Posted: 10/19/01

Re-Creating "T2"
Conversations With Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom And DVD Producer Van Ling
By Michael Coate & Perry Sun

Creating "The Ultimate Edition DVD"

In 1993, the Ultimate Edition LaserDisc was released. That disc was Pioneer's Special Edition release of James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. With supplements designed by Van Ling, the T2SE, as it became affectionately known by fans, went on to become one of the top-selling LaserDiscs as well as a fan favorite for Special Edition content. Seven years later, Ling has been given an opportunity to revisit the title for the Artisan Home Entertainment DVD release.

In addition, T2's Oscar-winning soundtrack has been given a makeover courtesy of multiple Academy Award®-winning sound designer and re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom.

About The DVD

August 29, or "Judgment Day" to fans of the movie, marks the release of Artisan Home Entertainment's Terminator 2: The Ultimate Edition DVD. The first DVD release of T2 in 1997 featured the 136-minute theatrical edition of the movie, while this new DVD goes one step further by utilizing seamless branching technology to give viewers the choice of watching the theatrical version of the film or an expanded version that was created specifically for the home video market. Based on the idea that, in the absence of time constraints, the expanded version allows viewers a better glimpse into the original intent of the filmmakers. The two-sided DVD is packed with hours of added value content, many carried over from the highly regarded LaserDisc release, with many new supplements exclusive to this new DVD. The DVD includes three documentaries, a collection of trailers and promotional material, and a complete production history of the movie. And be on the lookout for some hidden features. Please see page 104 for a more specific rundown on the disc's special features.

About The Soundtrack

The Dolby® Digital 5.1 soundtrack on the previous T2 DVD was considered somewhat conservative in terms of dimension and bass extension, compared to what is typically encountered for current films of a similar genre. However, the 5.1 soundtracks on this edition (Dolby Digital and DTS® Digital Surround™) are the result of an entirely new remixing effort, with some redistribution of sounds in favor of the surround channels, as well as the addition of back surround for Dolby Digital Surround EX™. Other enhancements include the increase in LFE content to give greater impact to some explosions, crashes, etc.

Part 1: Van Ling

Upon graduation from the University of Southern California, Van Ling began his film career as creative/technical/research/VFX assistant to filmmaker James Cameron. Ling proceeded to work on the original productions of The Abyss and Terminator 2, and served as head of the production department for Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment. In 1994, he joined Casey Cannon as partners in Banned From The Ranch Entertainment, and has been involved in the creation of visual effects and computer graphics for such productions as Titanic, Starship Troopers, Dr. Dolittle, Twister, Dante's Peak, Stir Of Echoes and Hollow Man. In addition, Van has produced supplements for several LaserDisc and DVD releases, including The Abyss, Terminator 2, Independence Day and Field Of Dreams. Longtime readers of Widescreen Review may know Van from his associations with Joe Kane, as well as from articles found in WSR Issues 3 and 6. And attentive viewers can even spot him as an actor in T2, Alien Nation and Titanic. WSR's Michael Coate recently spoke to Van about his involvement in the new T2 DVD and other projects.

Michael Coate, Widescreen Review: Was the entire movie given a new transfer or just the additional footage that comprises the Special Edition scenes?

Van Ling: The transfer uses as its base the 1997 theatrical transfer that was done by Lou Levinson in high-def to D5, then downconverted to D1; this was the 1997 DVD release of the theatrical version of the film. Bryan Ellenburg and Michelle Friedman at Artisan (then called LIVE) had the foresight in 1997 to anticipate this new Special Edition DVD version by going ahead and doing a high-def transfer of the Special Edition scenes as well, which were on one separate IP [interpositive] film roll. This didn't work out too well, however, because it was not transferred with reference to the rest of the theatrical version; and as a result, the segments did not match when intercut with the rest of the transfer. Plus, there were shots missing from the SE roll that were special cases that had to be found. So I went back in and re-transferred portions of the Special Edition material with Mike Conlin at HDTC, where Lou had done the original HD transfer three years earlier (on older equipment). We did it in high-def to D5, so when the time comes to do a high-def version, all the pieces are there and they will match.

WSR Coate: How did this "Ultimate Edition" disc project get started? Was there ever a consideration of releasing it as it appeared on the big 1993 LaserDisc set at the time of the first DVD release?

Ling: We talked back in '97 about whether it was feasible to try to do what we had done on the LaserDisc with what I had in mind for the DVD in terms of using all the angles and doing this kind of multi-story presentation where you can seamlessly branch between versions and so on. At that time, I don't think LIVE was quite ready to try to do that. They were more interested in getting the theatrical version out. Nobody was at the point yet where they felt comfortable in doing the kinds of things I wanted to do to really push the envelope of DVD authoring, using seamless branching and so on.

WSR Coate: Was it even technically possible in 1997 to make this new DVD as it appears today?

Ling: I don't think it was impossible, but I do think it was a lot less feasible. It was kind of like people were just learning to walk with DVD back in 1997. I wanted to run.

WSR Coate: How was the decision made to manufacture the disc as a DVD-18?

Ling: That was a choice from Artisan. There are various reasons to how the studios choose to do it. Artisan likes to push that technology a little bit. As you know, they did The Stand, which was the first commercial DVD-18 disc.

WSR Coate: It seems that not very many studios are supporting the DVD-18 discs. Is it a myth that they are more difficult to manufacture?

