One of the oldest and most prestigious film facilities in Poland, WFDiF (Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych – the Documentary and Feature Film Production Company) has installed a Cedar Cambridge system in its newly-opened film sound restoration studio.

‘A few years ago, we started to restore documentary and feature films that have been produced since the 1950s by the WFDiF, says MPSE Sound Restoration Engineer. Pawel Jaźwiecki. ‘During these processes, both the audio and video are digitised and restored to deliver perfectly clean picture and sound, free from clicks, pops, buzz, hiss and other types of noise. Furthermore, sound can be remastered in our dubbing theatre and optimised to create digital cinema packages.

‘The audio is transferred from the original magnetic 35mm mastertapes or from optical 35mm soundtracks. We then re-synchronise this, correcting ADRs or Foley that are often out of sync, and clean the audio using a couple of restoration chains. The Cedar Cambridge system guarantees that all the damaged audio can be treated to obtain the highest possible level of quality. In particular, Retouch 5 gives us unrestricted access to the audio content in both the time and frequency domains, which is very useful for removing low frequency disturbances or other non-typical noises.

‘We have also installed Cedar Studio’s DNS One process as a plug-in and, thanks to the very close cooperation of Mr Bogdan Wojciechowski from Dave – our Cedar supplier – we have also had the opportunity to familiarise and test the newest Cedar Studio 6 products such as Declick, Decrackle, and Auto Dehiss. These have turned out to be extremely useful, especially during our optical soundtracks restoration workflows.’

Cedar’s software is also used for cleaning contemporary dialogue, noisy set recordings, and for restoring other poor-quality material.