A car enthusiast and sound designer from the 1960’s has revealed some gems this week!

A client got in touch when he found his late father’s collection of 35mm slides, 1/4 inch reel to reel recordings and 8mm Cine film. His father was a musician in the 60’s and heavily into sound design and theatre work - so you can imagine the diversity of the content that’s been discovered.

First job was to capture all the 1/4 inch reel to reels using an ex-BBC workhorse Ferrograph Logic 7 modified to accept half track and quarter track recordings. Each reel contained a mixture of mono and stereo tracks, recorded at different speeds, so these were all imported into Protools audio restoration software for equalisation, editing and final mastering for modern standards. In one section a spooky backing track is accompanied by the deep monotone voice of the client’s father telling an extremely scary halloween story … The individual recordings will now be easily accessible as separate audio files on a USB stick.

400+ colour and B&W slides have been individually cleaned and scanned at high resolution using an Epson scanner and Silverfast software.

The standard 8mm Cine reels have been captured at 1080p using my own scanning system, although two contained an audio strip, which is quite rare, so these have been outsourced to a specialist film company. More about 8mm Cine film audio strips here

1/4 inch reel to reels, 35mm slides, and 8mm cine film from the 1960’s revealed by this client.