Ling: DVD-18s are authored exactly the same as two DVD-9s—you deliver two separate DLTs [digital linear tape]&emdash;but are more challenging to manufacture. On The Abyss and Independence Day, we did two separate DVD-9 discs, but we could have just as easily told the replicator to make one DVD-18 for each of those titles, using the same DLTs. It starts getting complicated, though, because you can't start replicating until you have both DLTs ready. You can't do one side and then wait until the DLT is done and then do the other side. For the consumer and studio, it can be like those VCR/TV combos&emdash;they're not that popular because if one part is defective, you have to replace the whole thing. This is also true for replication, so the failure rate per batch is statistically higher. Therefore, it becomes more expensive because you have to do more runs to get the same amount of good discs. For these reasons, there also aren't many manufacturing facilities that do DVD-18s&emdash;I only know of WAMO&emdash;so that adds cost, too, if you need a big run quickly to meet a street date and can't spread the work around. On the other hand, studios save in packaging and inventory control costs with everything on one disc, so maybe as they get better at it and the price goes down, we'll see more of them. Artisan's been leading the way in using DVD-18s, and I understand Warner is going to be following suit with the upcoming Superman disc.

WSR Coate: I think Warner also has indicated that they may do some other DVD-18s, possibly A Star Is Born and Gettysburg. Now as a content producer, and also as a consumer, do you care which DVD format is used? Should it matter?

Ling: I don't really have a preference. I've had a disc of mine done as an "18" and I've had some that have been done as two "9s." The differences between them are mostly on the manufacturing end. They both have their pluses and minuses. My main thing is, make sure it works. I think one of the things about T2 being a DVD-18 is that Artisan wanted to be able to say, "Look at what we put onto one disc." And this way, the packaging can be more standard. It doesn't need the double packs and so on.

WSR Coate: Did you use the layout style of the Special Edition LaserDisc as a model for the new DVD, or did you start from scratch and decide to take advantage of DVD being a more interactive, non-linear format?

Ling: We kept a lot of that paradigm intact. And as I did with The Abyss DVD, comparing it to the LaserDisc, I knew that there would be a couple different kinds of people who would be watching it. You had your general consumer who would just want to watch the movie and then maybe skim a couple of video-based items like documentary clips. Then you would have the people who wanted to know a little more, so they would watch all the trailers and all the things, but they wouldn't want to get really, really in-depth. And then you would have the hard-core fans and buffs who would want to get every little bit out of it. For that reason, what I tried to do, as I did with The Abyss, was to provide access to the information in several different ways. The big challenge that I had, even with the LaserDisc, was that a lot of people were overwhelmed by how much material there was, and for those who were like, "I just want to watch the movie and maybe see a documentary. I don't necessarily want to know all this other stuff," it was harder for them to get to it. The SE LaserDisc for T2 was really geared toward the serious film buff. It wasn't geared toward the general consumer in the sense that the general consumer was not used to stepping frame-by-frame through tons of information. I think that made it more of a niche presentation.

WSR Coate: Was that a challenge at all while creating the DVD? Did you have a desire to make the supplemental material more easily accessible?

Ling: It is a little more of a challenge in authoring because what I choose to do in these instances is to author the disc where you can view it from a beginner level, an intermediate level or an advanced level. Each of those gives you access to more material. In other words, if you go to side two on the DVD, you basically get three choices. The three documentaries and the four trailers are the data hub. If you were the kind of person who just wants to look at the normal stuff that people see as bonus material and don't really want to go further than that, then it's right there at the top level. If you want to go a little deeper, you can go down to the next level of the data hub, which gives you the screenplay, the storyboards and all of these video clips that are from the supplement but can be watched in and of themselves. They are understood kind of as, "Oh, that's nice. It's a little sound bite about this and a little one minute piece about that," and that's the intermediate level. If you want to go further than that and you want access to the full supplement as I created it for the LaserDisc, you go down one more to the core.

WSR Coate: And they're arranged in the menu that way?

Ling: Yeah, you're going deeper into Skynet. That's the visual paradigm that I use to help sell the concept. Kind of the same way I did on The Abyss with the drill room, Abyss in-depth and so on. Then once you get to saying, "Okay, I want to go through the supplement with the multimedia presentation of still images, text frames and motion video clips," you can choose whether or not to view it as you did on the LaserDisc, which is to literally start at the beginning and go through to the end. I do know that some people have actually done that, and they've said it took them 16 to 24 hours to get through it all. There's that way to go through the material, or you can go through it by selecting specific chapters and jumping from chapter to chapter.

WSR Coate: What I thought made the SE LaserDisc so informative and resourceful was the logical layout of the supplements. The bonus material began with project conception and proceeded through pre-production, production, post-production, marketing, release and so on. I don't think the linear nature of laser hindered that in any way.

Ling: And it's kept in that sequence when you get down to that level on the DVD. So what I've done is I've tried to give it that kind of breadth in terms of each level being a super-set of the previous level, if you will. You get to see more material. You get to see it in a context as you go down into it. Therefore, the people who just want to skim the top, literally stay on the top level. The people who really want to go in-depth can go to the lower levels and can really get into it. So that way we're not overwhelming the general consumer, but at the same time we're not short-changing the serious film buff or Terminator fan.

WSR Coate: How did you go about selecting which material from the SE LaserDisc set would be carried over to the new DVD and what material would be left off?

Ling: There is only one thing on the LaserDisc set that did not make it onto the DVD, and that was the Guns N' Roses music video.

WSR Coate: Was that left off by choice, or was there a licensing issue involved with retaining it, which often seems to be the case with music?

