Wikipedia:WikiProject Media Restoration

Welcome to WikiProject Media Restoration, a project dedicated to improving Wikipedia's presentation and use of historic sounds, still images, and moving images.

Before restoration After restoration

Project goals

• Locate and restore historic media
• Improve the presentation of historic media files within articles
• Whenever feasible, obtain and use original sources for illustration purposes - that is, sources from as near to the time of the event as possible.
• Maintain a list of source sites that provide high quality free media
• Prepare files for featured picture candidacy and featured sound candidacy
• Collaborate with other featured content drives (articles, portals) to provide high quality media
• Establish best practices for producing and documenting edited images
• Collaborate with other relevant Wikimedia Foundation sites (Commons, Wikisource, etc.)
• Coach fellow editors in image restoration techniques

Principles

WikiProject Media Restoration is a participatory project. Editors who want to learn restoration can find coaching and collaboration here.

Project participants

1. Durova^Charge! 22:30, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
2. Mitch32^(UP) 17:14, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
3. Dendodge|Talk^Contribs 17:31, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
4. Gnangarra
5. Jordan ^Contribs 11:03, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
6. Will help when I can. :-) Stwalkerster [ talk ] 16:42, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
7. Dureo (talk) 21:27, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
8. I can best help with audio restoration. Vassyana (talk) 04:11, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
9. Do what I can :) SirFozzie (talk) 05:19, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
10. I think I've got a natural talent at editing, and possibly restoring images. ;) — Ceranthor [Formerly LordSunday] 23:30, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
11. Carcharoth (talk) 18:44, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
12. Best at image restoration, but I'd love to learn audio too. Shell ^babelfish 03:12, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
13. — Jake Wartenberg 06:19, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
14. Synergy 01:24, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
15. Staxringold _talk^contribs 03:13, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Undertakings

Landmark images

A repository of images for restoration. Could use reorganization along project lines after move from user space.

A recording, a score, and a portrait

WikProject Media Restoration seeks to provide high quality media related to composers and songwriters by locating and restoring freely licensed recordings, scores, and portraits. Could use more examples.

A bust of Beethoven taken from his death mask.

Manuscript notes for Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 28.

Mentorship

If you're new to restoration, we'll help you get up to speed.

Archival searches

These include adding unused, high-quality files to appropriate articles; locating high-quality, pre-restored files under a free-licence; documentation; and propagating high-quality content. For instance, if one of us finds a repository of high-quality music, such as [1], [2], or [3], there may be some research necessary to get sufficient documention on the recording, and to will also need to be distributed throughout appropriate Wikipedia articles.

Wikibooks collaboration

At wikibooks:Image restoration we're building a module to explain image restoration. Assistance is welcome.

Media Restoration Category:WikiProject Images and Media

Basic song cleanup with Audacity

I've had good results with this method, using the freeware program Audacity:

1. Find a patch of "silence" - that is, a few seconds that have no sound except for the hiss or crackle you want to remove. If necessary, create a patch of at least a second at the end by copying shorter gaps in the music. Be careful to only include silence in here - not the fading notes of the last chord, etc.
2. Hit cntrl-2, Cntrl-1, Cntrl-1. This will get you at a good zoom level for the next part.
3. Go through, listening to the song, and, except in your patch of "silence", remove as many pops as you can by highlighting and deleting them. Don't highlight too much, or you change the tempo. Check after you removed them, because sometimes this can make things worse. If there's a large amount of crackle, just get the really, really obvious ones, then, perhaps, run the click removal tool under "Effects" as an additional step (it... sometimes helps, particularly when there's too many pops to remove by hand without changing the tempo, though it's often useless) and go to step 4.
4. Under edit, choose Select->All, then go back to the edit menu and choose "duplicate". You now have two identical tracks.
5. Select the patch of silence on one of these tracks (you may want to zoom back out using Cntrl-2), then go to the effect menu and choose Noise removal. Hit the "Get Noise Profile" button.
6. Select all of one of your two identical tracks. Home, followed by Shift+End will do this for you. Go to Effect->Noise removal and, using the default settings, remove the noise.
7. You now have a cleaned track and an uncleaned track. This is because noise removal removes information, so you don't want to remove the noise completely. Instead, using the slider bars on the left of each track window, adjust the relative volumes. I find that no change or -3dB to the cleaned track, and -6db or -9dB (depending on how noisy the original was) to the uncleaned is generally a good choice. You need to combine the cleaned and uncleaned, because removing hiss also removes information, and without adding some of the information back in, voices and instruments can begin to sound a bit unnatural or just generally lower quality.