Learn: Home » Creating The Closing of Winterland
CrutchfieldAdvisor: Can you begin by walking us through as much of the process of creating The Closing Of Winterland as you can, from your point-of-view and involvement?
Jeffrey Norman: First off, let me say that I worked in tandem with David Lemieux, who is basically responsible for everything you see, whereas I am responsible for what you hear, both on the DVD and CD packages. Now, that said, The Closing Of Winterland has been one of the most grueling and difficult projects that I have ever worked on, for a number of reasons. None of these difficulties were music related, however. It's all . . . whew!
 David Lemieux, the video producer of The Closing Of Winterland, in the vault. |
CA: Well, this is all uncharted territory from a technical aspect, right? You had never married a video to a separate audio source before while taking them from analog into the digital domain, correct?
JN: Yes, that is true. So, here's a bit of history that led David and myself to decide this was actually going to be viable. Well, the genesis of the whole thing dates back to the mid 1990s when former Grateful Dead producer John Cutler and I brought up the idea of releasing a VHS and CD set — this was before the days of DVD. So, the very first thing we noticed is that there was no time code that the independent audio and video tapes would both be able to identify. There wasn't even a 60 hertz cycle sync pulse for the video — which is basically the industry standard. This would be essential if the audio was to be matched to the video. However, it did not exist. So, we figured we'd perhaps issue the show as ?just music' or as on a videotape with the same audio that already exists on the broadcast. Eventually, we re-shelved the tapes and moved on to other more feasible ventures. So, fast-forward to 2002. We knew that we wanted to work on this and that technology had advanced enough to make it theoretically possible for us to pull this off — in theory, mind you.
CA: How were you gonna pull it off now, whereas you could not before? What had changed?
JN: By transferring both the audio as well as the video to a digital format, I figured we could start from there. We had not had the ability to do both mediums before. So last year, when we were in the planning stages, we decided to begin working on it in the early spring of 2003, for release in the fall. I knew one priority would be to obtain a digital multi-track workstation. That was quite a scene in and of itself. To sidetrack a second here: I was initially going to work with a platform called Pro Tools, which is designed by Digidesign up in Palo Alto, California. Then I began to work on a few other workstations. So, I began working with a system and ended up logging a full month on this prototype or beta-version. I loaded in the audio and performed some minor noise reduction and was about three-and-a-half weeks in. Then, we had a major problem as this workstation was simply not going to be completed and fully functional in the foreseeable future.
CA: YIKES!!
JN: (Laughs) That is an understatement. So, I had to go back to square one. I eventually got a Pro Tools system and had to redo everything I had done on this other platform. Now, to give you a bit of chronology, it is now June 2003 and we are just now getting started in earnest. Basically, the issue was that the technology was not able to deliver what I needed it to.
CA: I guess that is what happens when you are on the cutting edge.
JN: Exactly. I mean in my mind, I didn't think what I wanted to do was so difficult, but we were under a looming deadline as well. Anyway, after getting Pro Tools, I had to invest even more time learning it, which I did on-the-job. That might sound funny to most engineers, because Pro Tools has become one of the industry standards. So, we now have a 24-bit/96khz Pro Tools digital workstation, on which I loaded up the multi-tracks reels of audio tape onto my hard drive. The next step was to divide the audio into three sessions: set one, set two and set three. Because this show was being professionally recorded by Wally Heider's Studios, they captured every note. They were using two machines, so there was what we call an ?overlap reel' — when one machine was almost out of tape, they would start the next one and so on. Once all the audio was there, I edited the respective sets to mirror the actual performance. Once each set was complete, I also, by default had constructed a usable time code which I chose to be SMPTE [Society Of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the current industry standard for digital audio and video]. Now, for those keeping score at home, while we now have a time code, it still has no relationship with the video ? yet, that is.
