Nagra III: The Legend of Recording Engineers

Today we would like to introduce to you our new arrival, a real legend, Nagra III. Designed by Polish inventor Stefan Kudelski, and manufactured in Switzerland in 1957, this tape recorder became a standard for Hollywood sound recordings by the early 1960s. Cabled to a camera by a sync pulse, it soon became established as the recording equipment of preference for Hollywood feature production as well as for most documentary film work in the United States. More than 10’000 Nagra III were built which makes it the most popular Nagra ever.



The Nagra's recordings on a quarter-inch magnetic tape produced good fidelity and offered the mixer considerable latitude in using sound. Furthermore, Nagra recording equipment was lightweight and portable, very sturdy, highly reliable, and operated with cheap C-batteries-all of which permitted the Nagra to be used effectively for either studio or location filming.

The Nagra III was state-of-the-art in 1960 and proved extraordinarily reliable and effective throughout the ensuing decade. Equally important to motion-picture sound during the decade were advances in automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) techniques. In the ADR system, picture and sound are interlocked on tape machines that can be run forward and backward easily and reliably. If an actor has flubbed a line, for example, the tape is reversed and the line is simply spoken again by the actor. The sound recordist can then make a notation, re-record a word or a sentence, and lay them in during the mix, differences between the original recording and portions re-recorded are imperceptible.

"Looping," yet another, even more, common form of ADR, was done during the post-production stage of film-making. Actors and actresses were called into a sound studio after principal photography on a film had been completed to record portions of dialogue for insertion into a motion picture's soundtrack.

 

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