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Tonight I had a chance to really monitor the surround channels and I noticed some observations - let me know if you all agree -

It appears during the Twickenham sessions which only had NAGRA mono and sometimes the other camera's audio (stereo a little bit) - though they were cleaned up, I see the 5.1 surround mix is not really using DISCRETE CHANNELS - but echo or spectral processing of the main channels quieter in the rear channels. I kind of expected this as I think PJ really was focusing on the video restoration.

When they returned to Apple - I was hoping PJ would use some Glyn JOhn's multitrack sources for surround conversion during some of the audio, however I noticed he did not. He kept the same nagra source and standard expansion to the rear channels discussed earlier. Some of the tracks that were multitracked could have been converted to surround with more discrete channels, but I see this did not happen as FULL TRACKS were not always presented so doing this would sound awkward - as those tracks were edited for time.

Even the rooftop concert - since Glyn JOhn's recorded a limited number of tracks on the multitrack recorder and Jackson wanted to use audio from the nagra sources from the street, apple reception, etc integrated to give us a more complete concert - I see the surround is also the echo style he has been using throughout the movie.

I understand this, as some of you are familiar with my Glyn Johns Reel reconstructions - if I add official releases of multitrack sources in the reconstructions that are mainly using nagra spectral stereo - listening would be awkward when the sonic differences come out between those types of sources.

Wow - so I really want to take the nagra PJ used and merge them into the New Blue Soap spectral stereo source and use them in my multitrack reconstructions - but until I can EQUALIZE the levels to create a comfortable listening experience, I guess this will have to wait eh?

would love to hear some opinions and contributions regarding this - as I believe our ultimate goal should be to provide a COMPLETE KNOWN get back sessions audio in the best quality possible.

steve

millerTEK wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 5:33 am
Wow - so I really want to take the nagra PJ used and merge them into the New Blue Soap spectral stereo source and use them in my multitrack reconstructions - but until I can EQUALIZE the levels to create a comfortable listening experience, I guess this will have to wait eh?

would love to hear some opinions and contributions regarding this - as I believe our ultimate goal should be to provide a COMPLETE KNOWN get back sessions audio in the best quality possible.

steve

You might end up spending quite a lot of time synching audio from source A to source B to create matrix mixes for such an epic piece of work, so be prepared to walk some hard yards: you'll have to do a lot of speed corrections, in all likelihood. It's certainly worth a try, at any rate. Don't know if you've synched audio to video before: perhaps it's worthwhile synching stereo "NBS" tracks (for example) to a version of the original film (in decent quality), first, as a way to hone your synching skills.

According to the 4 Hour Interview, PJ did restore all of the Audio Tapes & Films,
in case Apple wanted to use them for future uses

Thanks to Covid restrictions it gave PJ & crew to expand this Project
& we got nearly 8 Hours, instead of 2 1/2 hours...

Yesterday we got a bit of insight into MAL in that article. Seems it is a descendant of Spleeter, which doesn't surprise me at all since there's no point in re-inventing the wheel when Deezer have done all the hard graft. Also Spleeter has a learning mode for inputting your own samples so I think they probably took Spleeter and rewrote the code a bit and used their own samples taken from the Nagras instead of using the ones bundled with it. They also mention they used CEDAR which is a manual spectral editing software. I would think this is used to clean up the stems after the AI extraction. All in all I think MAL is probably a pretty labour intensive process and not something that can churn out endless clean stems at the drop of a hat. If it could then we'd have heard it used a lot more in the series.

They said they used the 8 track (or 7 track actually) audio where they could. But Glyn didn't record all the time because 8 track tape is expensive (a shilling a second I think Glyn says in the film). For instance, the song "The Walk" is complete and three times longer on the Nagras than the multitrack version which only comes in right at the end. But I notice they did splice on the missing opening lines from Blue Suede Shoes from the Nagras, so they evidently knew what could be used and where it was. In contrast, Anthology missed the opening lines, even though any half competent fanboy could have told them where to find the missing lines.

Lord Reith wrote: ↑Sun Dec 05, 2021 7:29 am Yesterday we got a bit of insight into MAL in that article. Seems it is a descendant of Spleeter, which doesn't surprise me at all since there's no point in re-inventing the wheel when Deezer have done all the hard graft. Also Spleeter has a learning mode for inputting your own samples so I think they probably took Spleeter and rewrote the code a bit and used their own samples taken from the Nagras instead of using the ones bundled with it. They also mention they used CEDAR which is a manual spectral editing software. I would think this is used to clean up the stems after the AI extraction. All in all I think MAL is probably a pretty labour intensive process and not something that can churn out endless clean stems at the drop of a hat. If it could then we'd have heard it used a lot more in the series.

They said they used the 8 track (or 7 track actually) audio where they could. But Glyn didn't record all the time because 8 track tape is expensive (a shilling a second I think Glyn says in the film). For instance, the song "The Walk" is complete and three times longer on the Nagras than the multitrack version which only comes in right at the end. But I notice they did splice on the missing opening lines from Blue Suede Shoes from the Nagras, so they evidently knew what could be used and where it was. In contrast, Anthology missed the opening lines, even though any half competent fanboy could have told them where to find the missing lines.

as Peter Jackson said in that long podcast interview ,when they did anthology they didn't have the Nagra rolls, they were still stolen, so for the difficult part of anthology, they actually bought every available bootleg and hand synched the best bits to silent film.