Ling: That was a licensing thing. Believe me, I tried to get it. But what I tried to do to compensate for that was I do talk about it under the promotions category. I do include some still clips from it. The other thing we tried to do was to add some new things, like we substituted in a chapter about T2-3D which, of course, didn't even exist when the LaserDisc set was done.

WSR Coate: And what about T2: More Than Meets The Eye and The Making Of T2? Wasn't one of those included on the very first T2 LaserDisc?

Ling: The Making Of T2 was on the original 1991 CAV LaserDisc release.

WSR Coate: And More Than Meets The Eye was made for cable?

Ling: Yes. More Than Meets The Eye was a documentary that we did concurrently with the 1993 Special Edition LaserDisc. We used it to promote the LaserDisc. It was made specifically for Showtime, and was kind of a confluence of things. It worked out really well because Showtime was saying they were in their cycle of broadcasting the movie and thought it would be great if they could have a special "making-of" instead of just a normal promo. They had done that kind of thing before for Jacob's Ladder and L.A. Story, and they wanted something related to T2 to coincide with their cable run of the theatrical version. They wanted to commission or acquire something about the deleted scenes, so they would be able to run this little 20-minute piece right before or right after the movie&emdash;and it actually brought them more viewers. And coincidentally, we were starting to work on the Special Edition LaserDisc at that point, so it made perfect sense.

WSR Coate: Did you approach making the Showtime piece any differently than the LaserDisc material?

Ling: What I tried to do was to make something special for Showtime that covered the Special Edition version of T2, and at the same time it would be kind of separate from the LaserDisc but drawing from the same materials we were using. The Showtime piece has never been on a LaserDisc or DVD before. We actually had it on a VHS box set of the T2 Special Edition, but as far as I know, it disappeared relatively quickly.

WSR Coate: Do you think the general public really wants all these fancy extras, or do they appeal mostly to the film fanatic?

Ling: I think the general public is learning to discern these things because over the years, they have become much more film industry savvy. There are some people who don't care, but they want it if it's not going to cost more for them to get it.

WSR Coate: Do you think that may be why LaserDisc remained a niche?

Ling: Yeah, I think that's probably the case. Now, all of the basic features of LaserDisc are standard on DVD. You get chapter stops, a trailer, a widescreen version and some production notes for $20. And that used to cost $40-$100 on LaserDisc, so it's nice to have. And I've also noticed something interesting, which is that people sometimes feel that if they don't get something, even if they have no interest in using it but know that it could have been on the disc, they feel gypped. Which is a really twisted way of looking at things.

WSR Coate: The audio commentary found on the new DVD, if I'm not mistaken, is exactly the same as what was included on the LaserDisc. Since actors are now starting to get more involved in participating in audio commentary recordings, including Arnold Schwarzenegger with the recent Conan The Barbarian DVD re-issue, was there ever a consideration of recording a new one?

Ling: We talked about it. It would have been great, but I don't think Arnold and Jim were available. Here's the other interesting thing&emdash;the commentary is on all the versions of the film, which means that for the theatrical version it had to be edited.

WSR Coate: So what did you do to accommodate those viewers who choose to listen to the audio commentary while viewing the theatrical version of the film?

Ling: There was a little bit of editing involved. We had to go in there and figure out what we were going to drop and what we would keep. The goal was to make the commentary seamless.

WSR Coate: So the audio commentary track was originally edited to match the Special Edition running time of the LaserDisc, and was created years before the seamless branching option was a reality?

Ling: Exactly. My editor Lauryl Duplechan and I did that for the ID4 DVD as well. We had to take Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's commentary and not only have it for the Special Edition to which it belonged, but also trim it shorter for the theatrical version since those were both available on that DVD as well.

WSR Coate: Was director Jim Cameron involved in any way with this new T2 DVD?

Ling: I worked with Lightstorm in terms of them overseeing and looking over my stuff, but obviously they have some trust level for me with this material. They would send the stuff up to Jim to look at. I have a feeling that since Jim knew that it was based on the LaserDisc material and that I was doing it, he didn't have to worry about it and he knew he didn't have to be that hands-on. Certainly, everything went through his office so that if there were any problems, I'm sure they would have mentioned it. They have approval over everything. I worked closely with my successor at Lightstorm, Geoff Burdick, and the whole Lightstorm production department.

WSR Coate: Beyond creating the supplements, how involved were you in producing other aspects of the DVD?

Ling: I had to find all of the elements. As producer of the DVD, that was one of the things that I did. In addition, I supervised the new sections of the transfer and even did digital cleanup myself on some shots that needed tweaking that couldn't be done in just a straight dirt removal. I have a credit on the Special Edition cut of the film as Special Edition Producer, and so I take that rather seriously. I do try to stay involved in the whole process, whether it is supervising new sections, transfer or editing all those pieces together to create the different versions in order to encode them properly.

WSR Coate: Since you worked on the original T2 production, did that give you any advantages or disadvantages when it came time to creating the LaserDisc, and now the DVD?

