Vitaphone - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Vitaphone was a sound film

Sound film

A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially...

process used on feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

s and nearly 1,000 short subject

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

s produced by Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

and its sister studio First National

First National

First National was an association of independent theater owners in the United States that expanded from exhibiting movies to distributing them, and eventually to producing them as a movie studio, called First National Pictures, Inc. It later merged with Warner Bros.-Early history:The First National...

from 1926 to 1930. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the sound-on-disc

Sound-on-disc

The term Sound-on-disc refers to a class of sound film processes using a phonograph or other disc to record or playback sound in sync with a motion picture...

processes. The soundtrack was not printed on the actual film, but was issued separately on 16 inch (40 cm) and, later, 12 inch (30cm) phonograph

Phonograph

The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...

discs recorded at 33 1/3 rpm, a speed first used for this process. The discs would be played on a turntable indirectly coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer (1927 film)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system,...

(1927), used the Vitaphone process. The name "Vitaphone" was created from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound". It was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical soundtracks

Sound-on-film

Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track,...

and did not use discs.

Early history

In the early 1920s, Western Electric

Western Electric

Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...

researched both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc systems, aided by the purchase of Lee De Forest

Lee De Forest

Lee De Forest was an American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use...

's Audion amplifier tube

Audion tube

The Audion is an electronic amplifying vacuum tube invented by Lee De Forest in 1906. It was the forerunner of the triode, in which the current from the filament to the plate was controlled by a third element, the grid...

in 1913, and the development of the public address

Public address

A public address system is an electronic amplification system with a mixer, amplifier and loudspeakers, used to reinforce a sound source, e.g., a person giving a speech, a DJ playing prerecorded music, and distributing the sound throughout a venue or building.Simple PA systems are often used in...

system and the condenser microphone in 1915. DeForest himself debuted his Phonofilm

Phonofilm

In 1919, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patent on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines. These parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back...

sound-on-film

Sound-on-film

system on April 15, 1923 in New York City. However, due to the relatively poor sound quality of Phonofilm, Warners decided to go forward with the disc system as the more familiar technology.

The business was established at Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in Manhattan, New York, and acquired by Warner Bros. in April 1925. Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 6, 1926, with the release of the silent feature Don Juan
Don Juan (1926 film)
Don Juan is a Warner Brothers film, directed by Alan Crosland. It was the first feature-length film with synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and musical soundtrack, though it has no spoken dialogue...

starring John Barrymore

John Barrymore

John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...

with music score and sound effects only (no dialogue). The feature was accompanied by several talkie short subjects featuring mostly opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

stars and classical musicians of the day (the only "pop music" artist was guitarist Roy Smeck

Roy Smeck

Roy Smeck was an American musician. His skill on the banjo, guitar, steel guitar, and especially the ukulele earned him the nickname "Wizard of the Strings."-Background:...

), and a greeting from motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays

Will H. Hays

William Harrison Hays, Sr. , was the namesake of the Hays Code for censorship of American films, chairman of the Republican National Committee and U.S. Postmaster General from 1921 to 1922....

.

Don Juan was able to draw huge sums of money at the box office, but was not able to match the expensive budget Warner Bros. put into the film's production. In the wake of the failure of Don Juan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor

Adolph Zukor

Adolph Zukor , born Adolph Cukor, was a film mogul and founder of Paramount Pictures.-Early life:...

offered Sam Warner

Sam Warner

Samuel Louis "Sam" Warner was an American film producer who was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Warner Bros. Studios. He established the studio along with his brothers Harry, Albert, and Jack Warner. Sam Warner is credited with procuring the technology that enabled Warner Bros...

a deal as an executive producer for the company if he brought Vitaphone with him. Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry Warner

Harry Warner

Harry Morris Warner was an American studio executive, one of the founders of Warner Bros., and a major contributor to the development of the film industry. Along with his three brothers Warner played a crucial role in the film business and played a key role in establishing Warner Bros...

