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I picked up a collection of films before lockdown, and one of films included was Buster Keaton's The General. I was told that it was a new print - the chap I bought it off said that he'd found a Super 8 negative some years before and had given it to Larry Pearce of LGP cine. Apparently Larry printed it and released it, giving one print to owner of the negative.
I think it had originally been a Collector's Club release as the writing on the leaders matched those. The film was supplied silent on 3 x 400ft reels (with tails and headers every 200ft) and on one 200ft reel, I think. I fancied putting a music soundtrack onto this but knew I would have to do it wild as I only own Eumig projectors and so can't use a sync device. Being a silent film, I figured any slight lack of synchronisation wouldn't be a problem.
I spooled it up onto one big reel and sent it to Alberto at Movie Magnetic in Italy. A few weeks later, the reel came back with two fine-looking magnetic stripes on it. I planned on projecting it on my Eumig S940 so broke it down onto two 800ft spools.
I'm a fan of Carl Davis's scores for silent films so that was the soundtrack I wanted to add. Now, I mentioned before that perfect sync shouldn't be too much of a problem with a musical score for a silent film. How wrong i was to think that. Davis's score really does need to be in time with the action on the screen - he uses leitmotifs throughout and it's inappropriate to have The General's theme playing over the wrong bit. He also uses quite a lot of sound effects when guns and canons go off, for example, so if the drum beat is either early or late, it looks and sounds wrong. My print also varied from the release of the film on disc with the Carl Davis score so I soon realised that I'd have to build up the soundtrack from scratch to match my print.
To do this, I projected each reel at 25fps, capturing the image with the video recorder on my mobile phone, and imported the resulting video into the iMovie video editing program on my Mac. I also had a DVD rip of the film with the score. I extracted the soundtrack from that video file and went about building up the soundtrack on the video capture of my print. It needed quite a lot of editing - the titles were completely different from those on the DVD, my print was slightly abridged and some scenes were in a different order. It took quite a while but you can layer sounds in iMovie which gave a nicely blended score. It was also really important to get the sound effects in precisely the correct part of the print.
Having got the soundtrack built up on my video capture, the final process was to record it onto the Super 8 print. To do this I connected my laptop's audio output to the line input of my stereo Eumig S940. I queued up my video capture to one of countdown numbers (I think I used '3'), and started the projector. As soon as 3 flashed up on screen, I pressed play on the video and both the projector and the video were running together, with the sound being transferred onto the magnetic stripes.
The Eumig S940 has the ability to very finely alter the playback speed, and I constantly adjusted it to keep the projector and video file in sync. I got quite good at watching both the projected image and the laptop video file. The easiest way to keep them in sync was to watch for the cuts, and ensure that both the video and the print were cutting at the same time. I did do a few practice runs first, though when I was doing the recording I had to stop and re-start a few times.
I eventually got the job done, and I've now ended up with a lovely print with a unique stereo soundtrack. I wouldn't want to re-record a film with dialogue this way, but I think a silent with a soundtrack like this is within my (and my equipment's) capabilities.
I think it had originally been a Collector's Club release as the writing on the leaders matched those. The film was supplied silent on 3 x 400ft reels (with tails and headers every 200ft) and on one 200ft reel, I think. I fancied putting a music soundtrack onto this but knew I would have to do it wild as I only own Eumig projectors and so can't use a sync device. Being a silent film, I figured any slight lack of synchronisation wouldn't be a problem.
I spooled it up onto one big reel and sent it to Alberto at Movie Magnetic in Italy. A few weeks later, the reel came back with two fine-looking magnetic stripes on it. I planned on projecting it on my Eumig S940 so broke it down onto two 800ft spools.
I'm a fan of Carl Davis's scores for silent films so that was the soundtrack I wanted to add. Now, I mentioned before that perfect sync shouldn't be too much of a problem with a musical score for a silent film. How wrong i was to think that. Davis's score really does need to be in time with the action on the screen - he uses leitmotifs throughout and it's inappropriate to have The General's theme playing over the wrong bit. He also uses quite a lot of sound effects when guns and canons go off, for example, so if the drum beat is either early or late, it looks and sounds wrong. My print also varied from the release of the film on disc with the Carl Davis score so I soon realised that I'd have to build up the soundtrack from scratch to match my print.
To do this, I projected each reel at 25fps, capturing the image with the video recorder on my mobile phone, and imported the resulting video into the iMovie video editing program on my Mac. I also had a DVD rip of the film with the score. I extracted the soundtrack from that video file and went about building up the soundtrack on the video capture of my print. It needed quite a lot of editing - the titles were completely different from those on the DVD, my print was slightly abridged and some scenes were in a different order. It took quite a while but you can layer sounds in iMovie which gave a nicely blended score. It was also really important to get the sound effects in precisely the correct part of the print.
Having got the soundtrack built up on my video capture, the final process was to record it onto the Super 8 print. To do this I connected my laptop's audio output to the line input of my stereo Eumig S940. I queued up my video capture to one of countdown numbers (I think I used '3'), and started the projector. As soon as 3 flashed up on screen, I pressed play on the video and both the projector and the video were running together, with the sound being transferred onto the magnetic stripes.
The Eumig S940 has the ability to very finely alter the playback speed, and I constantly adjusted it to keep the projector and video file in sync. I got quite good at watching both the projected image and the laptop video file. The easiest way to keep them in sync was to watch for the cuts, and ensure that both the video and the print were cutting at the same time. I did do a few practice runs first, though when I was doing the recording I had to stop and re-start a few times.
I eventually got the job done, and I've now ended up with a lovely print with a unique stereo soundtrack. I wouldn't want to re-record a film with dialogue this way, but I think a silent with a soundtrack like this is within my (and my equipment's) capabilities.
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