Ling: I would certainly think it provided some advantages. Obviously, even though I'm having to do some archaeology to find materials and things, I have a pretty good idea of where everything is. There's never a question of starting fresh and looking at it and not knowing what something is. Because I did work on the film, I have all of that already burned into my brain. I think that gave me a distinct advantage with this title in that regard. That is not to say that all the other DVD producers don't bring to their projects some knowledge. I think that the best DVD producers are the ones who are fans of the films. They care enough about them to find out what things are. I have seen some Special Editions early on in the heyday of LaserDisc where there was some great material, but whoever put it together had no idea what they had. They were just like items on an inventory, and they threw the material all on a disc and didn't arrange them in any particular way. They didn't point out anything. This is just a small example. For stills, I would always go in and look through them and would say, "Oh wow, look at that. They shot this that way because you can see this kind of pole here," or something like that. Those are actually really interesting facts and they are buried in the middle of a bunch of stills. It should have been pointed out. That kind of thing to me is sad because you have a lot of producers out there who do care about the film, and they really look into them. You've got other people who are gathering the materials and they know enough to say, "Oh, this is from this movie. Why don't we include it on the disc?" But they don't necessarily know the significance of it. And so what happens is you can have things left off the disc that would have been really cool. It was only left off because they didn't really know what to do with it, or the significance of it was lost. I think that is what a good film historian does. All the best DVD producers that I know are also film historians, to some extent. They understand the value of it. I understand production because I have been in it, so I probably have a slightly different eye when I'm looking at things.

WSR Coate: Do you always use that approach with all of your DVD projects, even when you didn't work on the original production?

Ling: Even on the projects that I work on where I haven't worked on the original film, say Field Of Dreams or Independence Day, I still try to approach it with a film scholar's perspective and really look at, "Oh, look at how they did this," and try to understand the significance of things and not just say, "Here are a bunch of stills." I try to organize things and try to point out things that might be of interest to people.

WSR Coate: How have you found creating supplements for catalog titles to be different from day-and-date titles?

Ling: The producers who work on the current titles have a great advantage because it is all fresh; it is all pretty current. The studios haven't put the materials into a banker's box and buried it in a vault in St. Louis yet. They're now seeing just how big the video market is, so they are saving things. Filmmakers are saving things as well, and that has helped a lot. On the current titles, all this material that we used to have to dig for or try to save ourselves because people would throw them away thinking, who cares about the call sheets or who cares about these things, is now accessible. People are looking forward to including things on the DVD, which is great because that means that people who are producing current movies on DVD have a wealth of material to work with. From the Web sites, to the Internet, to ROM games and so on, all of this material is now much more available. For the people who are doing catalog titles, the older stuff, it is archaeology. Things have either been thrown away or been mislabeled.

WSR Coate: Which project has been the most difficult in terms of the archaeology aspect you refer to? Can you discuss some of the complexities involved in this area of DVD production?

Ling: One of the things that I've been working on recently is The Terminator (1) DVD for MGM. I was going back into boxes of film material that had not been touched since 1984. It was a fascinating process&emdash;the kind of archaeology that was involved in that. Trying to remember, "Wait a minute, we're looking for this particular piece of film. Where is it? Well, what could it have been used for? Did it end up in a network version? Well, let's look in the boxes that contain the trims for the network version of the film." There is a thought process that goes behind that archaeology where you're going to have to understand both the production process and the whole ancillary market process. Sometimes, for a network version of the movie, they will go back and pull trims and outtakes and use those to pad out the film to fill a time slot. I'm sure you've seen a number of films on TV that have been done that way where you'll say, "Hey, wait a minute. There's a scene I don't remember seeing." And it's because they've gone back and pulled them out to put them in the network version, and producers have to know where to look for those to find them. For the DVD version, usually you're given an IP from the original negative, and that's the version that went out in the theatres. So all these other little scenes may not exist. Or if they exist, they may only exist on video. So yeah, it's an archaeology process and a matter of really trying to understand the mind-set behind where some of this material may be and even knowing what to look for. You know, you read a script and say, "Well, did they even shoot this? That would be as cool as an omitted scene if they shot it," and then it's matter of finding it. Filmmakers today are a lot more savvy to this. Even on some of the productions where I've been doing visual effects in recent months and recent years, they'll be saying, "Oh, I can't wait to talk about this on the commentary," or, "I've got to tell this story when we're doing the DVD," or "You know what? We can lose this scene. I don't mind if the studio cuts it out; I will get my cut on the DVD." So this has actually made the theatrical film not the end of the process like it used to be, but somewhere kind of in the middle. I'm not sure whether that is good or bad.

WSR Coate: Has having a background in visual effects helped you as a DVD producer?

Ling: I certainly think it's been of use. Having a visual effects background makes it easier for me to understand where all the shots and all the elements are. I don't know how many DVD producers have had to contend with that. Sometimes on the current releases they have the ability to ask the effects house to put something together. You know, some before-and-after segments and some things like that that can be put on the DVD. From my standpoint, I know how it all works so I feel I can convey it all in layman's terms if necessary. I think that the stuff I wrote for the T2 DVD in terms of the text material, explaining how things were done, I managed to keep it pretty consumer friendly without it getting really, really arcane. So I think that the visual effects background certainly has helped. And it certainly has given me the ability to do create my own menus with elaborate 3-D visuals.

WSR Coate: The T2 menus, and The Abyss and ID4 for that matter, are very elaborate. How involved do you get with their design?

Ling: I was involved with the design, creation, rendering&emdash;everything. In most cases, DVD producers produce the supplemental material and then they consult on how the navigation will work. But the menu graphics and everything else are usually generated by another party. That's how a lot of the studios will do it.

WSR Coate: And you would rather just create the menus yourself?

