Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Mavimao said:
I noticed that the mono sound kinda clips at times. Sounds like someone years ago did a poor job mastering the audio for 16mm optical (which has a piss poor dynamic range of about 20 dB)
I have two ways of capturing 16mm optical mono... using my Elmo 16CL or using my Eiki slimline. When capturing I set the output and input levels so that *I* am not clipping anything. However, there could be clipping in a myriad other steps I have no control over; the mechanism in home 16mm projectors for reproducing the sound is pretty crude. I also have to imagine that the process for printing the sound is also limited in accuracy by the film grain. They probably compress it sufficiently to produce good saturation and volume.
Now, you may have noticed that the level in mine never goes above about 75% of the available headroom. That's not because I clipped it there... I actually lowered the levels to that so that it wouldn't blast your speakers when switching from stereo to mono.
Just so you know, I wasn't blaming you at all! I know your attention to detail and such an amateur mistake like letting sound levels clip wouldn't have happened on your watch.
I was simply stipulating that someone back in 198-whatever didn't compress it quite well enough. Like you mentioned, 16 optical is very limiting simply because of the relatively slow speed it runs through the projector and the tiny space available (the width of 16mm sprocket holes). You have very little wriggle room for anything dynamic. It also suffers horribly from wow and flutter.
A more detailed explanation here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~gotfrit/ZAP_Sept.3_99/f/fsnd_lect_16mm_mix.html
Similar to other things in life, I've heard great sounding 16mm optical (a documentary on Stan Brakhage) and then I've heard a myriad of student films, the creators of which had little to no sound mixing training, and the sound on their prints always come out sounding distorted.