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This site reproduces the information prepared for a poster session at 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995 by Mark Nizette, Manager of Preservation Services, National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).
By presenting recorded sound and stills from the National collection in a multimedia format we wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of multimedia as a publishing media for historical sound and image. The use of "before and after" examples of damaged sound recordings that have been restored in the NFSA's sound preservation studios gives an insight into the work being carried out at the Archive, and advocates the necessity of performing an appropriate level of signal restoration before historic material is used in the production of multimedia works.

Audio examples were selected from existing demonstration tapes, and fed directly from DAT to a 16 bit PC sound card at 44.1kHz, then down converted to 22kHz mono. Three historic sound recordings representing different media were selected. In each case a short segment from the flat transfer off the original and the same segment after processing were digitised for use in the presentation together with images of the original sound recording carriers. A search of the NFSA's MAVIS database identified appropriate historical images to be included. Images were transferred to S-VHS tapes from motion picture film, video tape, and camera sources, and these were captured using a Power Mac AV-8500 with Adobe Pemier software. The presentation was authored and presented on Harvard Graphics.

The sound recordings included in the presentation were:

  • Jean Batten : On 13 October 1936, during her record breaking flight from England to New Zealand, Jean landed at Mascot Sydney. A recording was made on lacquer disc of the welcoming speeches by members of the aero club. Substantial editing and processing on the Sonic Solutions system restored the continuity of the recording, and revealed the background aural atmosphere of Mascot airport in the 30s.
  • John Curtin : taken from a shortwave broadcast to the Australian people on 31/10/41. The speech was recorded on a shellac disc. The only copy we have of the disc was broken into two pieces. Manual de-clicking on the Sonic Solutions No Noise system was used to reduce the loud clicks present at the break.
  • Marie Narelle : Marie Narelle made many recordings on cylinder records for the Edison company between 1905 and 1914, including "Every Little Movement" from which an excerpt was taken for the presentation. Cedar real time de-clicking was used to reduce the effects of wear and damage.
While some of the subtleties of the aural restoration are lost when replayed on a typical multimedia system, the improvement in intelligibility of extremely damaged recordings is quite evident. The presentation has generated a good deal of interest, both at the NPO conference and at the Archive. The addition of stills and text to our existing aural demonstrations gives context to the recordings, and allows for a demonstration of the Archive's activities "behind the scenes" without the need to tie up studios and staff.


Return to 1995 NPO Conference
Last updated 27 February 1998