Tech Sounds We Don't hear Anymore

Tape to tape editing machine pre-spooling to speed and going "chunk!" when engaging for real.

NLE's replaced that.

Edit: Meh, prolly wouldn't use that in a movie now, though.
 
I was doing sound recently on a short and the director called, camera (rolling), sound (me - speed) - cut, what the hell is speed?

Me - my digital recorder has reached speed, duh. ;)
 
CamVader said:
I was doing sound recently on a short and the director called, camera (rolling), sound (me - speed) - cut, what the hell is speed? Me - my digital recorder has reached speed, duh. ;)
Click to expand...

For those who don't know, back in the "old days" cameras and audio tape recorders required a few seconds to spin up to recording speed. So the camera operator would call "Camera speed" or "Rolling" and the production sound mixer would call "Sound speed" to let the director know the equipment was fully functioning.

There's lots of holdovers. We still "dial" a phone number, although we actually press buttons now. And phones still "ring", even though they haven't used mechanical bells in decades.

"Cut and paste" was literally cutting with a razor and using an adhesive (paper mock-ups) or splicing tape (reel-to-reel audio recorders). And lots of folks still call ADR "looping" even though no one has looped actual film in years.

Hmmmm, I haven't heard "Don't touch that dial!" in a long time, however....
 
CamVader said:
I was doing sound recently on a short and the director called, camera (rolling), sound (me - speed) - cut, what the hell is speed?

Me - my digital recorder has reached speed, duh. ;)
Click to expand...

Director got it the wrong way round anyway, they always used to call "sound speed" before "camera rolling", because sound tape was cheaper than film stock! BTW, old location recorders used to take a few seconds to get to full operating speed.
 
AudioPostExpert said:
Director got it the wrong way round anyway, they always used to call "sound speed" before "camera rolling", because sound tape was cheaper than film stock! BTW, old location recorders used to take a few seconds to get to full operating speed.
Click to expand...

We still do this here in Aus. Though, when not on film, we do call 'rolling' rather than 'speed'. Sound recordists always call 'speed' or 'sound speed' however.
 
Very nice! I had a conversation yesterday about how I am prone to nostalgia, particularly tech nostalgia, but I don't miss dial-up. Don't get me wrong; the days of phone-cradle modems (on my c64!) were fun, and I loved the discovery of it all, but boy do I love my broadband!

The article also made me think of this:
http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/en/intro.html
Which was composed and presented in 1998. 14 years ago. Not only do I remember the tech, I remember the tech being repurposed for music/art. I feel old :-/
 
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