BOOM LIBRARY SFX ADVENT CALENDAR
DAY 2 – iZOTOPE RX5 RAFFLE (CLOSED)
Hooray! Day 2 of our BOOM Library SFX Advent Calendar. We had our first direct raffle that only ran for three days (besides the BIG RAFFLE for the Grand Prize from yesterday that runs the whole 24 days), so better chances for the early birds :-). The prize was nothing less than a copy of iZotope RX 5, one of the most essential tools our Sound Designers are using each and every day. (The winner has been announced on Friday, Dec. 4th on Facebook)
“Wonderful, thank you so much BOOM Library. But how could I win this wonderful piece of software?” you might ask yourself right now. Here’s how: Just join our BIG RAFFLE that we announced on day 1 (click here) and you’re in for all side raffles. Join the raffle by liking our Facebook Page AND the Raffle-Post on Facebook.com/boomlibrary, following us and retweeting our Raffle-Tweet on Twitter/bomlibrary and by subscribing to our newsletter here on www.boomlibrary.com. Each action that you take will increase your winning chances. If you’re already following us or you’re already a newsletter subscriber, then you’re automatically participating in the raffle.
Our Sound Designer and Creative Director Axel Rohrbach already tested iZotope RX5 and to anticipate it: he pretty much likes it – but read on:
About iZotope RX 5 – by Axel Rohrbach
Rather than doing a typical review of iZotope’s RX5, I want to talk about some of my personal workflows and creative usage, as there are already tons of reviews out on the web which can easily be found. For the unlikely event of you not knowing iZotope RX yet, you should definitely go to their website, download the demo, play around and try to fix issues you might have with audio material – you will surely be surprised.
One of the latest features I personally use pretty much daily is the “iZotope RX5 Connect”. Michael is using this one in Cubase / Nuendo, too, so it’s not just ProTools / AudioSuite exclusive. Here is a little video I made last year with the “iZotope RX4 Connect” when it first came out, and for which nothing changed to this day:
Having the selected region “connected” from my host to RX5 standalone I do all the cleaning which might be necessary. The denoise feature is awesome for quick results and often works pretty well if not used too excessively. Of course it’s most important to have the recordings as clean as possible, because denoising will always alter and remove parts of the source. Having too much noise or denoising too excessively results in bubbling artefacts, especially notable when compressed afterwards. So I always check back in ProTools if I used the denoising feature too much or not. But there are a bunch of other possibilities to denoise material.
Spectral Repair and Delete
I love the basic “attenuate” within the spectral repair and use this a lot when it comes to frequency based issues within a sound I want to get rid of. When there is a constant tone I want to damp I simply use the “Frequency selection tool” (key command “F”), select the frequency or even multiple frequencies (adding a selection works with all tools by pressing “Alt” and select a different part) and attenuate this. I sometimes also use this as an EQ-ing alternative to alter specific frequencies based on the surrounding frequencies.
Something I pretty much like with the RX is the delete function. Wait – what? Yes, simply the delete key on your keyboard. If you have selected too many bands, odd phasing will occur or a weird frequency response. But if only a very narrow band is selected, the delete works as a punctual EQ alternative as well, lowering the selected ones quite a bit, but not completely creating silence. I deleted sustaining open strings on violin or guitar recordings, it works sometimes on birds, mic stand pops and such things. In fact the delete button is probably the most used key command for me in RX.
I do use delete also to get rid of very low frequencies: selecting frequencies from 0Hz to 15Hz, for example with the “Frequency selection tool” and then hitting delete. But of course, I also use the EQ for such things as well, but sometimes the other option is simply quicker.
Anyway, talking about working time-based, I tend to use “Partials + Noise” algorithm within the spectral repair module. It is sometimes difficult to find settings that do not result in blurry tonal outcomes, but mostly it is nice to have things filled with similar surrounding material.
De-click and De-clip
Talking about clicks, I mostly select only higher frequencies instead of a full spectrum selection for better results and a smoother detection. I also use de-click to remove distortion crackling quite a lot. Whereas I am very happy with the results of the de-clipper for clipped stuff from version RX4 on. To become a bit more creative, it is interesting to clip material by purpose and remove the clipping afterwards to get a fake-clipping-loudness-feel without actually really clipping the material. This is the original sample – one cannon shot out of the “Historical Firearms – Designed” library.
For best audio quality, you can download each audio file in 96kHz via the soundcloud player download button
The same sound (clipped):
… and then de-clipped again:
Time & Pitch
This is of course a very cool sound design tool and it sounds amazingly good. I actually use it a lot for pitch shifting / time stretching work, especially when it’s supposed to be more complex. Just to stay with the cannon from the examples above, I added some movement and a more interesting tail to the cannon using the “Time & Pitch” “Pitch Contour” option.
One thing that I actually miss is a simple “x semitones (or percent) up or down with corresponding time stretch” solution. Right now, there are too many steps to do the most simple pitch task, in my opinion. Also an extremely cool feature would be to actually be able to see the waveform within the “Pitch contour” window to get a more detailed overview and being able to resize this window – especially when one is trying to alter longer files, it is tricky to find the exact positions here. A little workaround for applying time stretches by using the “Connect” feature: simply select the region with some space before and after the sound, otherwise “Connect” will not be rendered correctly back in the host when the length is different.
Deconstruct
The “Deconstruct” Module is often overlooked, but for me this sometimes works even better than De-noise. Plus it can produce some weird, sci-fi-ish sounds when noises are being deconstructed with focus on tonal aspects. So it can be used very creatively as well.
EQ Match
I personally do not like the idea too much of using the EQ Match to “copy” frequency responses from other guys’ work. However, the EQ Match can help me in two different ways.
One is to bring some things within one single production a bit more together frequency-wise. For example voice overs which might be recorded in different locations or with different mics but containing the same actor. It is useful to bring those a bit better in balance frequency wise. Very helpful for that is that RX offers the ability to change the strength of how the EQ Match applies the goal frequency response.
What I do love for certain things, is the signal generator in combination with the EQ Match. In this example I generated brown noise, learned that frequency response (white noise with 6dB decrease of power per octave up) and applied it to the cannon shot again. The result is a much more even, less “noisy” sound. It loses some character as well, but this is certainly wanted in a bunch of situations. It is also possible to remove some room resonances in certain situations, creating a sound which seems to be less reverberant (which actually is not the case).
iZotope’s RX5 is definitely one of the most used software besides Pro Tools, Mail and Excel on my computer. Not only for cleaning, but also basic tasks such as cropping, fading, adding silence or removing unused parts, re-gaining and so forth. What I currently miss most is multichannel support. There are of course workarounds for it, but it would be very handy to simply open LCR, Quad, 5.0, 5.1, 7.1 sounds and edit all channels simultaneously. One thing I need to mention: iZotope was able to include the most important feature for me (actually concerning all applications) since at least iZotope RX3: I did not tremble over any bugs, reliability issues, crashes or any such thing that I can remember.
The iZotope RX5 simply is awesome – I couldn’t live without it anymore. Thank you, iZotope!
Thanks Axel.
Your BOOM Library Team