The Picture and Sound of Music

I had to write this as a techie follow-up to my last post, so impressed am I with this new Blu-ray...yes the movie is great as well, but here I wanted to chatter on about how well it's presented on this disc.

 

If you love The Sound of Music, you need to get the 45th Anniversary Blu-ray version. It is astoundingly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Far better than you would ever think a film made in 1965 could look (and sound by the way). Here's a sample of an expert review for this disc (the reviewer gave this disc 5/5 stars for both picture and sound, something that few new films even achieve)...

 

"Now this is how you do a restoration of a film from the mid-1960s. The Sound of Music was shot in the widescreen 70mm Todd-AO format, and for this new release, the original negatives were scanned at 8K and downsized to a 4K master that has been given an extensive restoration. Color fluctuations between takes have been corrected and thousands of instances of dirt and debris have been removed, resulting in a 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 encoded transfer that's absolutely pristine. Most importantly, the fine grain structure of the 70mm negative hasn't been tampered with at all and there have been no attempts to artificially sharpen the picture. It simply isn't needed. Like most of the other 70mm films to appear on Blu-ray—2001: A Space Odyssey, Baraka, etc.—The Sound of Music inherently has a tremendous sense of clarity, revealing every detail of the wool and herringbone suits, the ornately gilded interiors of the von Trapp estate, individual blades of grass on a mountaintop meadow, and the fine textures of the actors' faces."

 

That's quite an endorsement, those guys are picky.

 

More than anything, the 70mm Todd-AO format is the big secret to this film's lasting beauty. The process was created back in 1955 (Oklahoma! was the first Todd-AO film) and this tech was still cutting edge in 1965 and for many years afterwards. A 65mm negative was photographed and printed to 70mm film (twice the width of most film movies, even today - the only film neg with higher resolution is IMAX which also uses 70mm film but turned on its side) which left 5mm for the magnetic soundtrack. And what a soundtrack it was. Hard to believe but Todd-AO movies had hi-fidelity 6-channel sound! Think about that. Most movies even well into the 80's had mono soundtracks, and this film from 1965 had 6-channel stereo. Wow.

 

This Blu-ray was almost pre-destined to be great. Everything about it pointed towards a stellar restoration:

 

1) The original 65mm original negative was used...this almost never happens - most films are restored from prints or inter-positives or other degraded sources, original negatives get lost or damaged easily. And SOM was filmed in the period before Kodak started experimenting with cheaper film stocks in the 1970's, experiments that just about wiped out a generation of movies due to early fading and deterioration. This film got lucky, for sure - the source material is as good as it gets...these are the very same strips of film that rolled through those cameras 45 years ago in Austria and Germany. Think about that.

 

2) Full 8K scan of this original negative. That's the highest resolution available right now for film restoration - every nuance of the negative was captured right down to the finest elements of the film's grain structure...it is safe to say this process extracts virtually all of the negative's usable image detail. The amount of data these scans add up to must be mind-boggling. A new digital master was created, scaled, and given a very careful and very expensive (some say more expensive than the original cost of the movie) digital restoration using the best tools available.

 

3) You need good sound for a film called The Sound of Music, right? Well, SOM lucked out there too. The original 6-channel master sound print, available for the first time since 1965, was used to create a monster 7.1 (8-channel) modern sound mix that has been described as nothing short of flawless. And this is no tricky surround mix - the new 7.1 version is faithful to the original sound of the movie. With supreme clarity and a spacious soundstage to match the movie's vistas, huge dynamic range, and presented on the Blu-ray in DTS-HD Master Audio uncompressed, what you get on this disc is a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the new 7.1 sound masters. It doesn't get any better than that. The songs, of course, sound fantastic.

 

4) And maybe the most important thing: this movie won best picture in 1965 and is beloved the world over, and that means 20th Century Fox was willing to throw serious money at the restoration. Many restorations consist of not much more than a 2K scan and automatic filtering to remove dust and dirt. This one got the royal treatment, including hand-removal of many defects (some of which this negative has carried with it since day one), shot-to-shot color and density stabilization across the film to remove fluctuations that were either congenital or have been incurred by the wrath of time. Finally, the film was given a shiny new telecine color grading, the process by which the entire film is color-corrected to the exact specifications of the cinematographer's intent. Color tints and inconsistencies that have plagued previous releases are no more.

 

The result of all this is the most amazing this film has looked since it's first run back in 1965. And I can definitively say that due to advances in sound design and delivery, it has never sounded this good, anywhere or anywhen.

 

If you have a Blu-ray player and like this film, you should really get this.