BOOM LIBRARY SFX ADVENT CALENDAR
DAY 22 – iZotope INSIGHT – A Closer Look
Our Sound Designer and Creative Director Axel Rohrbach loves playing around with plugins, especially when it comes to visually analyzing our sounds. This time, Axel got its hands on the iZotope INSIGHT Metering Suite. So if you ever thought about adding this toolset to your plugin list, read on and see what Axel likes about it:
Axel Rohrbach about iZotope INSIGHT:
I personally loved my aged Master Pinguin Audio Meter which I used for quite some time. But with some changes in my DAW setup I am not able to input my DAW audio into the same interface and using that as an input for the stand alone Master Pinguin. So I had to switch to a plug-in based system (for now) which brings up a few different options. I chose iZotope’s “Insight” which comes for 499 USD at the iZotope online store. This is less than half of what I paid for the Master Pinguin Audio Meter, but does it provide the same quick and deep visual information of my audio material? I did a quick test.
First of all, with all kind of different metering options out there, I find it a bit difficult to get used to different colors. That has nothing to do with iZotope’s “Insight” rather than the switch to a different visualizer in general. The military olive-green does not really suit my studio optics, but hey, I am doing audio, not interior design. The green is not very aggressive and after surprisingly little time I got used to the color settings.
OK, let’s get to the important stuff. When opening “Insight” it shows you a whole lot of information. It opens up a Spectrum Analyzer, a Spectrogram window, a Sound Field window, Levels and Loudness History. The window sizes don’t match what I usually like to work with at all in the default settings, but a very handy feature is that you can rearrange all window sizes within the plug-in window however it suits you best. Not only that, but you can also simply drag the lower right corner to reset the whole plug-in window size additionally. This way, I can use it full screen on one of my screens which is perfect for my workflow if there is no video present. But even with a video it is possible to arrange it as needed. And that’s still not all (again), it is also possible to completely hide single analyzers or to hide everything but the selected one. This way you can quickly switch from a total overview to the Sound Field only view for example, if you want to get to the depth of this particular information.
Doing all of that every time you open “Insight” the first time would be very obstructive and cause delay in your tight schedule. This is where one of the key features of “Insight” comes in: the preset manager. It seems iZotope put a lot of work into preparing some of the most interesting overviews in some presets, for example a view for international EBU standard metering or all sort of other useful settings.
You can also store your favorite settings, not only including the window configuration but also all other settings you might have customized. I will talk about a few setup possibilities when surveying the analyzer in the further course.
Two minor things I would love to see here are a) a small text showing the name of the preset currently active as an indicator and b) an option to store the window size of the plug-in within the preset.
After the above remarks, I want to take a detailed look at some of the analyzers.
SPECTRUM ANALYZER
Click image to enlarge
There is not too much to say here. The Spectrum Analyzer is doing what I expected. It responds very well and has a lot of options you can change as seen in the screenshot above. Those options mainly change the optical feedback you get, which curve to read out, if the peaks should hold and for how long they should do that, how exact the frequencies should be displayed or if they should overlap. You can also chose 1/3 octave and full octave bandwidth and a very interesting “critical” option, which I’m going to investigate further later on. This one fans out the spectrum the way we humans perceive it: with few bands only that show the frequencies considered similar to us.
Soundfield Analyzer:
This one is similar to the Spectrum Analyzer. It works reliably and well, as one would expect it. It’s a solid and very important tool with several different display options.
Spectrogram:
The above posted screenshot is a good example to introduce this tool. The spectrogram can be moved around, turned, zoomed. You can change the resolution, the displayed time and more. You also have the option to select different color schemes. As an old iZotope RX user, it is very handy for me that all kind of different RX color schemes are included as well. It’s very useful to get a different view on the frequencies your material produces, especially talking about frequency response over time.
Another cool feature of the Spectrogram is that it enables you to preview additional channels in your mix while you’re actually working in your current main channel. You only have to insert the “iZotope Meter Tap” plug-in on a channel and you can rename it there to whatever makes sense for you. When you get back to your main “Insight” window and maximize the Spectrogram window you can chose a different “Meter Tap” to view the spectrogram of that, without the need of inserting the whole plug-in on those tracks. But wait, this can’t be the function, right? No, it actually isn’t. You can setup up to 8 Meter Taps, select different colors and – here comes the magic – oversee all of them simultaneously in one view! That’s a super cool help to get an idea of which frequencies in which tracks are overlapping, for example.
Loudness Metering
There are two different analyzers for loudness metering. One is “Levels”, showing you all of the relevant information, including integrated loudness, short term and momentary levels. This one again comes with several different settings and should be self-explanatory. There also is the “Loudness History” analyzer, a meter that shows how your loudness develops over time, taking in consideration what you have setup as the target loudness. This works just like the integrated loudness, but actually shows where critical spots are in your material. Still, it might be a little difficult to read in your session, so iZotope created the remedy tha
t comes along: the analyzer enables you to write a slightly simplified version of this graph as automation.
Thus it gives you a perfect overview within your session, right under (or above, or in the middle) of your tracks as a reference. Also, it’s possible to quickly change certain factors to match your loudness target easily.
Conclusion:
The reason for trying the “Insight” was that I had to switch my main analyzing tool. Well, iZotope, you got me – again. All the basics I wanted to see are there as I had hoped for, in expected quality. And there is so much more to discover: the loudness metering with its automation possibility is a blast, the preset manager enables you to speed up the workflow and also the possibility to resize the whole plug-in window and the analyzer windows within the plug-in makes it fairly customizable. “Insight” provides me with all the armamentarium I need. The graphics react fast and fluently and the CPU usage is totally acceptable, which unfortunately can’t be said for a whole lot of other tools providing at this professional level. So this one definitely is my go-to analyzer from now on.
Thanks Axel.
Well, wouldn’t it be nice to own this cool metering suite? We suggest you visit us again tomorrow. Maybe we can help you out 😉