync cable broke early on, and they had no sync indicator on the
Perfectone, so most of the film required extensive messing around to get it
into sync, using a monstrous machine that Loren Ryder built and was used in
the hotel room where it was edited, on a deadline. (This machine was the
inspiration for Pennebaker's "Time Machine" -- which used a variable speed
motor chain driven to the one-frame-slip-per-rotation crank on a Magnatech
92 resolver -- sometimes used with the really bizarre Eltro rotating head
pitch-shifter Penny had attached to his Studer C-37.)
The Accutron came after Primary. The inspiration was from Willard Van
Dyke -- kind of. Willard was making a hack industrial film for Bulova and
showed Ricky the watch. Ricky (who studied physics at Harvard) said he can
pinpoint the exact spot near St. Patrick's cathedral where inspiration
struck -- sync was a time issue, and you could use the Accutron as a time
base (though not a very good one). For those too young to remember, the
Accutron watch used a 360Hz (back then it was a 360 cycle) tuning fork to
keep the watch accurate -- it was used by astronauts and railway workers.
With the help of the great Mitch Bogdanowicz (senior), they used the
Accutron to drive an AC sync motor in the camera, and a second one to
generate a 60 cycle pulse that was recorded on the Perfectone or Nagra. If
the watches remained synchronized, you kind of hoped your audio might, too.
The special black-faced "Astronaut Accutrons" that were used were also worn
by these filmmakers -- Ricky, Penny, and Al all wore them through the
mid-70s at least. They were replaced by industrial, temperature compensated
tuning forks, and later, crystals.
The integrated circuit and phase-locked loop combined with smaller DC motors
and crystals changed everything. In the US, Ed diGiulio's Cinema Products
made many cool motors, especially those in the CP16 cameras. In France,
about the same time, JP Beauviala invented a similar motor for Eclair (the
BEALA for the NPR) and later founded Aaton, and pioneered time code for
film.
Didn't mean to go on so long here, but this is an area of obsessive interest
to me -- I've shot on many films with Ricky and Penny, worked with Ricky for
a couple of years at MIT, and chat with Al sometimes. I've bugged all of
them for historic details about this stuff, and collect old odd film sound
recorders of the era -- including a Perfectone, Stellavox SM-5 with
Rangertone, Nagra II (spring-wind with tube electronics), Nagra SNNs (which
I use), Sony EM2NS, Magnasync Nomad, Maihak springwind, and many more.
Jeff "spending the weekend in lovely Culpeper, VA, in a little room in a big
building" Kreines