Ling: I did them all myself and with one other digital artist, Johnathan Banta, on our Macintoshes. We create them out of our little offices. What was really interesting with all three of these titles [T2, The Abyss and ID4] is that we did full-on 3-D. The shots that start up the two sides of the T2 disc were generated from scratch. That terminator factory is generated from scratch. The exterior shot with the tilt down from the Skynet or the Cyberdyne shaped bunker to the endo skeletons on patrol to the HK flying overhead are all generated from scratch. That's the thing that I like to bring to titles of this magnitude. On Independence Day we recreated the shot of the Alien Destroyers hovering over the White House as well as the entire interior of the Area 51 hanger. We actually got the visual effects companies to provide us with the digital 3-D model of the alien ship in the hangar. I told them what I was doing and they said, "Hey, that's really cool. I'd love to see that. We'll see if we can dig up the CG models." That's one of the other benefits of having a visual effects background. They know my work. It is very easy for me to talk to them and say, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if I could get a still of this element at 2K and use that as a texture matte," for instance. And have them be able to say, "Yeah, lets get it off the DLT and it will be in this kind of digital format," and so on. Then I'm able to work with it because I do that on the visual effects projects that I do anyway. In that sense, it is definitely a benefit.

WSR Coate: Do you enjoy creating your own menus?

Ling: In doing the menus we just had a blast, because creating a 3-D environment is basically recreating stuff from some of our favorite movies. It's kind of fun. The mandate that I put on myself and my artists when we do this is to use those as a navigation device and try to make it cool to look at in and of itself, but have them also convey and keep the mood of the picture and be fairly easy to use.

WSR Coate: What is your main objective with the menus?

Ling: Well, you want to make sure that people can find what they're looking for.

WSR Coate: A lot of the menus I have seen are very interesting visually and thematically, but my main complaint is that they are often on-screen too long. It's as if the designers are so in love with the fancy technology that they forget that it is merely a navigation tool.

Ling: Yeah, you have to find that balance. You want to make the navigation intuitive, but you might as well make it cool if you can. Make it really interesting to look at or have people say, "Hey, wouldn't this be neat if this thing moved," or if when you went from one place to the other it wasn't just cutting from one still with some text overlaid on it to another still with some text overlaid on it. That's not what you want to do for every title, but sometimes it really helps keep the mood. They're are some, like The Wedding Singer, where you can feel like you're in an environment and you're almost playing a game. And as long as the menu doesn't become too annoying, you can use it to your advantage to keep the feel of the film. In terms of The Abyss, T2 and ID4, there was a universe that I think people were interested in. The surrounding environment was interesting about those films as well as the storylines and the characters, so that's one of the things that we try to do in creating the menu systems for those&emdash;to give you a sense of things and have them make sense.

WSR Coate: Was the LaserDisc for The Abyss the first home video Special Edition project you had worked on?

Ling: That was the first LaserDisc that I got fully involved in. I had done some helping on the side for the guys at Sharpline Arts when they did Aliens. I helped them pull materials because I was in charge of all that when I was at Lightstorm. I provided them with materials and proofed some stuff and so on. Although we kind of started working that way on The Abyss LaserDisc project, it became a situation where, because I knew that film intimately inside and out, it made more sense if I ended up writing and organizing it. Dave Fein did some nice work on that project. In going back and looking at how much material we went through, he did some nice organizational things. He was going to try to keep it together, but he didn't have the benefit of having been there when the film was shot, which gave me the ability and the opportunity to be a little more accurate with certain things and to be able to sort things out and organize things a little better. I feel that the Abyss Special Edition LaserDisc, because of time and a number of other factors, was only about 65 percent of what I wanted it to be.

WSR Coate: Were you able to fill in the extra 35 percent with the DVD?

Ling: Yes, I think I'm up to about 95 percent where I wanted to be with the DVD.

WSR Coate: So the HD version five years from now will be 100 percent!

Ling: I think the main part of the five percent that isn't quite all there has to do with it not being anamorphic or a couple other things I would have added, had there been space. I have a tendency to like to fill up my discs.

WSR Coate: But the menus were anamorphic on The Abyss, were they not?

Ling: The menus were anamorphic, as they were on T2 and ID4. I always do my menus in anamorphic. That's actually what most studios have you do&emdash;at least the ones I've dealt with. And now that Fox has new management, they've finally gotten the anamorphic bug and have embraced that.

WSR Coate: That's good. It's expected with new titles but it's definitely welcome when they go back and do a catalog title with an anamorphic remaster.

Ling: Exactly; though it does cost money to go back and do it for the older titles. And right now we are on the cusp of digital television, so there's this whole question of, should we go back and do certain kinds of transfers now because what if things change in two years? We want our transfers to last longer than six months, you know?

WSR Coate: Can you elaborate on why the DVD for The Abyss utilized a previously created non-anamorphic master instead of a brand-new anamorphic one?

Ling: Fox's policy at the time we started working on the disc (mid-1999) was to use the existing approved transfer if it was viable. There was a non-Cameron-approved anamorphic transfer of the film done by Fox at one point, but Lightstorm reviewed it in detail and deemed it unusable. I can understand why, as I was involved in the two approved (and extremely different!) transfers of the film from 1989 and 1992 and I know what kind of care and attention had to go into it (color dissolves all over the place, specific framing of every shot). Jim is focused on his future projects, and Fox asked if the current D1 transfer was approved and viable, which it was&emdash;so they went with it. And in fact, I did have to re-transfer a few shots of The Abyss from film in order to make the seamless branching work, but I couldn't do the whole film. Fox, at the time, also did not see The Abyss as a "major" title in the sense that it was not a moneymaker on the level of Aliens or ID4. The new team at Fox, people like Peter Staddon, are much more in tune with what home theatre enthusiasts care about, so since The Abyss, I think they've acquitted themselves quite admirably on the anamorphic issue. Would Jim and Lightstorm have done a new anamorphic transfer if Fox had been willing to put up the time and money, as they are now doing on all their titles? I can't speak for them, but I think so. I do know they are not opposed to anamorphic, as some have suggested. Aliens was anamorphic, for instance.

