Understanding the forgotten world of analog film sound workflow to improve sound preservation and restoration

It will be hard to forget how analog film sound technologies and techniques influenced our modern sound postproduction workflow after reading another whitepaper from Endpoint Audio Labs founder Nicholas Bergh. This dive into on-set sound recording and finishing workflows recounts the origins of both the technology and the methods of the analog era and how they evolved into today’s modern sound workflow. But the key message and intent of this paper is a call to the industry to better understand the challenges of ensuring these important elements of our cinematic past can be properly restored and preserved.   

Unlike the picture finishing and restoration process, sound has unique challenges due to the multiple sound outputs and versions of a single film. Many film buffs have a good understanding of the picture process of film and film “archive”, but the complexities of the workflows and elements involved in creating, delivering, and especially storing, restoring and preserving these cinema sound elements are not well understood, outside of a small, dedicated community who “keep the flame” in our global archive, preservation and restoration community. 

This paper documents the evolution and history of the technologies and methods that created these multiple elements which are still being stored in film archives. Their story, plight and need for a little attention is the subject of this history, until now, not well documented - seen through the unique lens that Nicholas Bergh brings to this topic.