I took the DAT tapes into Zounds, the audio house, yesterday, and they made a magnetic sound track for me overnight. Nice to see something happen quickly.
The mag track cost me about $250. This is significantly less than the $1000 plus price tag for an optical track, my next expense, which is used to make the final print. I could have skipped the mag track and gone straight to the optical, but if the image and sound then turned out not to be in sync I'd have to correct the problem and do the optical track all over again. The mag track is a relatively inexpensive way of checking for sync problems, and it can be edited directly to correct any problems that do come up. So it's basically insurance against bad sync. I think we've anticipated all possible sync problems, but I didn't feel like gambling for high stakes. Early next week I'll pay a production company $50 to let me check the mag track against my silent answer print before I proceed to the optical.
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