AES Journal Forum

Back in the fifties when there wasn't a lot of common knowledge about newly developed facilties and production techniques, a big part of the AES was for engineers to talk to one another and discuss what they were doing.  So you will find a lot of papers from this era that just describe facilities and those papers are very cool because they provide insight into facilities and production techniques of that era.

This is a review of the sound mixing and transfer facility at what was perhaps the world's largest industrial film production operation at the time, making publicity and training films for the US Military.  A lot of effort was put into industrial-grade 16mm production as well as theatrical-grade 35mm films for release, and so the facility has a lot in common with both small local TV production facilities as well as with big Hollywood dubbing stages.  Work had begun at this time into making stereo mixes for Cinemascope release and fitting the facility up for that.

Howard Tremaine was much more famous for his work as an author of such works as the Audio Cyclopedia than for his work doing film production for the Air Force, so this paper is a look at a different side of a well-known pioneer.