's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer, but the deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino

Rudolph Valentino

Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik...

's death. Harry eventually agreed to accept Sam's demands, and Sam pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature, based on a Broadway play starring Al Jolson, who had just starred in a musical short for the company, A Plantation Act
A Plantation Act
A Plantation Act is an early Vitaphone sound-on-disc short film starring Al Jolson. This was the first film that Jolson starred in. On a film set with a plantation background, Jolson in blackface sings three of his hit songs: "April Showers", "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody", and "When...

. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer (1927 film)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system,...

premiered at the Warners Theater in New York City, broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and single-handedly launched the talkie revolution.

Orchestra leader Henry Halstead

Henry Halstead

Henry Halstead was a U.S. bandleader.Henry Halstead's Orchestra began in early 1922 and over the next 20 years Halstead's band engagements extended from coast to coast, including the Blossom Room at Hotel Roosevelt, New York City; the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California; the St...

is given credit for starring in the first Warner Brothers Vitaphone short subject filmed in Hollywood instead of New York. "Carnival Night in Paris" (1927) featured Halstead's band and a cast of hundreds of costumed dancers in a Carnival atmosphere.

Process

A Vitaphone-equipped theater used normal projectors

Video projector

A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. All video projectors use a very bright light to project the image, and most modern ones can correct any curves, blurriness, and other...

equipped with a special turntable and reproducer, a fader

Fade (audio engineering)

In audio engineering, a fade is a gradual increase or decrease in the level of an audio signal. The term can also be used for film cinematography or theater lighting, in much the same way ....

, an amplifier

Amplifier

Generally, an amplifier or simply amp, is a device for increasing the power of a signal.In popular use, the term usually describes an electronic amplifier, in which the input "signal" is usually a voltage or a current. In audio applications, amplifiers drive the loudspeakers used in PA systems to...

, and loudspeaker

Loudspeaker

A loudspeaker is an electroacoustic transducer that produces sound in response to an electrical audio signal input. Non-electrical loudspeakers were developed as accessories to telephone systems, but electronic amplification by vacuum tube made loudspeakers more generally useful...

system. The projectors operated as normal motorized silent projectors would, but also provided a mechanical interlock

Interlock (engineering)

Interlocking is a method of preventing undesired states in a state machine, which in a general sense can include any electrical, electronic, or mechanical device or system....

with an attached phonograph

Phonograph

turntable. When the projector was threaded, the projectionist would align a start mark on the film with the picture gate, and would at the same time place a phonograph record on the turntable, being careful to align the phonograph needle with an arrow scribed on the record's surface. While the projector rolled, it rotated the linked turntable and (in theory) automatically kept the record "in sync" (correctly synchronized) with the projected image.

The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems:

Amplification - The Vitaphone system was one of the first to use electronic amplification, using Lee De Forest
Lee De Forest
Lee De Forest was an American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use...

's Audion tube
Audion tube
The Audion is an electronic amplifying vacuum tube invented by Lee De Forest in 1906. It was the forerunner of the triode, in which the current from the filament to the plate was controlled by a third element, the grid...

. This allowed the sound of the phonograph to be played to a large audience at a comfortable volume.
Fidelity - In the early days, Vitaphone had superior fidelity to sound-on-film
Sound-on-film
Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track,...

processes, particularly at both low and high frequencies
Frequency
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...

. Phonographs also had superior dynamic range, on the first few playings.

