[Jim Curtis]

I had satisfactory results with DiskDrill after a major drive catastrophe. You can find out in demo mode whether it’s worth it to you to pay for the fully featured version. I only used it for one day for one catastrophe, but I thought it was well worth the $75 or $80. I hope I never have to use it again.

[Jim Curtis]

Another method is to set your Timeline to Audio Time Units, unlink the audio from the video, zoom in to the plosives, and snip them out. They are usually a small number of samples in duration, and probably won’t affect your sync visibly.

There are other plosive reducing plug-ins on the market than iZotope RX. Accusonus has one.

[Jim Curtis]

Sorry, Ian, I totally missed the “WIN” part of your post.
My Noise Reducer version is 4.1.10. I had to search for that. I didn’t know what version I have off the top of my head. I apologize for not knowing what version I have, too. I’ve gotten no indication from Accusonus that the version 5 effects have been updated or features added, just that the bundle has more effects now.

I’m interested in their Voice Deepener product, but not at the cost. The bundle I have is a perpetual license, and working well enough. I think I paid $49 for it, which was well worth it. Now that they’ve gone uptown, they don’t seem like such a bargain.

Since I don’t have V5, I can’t expand on the ERA 5 experience.

I also have Zynaptic Unveil for reverb removal, and UnFilter for comb filtering removal, which works as well as de-reverbing for many room sound reduction situations. The Zynaptic effects were the only game in town when I seem to recall buying them at $400 each. The prices have gone down slightly in light of competition, but I needed them for a project. Some times, the ERA Dereverb works better. I’ve tried the Premiere reverb removal, but the “Essential Audio” features are pretty unessential to me. I can see how they would be useful for people who don’t buy third-party products. Their music under VO Ducking feature is a joke, and I’d far rather they implement a side-chain feature for their and third party compressor/limiters.

The Voice Leveler is good, but my preferred compressor for voice tracks is PSP Vintage Warmer.

I suppose you need to wait for somebody else to pipe up about the V5 Bundle.

[Jim Curtis]

<div>

I have an Enhance (Enchance… Good one!) E8. It has no lights other than the eight for drive activity, nor have I ever heard it beep. My drives sound like they spin up, although maybe I’m just hearing the fan, and feeling the air move when I enable the power switch.

Sounds like you may have blown a fuse (if there is one) or had a solder joint fail in the power supply or on the backplane, or have some similar air gap.

FWIW, I replaced my old 2 TB SAS drives with 10 TB SATAs, and it’s been working fabulously with the old ATTO R680.

</div>

[Jim Curtis]

You didn’t mention Mac or Windows. I have the first gen ERA bundle, and have demoed RX8. Both have worked without any crashing on my MacPro7,1 running 10.15.6 and 10.15.7.

I love the simplicity of the ERA effects, and they mostly work very well. I demoed RX8 only to try out the noise reducer, and am unimpressed with the results, given the price.

I’m sorry that ERA went to subscription, but their marketing materials claim there’s a perpetual license option, which is almost as expensive as RX8. I like that iZotope is perpetual, but again, the price seems out of line.

I’m still looking for the holy grail of noise reduction without shelling out $5K or whatever it is for CEDAR, which doesn’t have a demo option. I might even pay the ransom if I KNEW it was able to do magic on production tracks with wind noise and other high noise to signal problems.

I’ve also tried Audionamix Instant Dialog Cleaner, which is probably the best, but doesn’t work at 48 KHz without adding clicks to the audio. I complained about this well over a year ago, and they haven’t done anything to fix it. They could only suggest working at 44.1 KHz. It’s weird they sell this as a professional post production product when almost all pros record and distribute audio at 48 KHz.

[Jim Curtis]

Thanks for that link, John. I suppose I need to be ready in case the worst happens.

BTW, I’ve also read elsewhere that you can’t mount a new MacPro with an external drive. That’s not true. There are some “security” features one has to address, but if this wasn’t possible, I would have been in deep doo doo. I suggest other readers take precautions.

I’ve had reinstall Catalina at least a dozen times since December, including after this scary error business. My computer wasn’t visible on my network, and reinstalling Catalina fixed that (again).

[Jim Curtis]

I’ve been looking for a third party solution to Pr’s lousy Track Matte for years. This is good to know, but I do not like the FX Factory model for plug-ins. I’ve written to several plug-in developers of Pr plug-ins and asked them to take this on.

Adobe could improve on track matting easily as FCP 7 did by making mattes one of the Transfer Modes.

[Jim Curtis]

The suite of 2020 CC apps are working well for me on my MacPro7,1 on 15.5.7. I’ve had to reinstall Pr several times because it gets borked somehow. I’ve had to reinstall Ae once. And I’ve had to reinstall Catalina way too many times. Since there are few utilities to fix Catalina problems, reinstalling is what I do. I’ve got fiber internet, so it’s not too time-consuming. Takes about 20 minutes. Ae and Pr reinstall in about five minutes each. Reinstalling is what I do when trashing prefs and the other usual fixes don’t work. I haven’t missed a deadline yet.

[Jim Curtis]

Mark, you made some excellent points. Thanks for adding your thoughts.

When I wrote that I charge 4x to send media to a competitor, it’s not as onerous as it may sound at first. I generally don’t charge clients for unaccompanied machine time. If I step away for a render or a long upload, I go off the clock. My rate for my labor & creativity, including my hardware and software, which is currently $150/hour. The time I have to devote to a restore is maybe 10 minutes to locate the tapes I need and start the restore to a RAID. I buy a drive from Amazon: 5 minutes. I start a copy process to that drive: two minutes. I box up the drive and make a UPS / FedEx label: 10 minutes. I also charge my clients for email correspondence / administration; so add another five minuets. So, the total of my time may be 30 minutes at $600/hour, or $300, plus shipping and cost of the drive. That’s not bridge burning level extortion.

If I did want to “punish” a client, I’d include all my machine time. But, then the bill would be more like $1200+, which still isn’t unreasonable given what cloud storage used to be.

[Jim Curtis]

Nice. Thanks, Tim.