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James Paterson
Australian Television Archive, Broadcast Film & Video Digitisation
Services

The Restoration of Classic Australian Film, Spirits Of The Air, Gremlins Of The Clouds
In 2015 James Paterson of the Australian Tel- PAL Betamax recording, and a 3/4" U-matic
evision Archive was given the task of restoring videotape screener.
the classic 1980's Australian film: Spirits of "It did however present its own set of challenges"
the Air - Gremlins of The Clouds.
The interesting thing about "Spirits" was that
Whilst the project was not for public release, it was the first Australian film music sound-
but simply for the client's own personal ar- track to be mastered digitally. The original
chives, I wanted to do justice for this film the PCM encoded music soundtrack mix still ex-
same as I would if it were to be seen by mil- isted, recorded onto 3/4" U-matic tape (the
lions. It did however present its own set of only way to record digital sound at the time).
challenges, the main ones being that the only To recover the digital audio required a special
source material (for the vision) existed as two PCM decoder/adaptor which converts the U-
completely different video formats: a domestic

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