These innovations notwithstanding, the Vitaphone process lost the early format war

Format war

A format war describes competition between mutually incompatible proprietary formats that compete for the same market, typically for data storage devices and recording formats for electronic media. It is often characterized by political and financial influence on content publishers by the...

with sound-on-film processes for many reasons:

Distribution - Vitaphone records had to be distributed along with film prints, and shipping the records required a whole infrastructure apart from the already-existing film distribution system. The records would start to suffer from audible wear after an estimated 20 screenings (a check box system on the label kept track of the number of plays) and were then supposed to be replaced with a fresh set. Damage and breakage were inherent dangers and could stop the show cold for the day, so a spare set of discs was usually kept on hand. This consumed even more distribution overhead.
Synchronization - Vitaphone was vulnerable to severe synchronization problems, some of which were spoofed in a few hilarious scenes in MGM's Singin' in the Rain
Singin' in the Rain
Singin' in the Rain is a 1952 American comedy musical film starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds and directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, with Kelly also providing the choreography...

starring Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly
Eugene Curran "Gene" Kelly was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director and producer, and choreographer...

. If a record was improperly cued up, it would start out of sync with the picture and the projectionist would have to try to manually acquire sync. If the wrong record had been cued up (the cause of much audience hilarity on occasion) there was no realistic option but to pause the show for a few minutes while swapping in the right record, resetting everything and trying again. If the film print became damaged and was not precisely repaired, the relationship between the record and the print would be thrown off, also causing a loss of sync. The Vitaphone projectors had special levers and linkages to advance and retard sync, but only within certain limits. Scrupulous care and attention were demanded from the projectionist, which, if amply supplied, left only the equipment itself to occasionally go awry.
Editing - A phonograph record cannot be physically edited, and this significantly limited the creative potential of Vitaphone films. Warner Brothers went to great expense to develop a highly complex phonograph-based dubbing system, using synchronous motors and Strowger switch
Strowger switch
The Strowger switch, also known as Step-by-Step or SXS, is an early electromechanical telephone switching system invented by Almon Brown Strowger...

-triggered playback phonographs. Multiple source discs would be carefully cued up, then parts of each in turn were dubbed to a new master disc. The cutting of the new wax master could not be paused, so each playback turntable had to be started at just the right moment and each signal switched to the recorder at just the right moment. The system actually worked, but imprecisely enough that the reel of film typically required some adjustment by adding a few frames here and removing a few there in order to conform it to the disc of edited sound. This discouraged frequent changes of scene in the film and the lively pace that they created. Not only was editing sound on disc a nightmare for the editor, but it was increasingly obvious to everyone that while the system sufficed for musical shorts and a synchronized musical accompaniment for otherwise silent films, it was no way to make a feature-length film with "live" sound. By the middle of 1931, Warner Brothers-First National had thrown in the towel and was recording and editing optical sound on film, like all the other studios, and only then dubbing the completed soundtrack to discs for use with the Vitaphone projection system.
Fidelity versus Sound-on-Film - The fidelity of sound-on-film processes improved considerably after the early work by Lee DeForest on his Phonofilm
Phonofilm
In 1919, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patent on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines. These parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back...

process, and the introduction by the Fox Film Corporation of Fox Movietone
Movietone sound system
The Movietone sound system is a sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures that guarantees synchronization between sound and picture. It achieves this by recording the sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film that records the pictures...

in 1927. The DeForest and Fox systems were variable-density, but were superseded by RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...

's variable-area sound-on-film process RCA Photophone
RCA Photophone
RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was a sound-on-film, "variable-area" film exposure system, in...

, introduced in 1928.

With improvements in competing sound-on-film

Sound-on-film

processes, Vitaphone's technical imperfections led to its retirement early in the sound era. Warner Bros. and First National stopped recording directly to disc, and switched to the Photophone sound-on-film recording. The Warner studio had to publicly concede that Vitaphone was being retired, but put a positive spin on it by announcing that Warner films would now be available in both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc versions. Thus, instead of making a grudging admission that its technology was flawed, Warner appeared to be doing the entire movie industry a favor.