WSR Coate: What was involved in creating the T2 booklet that is included with the DVD?

Ling: Most of that stuff I had written for the LaserDisc. Some of it is an encapsulated version, and all of the notes about the restoration are straight out of the LaserDisc insert. Some of the other information I had written for a VHS set in '92. I had written a whole booklet on that back then which gave smaller encapsulations on the production history, so they took that and worked with it for the new DVD booklet.

WSR Coate: No subtitled production notes/trivia subtitles on the new T2 DVD, like with The Abyss?

Ling: No. We completely ran out of room, but I wanted to have them. The reason we did it on the Abyss DVD was we weren't able to do a commentary. Jim Cameron, in general, doesn't do commentaries, as you may have noticed. He did a partial commentary for T2 through the magic of editing.

WSR Coate: And was Cameron's "commentary" just a wild recording, or was he watching the movie during the recording?

Ling: That was me asking lead-in questions I knew I could later put into a commentary.

WSR Coate: Why encode a third version of T2 as a hidden feature?

Ling: I did not feel that the third version of T2 with the original ending was compelling enough to advertise as an additional featured bullet-point on the disc. We didn't have it on either the original theatrical version or the LaserDisc Special Edition for a reason, so why advertise it as a big new thing and in my mind, disappoint people? I think it's good to have on the disc so that students of narrative can see what the original intent was, but it doesn't merit more attention than that. Frankly, I wanted it hidden on there so people who knew about it could mess with their friends' heads by playing the hidden version in its entirety and have their friends who don't know about it freak out when the movie ends totally differently from what they remembered!

WSR Coate: I liked seeing the names appear on-screen of the person talking during the T2 DVD commentary. What prompted you to have that feature added?

Ling: Somebody had suggested it to me, and also feedback from fans. I asked people on the net what they would like to see and how I could make the DVD better. With the LaserDisc, people were saying it was great that we had 26 people on the commentary, but that they didn't always know who was talking. So what we did was put in a subtitle track that does nothing but tells you who is speaking. It's not often that you have the opportunity to have done something seven years ago, and it's essentially version 1.0 of what you're doing now on DVD. It's an interesting thing that what I was able to do with T2 seven years ago was really what I try to do on a daily basis on DVD.

WSR Coate: It seems that you pushed the envelope of technology in terms of interactivity at the time the LD set was created. The Criterion editions of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Close Encounters come to mind as being LaserDiscs that also gave us a glimpse of things to come with the interactive capabilities of DVD.

Ling: Not just the technology, but the presentation and the way the materials were organized and put together, and by having a lot of graphics. And I owe a big nod to people like Morgan Holly and the folks at Criterion.

WSR Coate: Emphasizing LaserDiscs and the efforts of Criterion always seem to come up in these interviews. Do you think this is beating a dead horse, or is it important to continue to let newcomers to DVD know where these Special Editions evolved from?

Ling: That's one of the points I was getting at, which is there are people such as myself and Morgan, the guys at Sharpline, Laurent Bouzereau and others, who were doing this back during the LaserDisc days, and because it was such a small market, nobody has really seen the stuff&emdash;or very few people in the general consumer world. Now they are seeing it and embracing it for the first time on DVD, and it is all brand new to them. For those of us who are veterans, we look at it and say it is the same stuff, but hopefully better transferred. And if you're lucky, they've added a few new things. Some people do say this is just the same old stuff and that's the thing that's going on with Jaws right now. They will say that because there is less material on that DVD than what was on the LaserDisc, it's not worth talking about. They forget the fact that most people haven't seen the material and they were the privileged few who embraced LaserDisc. They were ahead of the game, but that doesn't mean that all the work of the people who produced the material should be diminished because they look at it as old stuff, when in fact it's only old stuff to the people who have already seen it on Laser Disc. The ironic thing is that what we did seven years ago on T2 is still considered pretty high-end on the Special Edition scale.

WSR Coate: I think a lot of LaserDisc collectors liked that set immensely. If you took a poll on favorite Special Editions, it would likely finish near the top. Does that put any pressure on you to try to top it, or make sure the new DVD isn't anything less than what the Laser Disc was, or somehow do better with each new project?

Ling: Well, there is always that. But that's a good thing because I'm really amazed and gratified at all the Special Editions I see today&emdash;the stuff from Pixar, the stuff from New Line and so on. Some of those are done by people like Morgan Holly, who is a veteran. He's gone through the whole evolution of Special Editions, as have I. Some are being done by people who were inspired by those, which is always a nice thing. People look at T2 and say, "Oh well, this is cool, but it's the same stuff we had seven years ago." If you think about what I just said, it's stuff that was from seven years ago! Seven years ago, it was revolutionary to some extent. It was setting a bar that is now becoming the standard.

WSR Coate: Can you elaborate on why the Cameron films on DVD haven't included full screen transfers since in the past with VHS and LaserDisc, he had a preference for both widescreen and full screen (not that releasing DVDs in widescreen-only bothers any of us here at Widescreen Review). With T2 being a jam-packed "ultimate" edition, one might think that an attempt would have been made to include both versions on the disc.

