SONY creative software – any reccomendations

[Michael Gissing]

Spectral layers is excellent software – not trivial to learn and drive but the most useful thing might be the denoise and declip plugins from iZotope that come with Soundforge.

Soundforge is more a CD mastering DAW but it has some nice features. I wouldn’t think it overly useful for editing and most of the tools are in DAWs if you are going to a sound post facility to finish.

Can’t see that Prepare does anything that Resolve Lite doesn’t also do for free plus Resolve is overall a more powerful piece of software.

[John Rofrano]

[Nick Meyers] “anyone out there use Sony Creative Software products, and love them?”

I resemble that remark. lol 😀

I’ve been using Sony Vegas Pro, Sound Forge Pro, & ACID Pro, for over 12 years now. I create training material and plug-ins for their products so I’m very familiar with what Sony’s products can do. (I just recently moved to the Mac and started using FCP X while I love too)

Sony has just started making software for the Mac. Special Layers was an acquisition and is a jaw dropping piece of software. It actually allows you to extract audio from a mix for the purpose of keeping it or eliminating it. Think about that. Most noise reduction software looks for noise and removes it. Spectral Layers can do that too but it can also find the dialog and lift it leaving everything else behind. It’s like taking the eggs out of cake after you bake it! You can even add audio FX to the layers that you extract. Spectral Layers is an amazing piece of surgical software when placed in capable hands but it does have a bit of a learning curve.

Sound Forge for Mac has less capabilities than the Windows version and was a bit of a disappointment for me coming from Windows but is a capable little audio editor in it’s own right. If you have an audio file that you need to process for some reason, it’s a easy to use and unabtrusive and gets the job done quickly. I usually use it to fix problems with audio that can’t easily be fixed in an NLE. Think of it as a sample accurate audio editor. On Windows, there is a audio context menu in Vegas Pro that’s called “Send to Sound Forge” and when you click it, it transfers a copy of your audio to Sound Forge where you can work on it, and when you save it, it adds the copy back to your Vegas Pro timeline as a Take (which is the same as an audition in FCP X). The two products are integrated nicely on Windows but on the Mac there is no Sony NLE to integrate with so it’s just a stand alone audio editor much like the free Audacity.

Catalyst Prepare is a brand new product from Sony and it’s really aimed at people who use Sony cameras as a way to easily ingest footage, convert it, do some simple color correction, and assemble a simple cuts-only, single track edit (they call it a storyboard) that you can export to several NLE formats including FCP X. I guess it’s more like the logging tool in FCP 7. I’m not sure how much value it would bring unless you have a Sony camera that can benefit from it.

Everything else form Sony is on the Windows platform and uninteresting to Mac users. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Nick Meyers]

thanks,

in the end we went with both copies of the Audio Mastering suit, and gave one to our musicians.
it did seem to offer something unique, especially Spectral Layers.
so thanks for the feedback

now for my next question:
Spectral Layers looks a bit like Izotope’s RX,
and the reason i ask is that we have some distorted field recordings.
I see RX can do a certain amount of repair on clipped audio, can Spectral Layers?

cheers,
nick

[John Rofrano]

[Nick Meyers] “I see RX can do a certain amount of repair on clipped audio, can Spectral Layers?”

Spectral Layers doesn’t have the breadth of tools that iZotope RX has. It doesn’t have clipping repair. Spectral Layers is really an extraction tool. What it does is amazing and it does it well but it’s not a suite of tools like RX. I have both and I use iZotope RX far more.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Nick Meyers]

thanks, John, good to know.

nick