Theater owners, who had invested heavily in Vitaphone equipment only a short time before, were unwilling (or financially unable) to abandon the sound-on-disc process so quickly. Sound on film was now standard, but demand for sound on discs continued, compelling the Hollywood studios to offer disc sets for new films, although in ever-dwindling numbers, on into the mid-1930s. (This is analogous to today's movie studios continuing to issue new films on VHS videotape after the DVD format had eclipsed it.)

Warner Bros. kept the "Vitaphone" name alive as the name of its short subjects division, The Vitaphone Corporation (officially dissolved at the end of 1959), most famous for releasing Leon Schlesinger

Leon Schlesinger

Leon Schlesinger was an American film producer, most noted for founding Leon Schlesinger Productions, which later became the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio, during the golden age of Hollywood animation.-Early life and career:...

's Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...

and Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies
Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969.Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944,...

, later produced by Warner in-house from 1944 on. The Vitaphone name was adopted in the 1950s by Warner Bros.' record label, as a trade name for "Vitaphonic" high-fidelity recording. Later still, in the 1960s, end titles of Merrie Melodies cartoons carried the legend "A Vitaphone Release", while Looney Tunes of the same period were listed as "A Vitagraph Release".

Vitaphone soundtrack discs

In 1924-1925, when Western Electric established the format of the system which would eventually be named Vitaphone, they settled on a 16 inch (40 cm) diameter disc rotating at 33 1/3 rpm as a good practical compromise of disc size and speed. The slow speed permitted the 11 minute playing time needed to match the maximum running time of a standard reel of film projected at 24 fps

Frame rate

Frame rate is the frequency at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems...

, yet the increased diameter preserved the average effective groove velocity, and therefore the sound quality, of a smaller, shorter-playing record rotating at the then-standard speed of circa 78 rpm.

Like most ordinary records, Vitaphone discs were made of a shellac compound rendered lightly abrasive by its major constituent, finely pulverized rock. They were designed to be played with a very inexpensive, imprecisely mass-produced steel needle with a point that quickly wore to fit the contour of the groove, but then went on to wear out in the course of playing one disc side, after which it was meant to be discarded and replaced. Unlike ordinary records, Vitaphone discs were recorded inside out, so that the groove started near the scribed synchronization arrow and proceeded outward. As one consequence, the needle would be fresh where the groove's undulations were most closely packed and needed the most accurate tracing, and suffering from wear only as the much more widely spaced and easily traced undulations toward the edge of the disc were encountered.

Initially, Vitaphone discs had a recording on one side only, each reel of film having its own disc. As the sound-on-disc method was slowly relegated to second-class status, economies were effected, first by making use of both sides of each disc for non-consecutive reels of film, then by reducing the discs to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The use of RCA Victor's new "Victrolac", a lightweight, flexible and less abrasive vinyl-based compound, made it possible to downsize the discs while actually improving their sound quality.

The Vitaphone Project

Today there is a group of hobbyists known as "The Vitaphone Project", whose mission is to restore long-unseen Vitaphone productions. The members track down mute picture elements and their corresponding Vitaphone discs, and produce new, synchronized 35mm versions using the latest motion picture and sound technology. (Today's technicians have found that the original Vitaphone discs have superior sound fidelity, and are often preferable to the identical tracks in archival, sound-on-film copies.) To date the Project has restored more than 50 Vitaphone shorts from the dawn of sound, featuring many stars of 1920s vaudeville, radio, and the concert stage.

Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, Digital Theater Sound is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone.

Legacy

The Vitaphone process was among the first 25 inductees into the TECnology Hall of Fame at its establishment in 2004, an honor given to "products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology." The award notes that Vitaphone, though short-lived, helped in popularizing theater sound and was critical in stimulating the development of the modern sound reinforcement system

Sound reinforcement system

A sound reinforcement system is the combination of microphones, signal processors, amplifiers, and loudspeakers that makes live or pre-recorded sounds louder and may also distribute those sounds to a larger or more distant audience...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Early history

Process

Vitaphone soundtrack discs

The Vitaphone Project

Legacy

See also

Further reading

External links