Ling: If you re-read Jim's "thoughts on the topic" ("The Letterbox Heresies"&emdash;included with the original pan-and-scan Abyss Special Edition LaserDisc set), you'll see that his argument (in 1993, mind you) was that NTSC video&emdash;particularly VHS, the format in which most people would see the film&emdash;was not good enough in quality for letterbox alone. And since VHS was the dominant format, he felt strongly that filmmakers should be doing a director and/or DP-supervised full screen transfer to protect their storytelling in 4:3. And since they were going to be doing that anyway, why not make it available on LaserDisc too? Laser was better in preserving the film while letterboxed than VHS, but it was still analog composite, so Jim felt it was still not perfect. On VHS, letterbox was out of the question, and a supervised full screen was the only option for preserving story and performance visibly. On LaserDisc, letterbox and full screen each had their pros and cons (what I call "scope versus intimacy"). Now, on DVD&emdash;a digital component format that can accurately reproduce the detail of a D1 transfer&emdash;a letterbox-only release is viable. A comparison between the LaserDisc Abyss SE and the new DVD will show you that. The same D1 letterbox transfer looks vastly better on DVD, and this is one of the benefits of the DVD format.

WSR Coate: Are there any other projects you will be involved with that you are willing to discuss?

Ling: I'm working with Joe Kane on some of his next DVD projects. On the visual effects and computer graphics side, we just did some stuff for Hollow Man and some digital composite work for Artisan's Way Of The Gun. Casey Cannon and I recently worked on the MTV Movie Awards doing some spoof material. And for the international DVD versions of ID4 and The Abyss, Fox hired me to redo all of my menus in several different languages. So between those two titles, I've generated 80,000 frames of animation and had to deliver those to be authored!

WSR Coate: Did you make those international menus different in any way from our Region 1 versions?

Ling: We really tried to keep the same look to them. But my menus tend to be very elaborate. You can't just substitute the new language. You have to recompose things. It was an interesting challenge, needless to say.

WSR Coate: Can you tell us anything about MGM's upcoming DVD edition of the original Terminator movie, that you mentioned being involved with earlier?

Ling: We're still working on T1 right now, so I can't say too much about it. Suffice it to say that we do have a new anamorphic widescreen transfer and a new sound mix&emdash;a nice, true 5.1. We even had composer Brad Fiedel come back in and remix his music masters, and MGM hired Gary Rydstrom at Skywalker to do the overall remix on my recommendation. So, MGM really put their money where their mouth was on this title.

WSR Coate: I'm sure that that will be a welcome addition for a lot of Terminator fans. Many readers probably recall that T1 has had a weird history over the years, soundtrack-wise.

Ling: Yeah, the movie was mono originally. And there were a number of faux-stereo things out there. In my discussions with Lightstorm and talking with Cameron about it, we would always say that it would be cool to have something in stereo, but only if it was done right; and doing it right requires some diligence, because you want to stay true to the mix and stay true to the balance that people have come to expect. But at the same time, you want to broaden the soundtrack a little bit. You don't want to do something that is totally different because maybe part of the appeal was the way it sounded in mono. And that's one of the things that was really important and one of the things that led Jim to say, "If you're going to do it, do it right." It's not just a matter of panning the mono right and left like some of the earlier faux-stereo mixes. And if I have my way on the disc configuration, MGM will also include the original mono audio as a separate track for the real purists.

WSR Coate: Anything new in the way of supplements for the T1 disc?

Ling: I've done some interviews with over half a dozen cast and crew members already. The fun thing about this is that I know a lot of these people from other projects, so it makes it a bit of a reunion to some extent. There's going to be as much as we can put on there. What you have here is a low budget film from a company that doesn't exist anymore that probably has more lawsuits entangled. MGM inherited it from Hemdale and all of the baggage that went with it. I've been working with the folks at MGM trying to sort out various issues on some of the material. Now that's archaeology!

WSR Coate: To close out our interview, what would you say to someone who already owns the T2SE LaserDisc set and may not be interested in watching the movie again? Why should they buy or rent the new T2SE DVD?

Ling: Well, first of all, there is a fair amount of new material on it. I updated a lot of material in the restoration chapters. I would actually add things about the DVD transfer and the DVD work, so it's like the revised edition of the Special Edition LaserDisc. I think I've collected materials together that may have been here and there, but they were certainly not included on the LaserDisc. And I tried to be as complete as I could in terms of what I could try to get. There are more stills in some of the galleries. There's more text, and more updated materials, new chapters and probably about an hour-and-a-half worth of material that was not on the LaserDisc. And the irony to all this is that the LaserDisc set was three, two-sided twelve-inch discs in a large box, and now it's all on one CD-sized disc...with more content!

WSR Coate: At one third the price!

Ling: That's the other thing. And if they can say it's just the same stuff from the LaserDisc, I have to say thank you for having bought and known the LD, because you were one of the first to support the kind of things that all DVD producers are trying to do today.



Part 2: Gary Rydstrom

To find out more about the creative approaches to creating the new sound mix, Widescreen Review's Movie Sound Editor Perry Sun spoke with Gary Rydstrom, the original sound designer and re-recording mixer. Rydstrom is a seven-time Academy Award®-winner and is based at Lucas Digital Ltd.'s Skywalker Sound as the Director of Creative Operations. His credits include many, if not most of the best-sounding films to date, including Star Wars: Episode I&emdash;The Phantom Menace, Saving Private Ryan and Titanic.

Perry Sun, Widescreen Review: Between yourself and James Cameron, who initiated the idea to remix the soundtrack with Surround EX?

Gary Rydstrom: I was the one who favored remixing in Surround EX. I thought it would be a nice additional touch, and T2 seemed like the perfect project to do something new on. Originally, what we had planned to do was, at the very least, create a six-track mix for some of the special edition scenes that we had done previously for the LaserDisc, for which we had only a two-track matrix surround mix. But then, I figured that I might as well go back into the primary six-track mix and try to make it a little more up-to-date with Surround EX.

