How Mi Casa Multimedia recovered sound effects, including silence, from the hiss and hum of an aging mono soundtrack

Fantastic Voyage, 20th Century Fox’s 1966 sci-fi thriller, is best known for its pioneering psychedelic visual effects and set design, which earned it two Academy Awards. But the film’s soundtrack-which includes eery sound effects that imagine the echoes of supersized and amplified internal organs inside the body’s various passageways and an atonal score that only begins some 50 minutes into the film-is equally groundbreaking. Before all of it was swallowed whole by the hiss of encroaching deterioration, L.A.’s Mi Casa Multimedia stepped in to remix the mono track. Says Brant Biles, Mi Casa’s president and chief engineer, he and his team relied on several audio restoration plug-ins to help them “fix things that previously couldn’t be fixed” and return the soundtrack and sound editing-nominated for yet another Oscar-to its original state.

Starting on a SADiE digital audio workstation, the Mi Casa editors first used CEDAR noise reduction plug-ins, including Retouch and DeNoise, to remove obvious hum and hiss from the original transfers. Once back in the Pro Tools environment, Biles says, they used Sonnox’s Restore suite of Oxford restoration plug-ins, as well as the Sonnox Oxford SuprEsser, a movable-band compressor, for fine-tuning their results. “In the SuprEsser software you can actually see a frequency analysis of where the spike is, so you can center your compression on that frequency,” he says. “It was really great to be able to go in an automate it as we needed, say getting right down to certain syllables.”

Biles and his team had previously used the Sony Oxford plug-ins, the predecessors to Sonnox Oxford plug-ins, and he says he was eager to find out how the next-gen tools could help his workflow. “The thing that immediately appealed to me about these plug-ins was how we could so easily customize and automate them,” he says. “You can really go in and surgically finesse elimination of noise floors, although you are never really eliminating it but suppressing it. When I’m using CEDAR with my SADiE system, it’s much more of a global search and restore process. First, we’ll find the floor of the actual mag itself and suppress that a bit. But then, once you start peeling off that layer of the onion, certain other anomalies really stick out and you start to hear the differences in cuts from scene to scene. You’ll have edits that were made from one camera shot to another and you can actually hear the noise floor change. Before, it was masked by that overall level of hiss. The Sonnox plug-ins give us more control over these details than we certainly had before.”

The flexibility that came with that control, he says, was an added benefit. “I like the fact that you could step away from it and come back the next day and listen to the work you’ve done and still be able to make minute adjustments using these plug-ins. It saved us from having to keep going through the more laborious process of setting it for a particular edit in a scene, finding the trouble spot, bouncing it back and importing it. We could go back to exactly where we left off.” When his team wrapped the restore last week, they handed off three “translations” of the film back to Fox: the raw mag transfer done by Nicholas Bergh at Endpoint; the Mi Casa version that is ready for DVD release, and a third pre-emphasized optical version, in case the studio wants to screen it the way it was originally heard.

Biles was most surprised by how much the audio restore actually enhanced the of drama in certain scenes, especially those with very little background audio to begin with. “There are a lot of scenes where they are doing the miniaturization in the lab and it’s so suspenseful,” Biles says. “But in terms of audio, there’s really nothing there. Now that we’ve got it to where that hiss is removed and you hear the room tone, it amplifies the level of suspense.” It puts it back, he says, to where the director and sound editors originally wanted it-silent, scoreless and as a result, pretty unsettling for the audience watching it. “It’s harder to make a film and pull your audience in emotionally without a score. No Country for Old Men did it, but that was some phenomenal filmmaking, too. Most films just manipulate you emotionally with every upswing of the music.”

Biles says he is just as excited remixing a mono soundtrack for a film that came out 40 years ago as he is doing a surround mix for a new film’s DVD or Blu-ray release. “I think I saw Fantastic Voyage about 30 times when I was a kid,” he says. “This was a major treat to be able to work with the original sound elements and match them back to their original state.” He has also remixed several early James Bond films for DVD and Blu-ray (including On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the first film he saw in a theater, at the tender age of seven, and recently, a special edition of The Sound of Music. “There are about three or four folks at Fox who have this list of the classic films in their archive, and they know the oxide is coming off and the films are in need not just of restoration but in preservation before they’re lost forever,” he says. “These are classic films and the longer they sit, the more likely they are not to play back properly.”