WSR Sun: What was it about the original soundtrack which you felt could have benefited from a back surround channel?

Rydstrom: It's always interesting, and also fascinating, to go back and listen to something that you've done years ago. To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised that there wasn't as much activity in the surrounds in T2 as what I would incorporate today. One of the reasons was because Cameron, from whom I learned a lot and thought he was right about this, approached the T2 mix with the intention of keeping the soundtrack focused on only a few events, the really important events, and not to clutter it up with sounds that were peripheral to what was going on dramatically. So that approach takes away a lot of what you put in the surrounds, such as ambience, pass-bys and the like that tend to fill out the surrounds. We really kept the mix focused on what was happening on-screen. So when I went to create the additional Surround EX track, it was really for specific cues that were dramatically important in the movie, such as the T-1000 on top of the elevator, with the Terminator inside, stabbing his spikes through the ceiling of the elevator. We did a lot of mixing in the surrounds with that scene, taking advantage of a great opportunity to put some of those stabbings into the back surround channel. I also placed Termovision sequences into that channel, as well as some car pass-bys and some other events.

WSR Sun: Did you work with the stems, or just the final mix?

Rydstrom: I worked from the final mix stems, so I had the dialogue, music and effects separate and was able to do some remixing from those. I did some re-balancing between those elements, but mostly what I was doing was re-positioning some of the effects in the surround channel, placing them into the back surround channel and shifting some content from the front to the surrounds. I also generated surround channels for the music. The music actually consisted of only the front channels, and when we did the original mix, we generated a surround channel for the 70mm CDS version with the Dolby Stereo matrix encoder, which gave us just mono surround for the music. [CDS is Cinema Digital Sound, a short-lived digital film sound format.&emdash;WSR Sun] So for this remixing, I did a pass where I would generate, through reverb units and the like, stereo reverb surround channels for the music.

WSR Sun: Did you incorporate any new sounds for this remix?

Rydstrom: No, I wanted to stay true to the original mix. I didn't want to add anything to it, so we only used what was initially done for the mix. The only new sounds we added were for a nice new T2 THX® logo at the beginning of the disc, which was fun. But otherwise, everything else was from what we did before, with just some remixing. Also, as an updating of the way I originally mixed the soundtrack in 1991, I boosted the subwoofer content in parts of the mix for more low frequency impact.

WSR Sun: When you did the remixing, did you also alter the content of the left and right surrounds to enhance their effect?

Rydstrom: Yes. At the most basic level, what I would do is pan between them. When there's a pass-by behind the listener, I would pan it between the left and right, and also through the back surround channel to allow for a little smoother pan. For some other sounds, I would redirect from the left and right surround, into the Surround EX channel, such as in the Termovision scenes, where I used this channel to kind of pull the sound up and over the listener's head. Every once in a while, I would take an effect from the front, which I originally had been a little too shy about pulling into the surrounds, and reposition it into the surrounds for this mix. Again, nothing new was added&emdash;I would just take the existing effects channels, as they existed on my final mix stem, and then do a little re-panning with those.

WSR Sun: Did you also work with the screen channels and the LFE?

Rydstrom: I pretty much left the front channels alone, aside from some minor rebalancing of levels. I focused all of my re-panning efforts into the surrounds. As I said before, I did a lot of "booming" of events that I hadn't "boomed" in the first place, which I think was just simply a matter of the way that I mixed the soundtrack back then, versus the way we do it now. I wanted to update the mix a little bit and make use of the LFE channel.

WSR Sun: Could you name or describe a particular scene in which the addition of back surround was particularly beneficial?

Rydstrom: The one that I mentioned was good&emdash;the elevator scene with the T-1000 spikes coming through the ceiling. The freeway chase at night with the helicopter has always been one of my favorite scenes in the movie, so we did a lot of re-panning of sound into the Surround EX channel, for the helicopter passing underneath the overpass, some off-screen gun shots, bullet hits and other events. For all of the Termovision scenes, we would take the "thinking process" sounds and put those just into the back surround channel, with no use of the left and right surrounds. With Surround EX, you sometimes can get a great "vertical" effect for sounds that are in front of you to directly behind you, and so you get this strange feeling that you don't normally get in a movie. This was perfect for Termovision, because we could put all of those sounds into this front-back axis, without using the left and right surrounds at all, so that we're trying to pull the sound over the listener's head.

WSR Sun: Do you have a desire to re-work the sound mix for your other previous achievements, such as Casper or Jurassic Park?

Rydstrom: It's funny&emdash;when you revisit something, there are always things you'd like to change. And there's an interesting, philosophical question, probably film sound's version of colorizing movies&emdash;how much do you change something from the past to make that what you like today, versus what you did years ago? Personally, I can't leave anything alone. So, for better or worse, I would love to get a shot at fine-tuning mixes that I've done in the past. But it's an interesting, philosophical question, and I felt very much on this film to stay true to the mix as much as possible. What I was doing was enhancing some surround panning, enhancing the "boom" and performing some fine-tuning, but it still had to be the mix that we initially created. That's what we were aiming to do&emdash;to keep that original mix as much as possible. At the very least, what I would love to do in my own work is take mixes that I had only done for optical Dolby Stereo, such as A River Runs Through It or another film that I only did as a two-track, and then go back to those elements and really make a clean, six-channel version.

WSR Sun: Thank you very much Gary, for sharing your creative experiences with the new T2 soundtrack.