Evertime Spot opens his mouth I learn something...thanks Spot.
I might also add that if you r-click the audio and choose "open copy in SF" you can then "save as take" and A/B multiple takes in V5.
Randy

Yup. In fact, you don't even need to "save as take" but simply close Sound Forge and save when it prompts. Vegas will automatically see it as a take. Great point, Randy!

Gents,
I've used Clipped Peak Restoration a LOT.
There's a trcik to using it. Unless your peaks are really clipped and I mean hitting the maximum sample value for more than one sample it doesn't work.
But that makes perfect sense, there's no way for it to know what is 'clipped'.

So to get it to work you have to INCREASE the levels so that the peaks that you wanted repaired are truly clipped. This could be as little as 1dB or in the case of some stuff I worked on where it'd been damaged by an analogue limiter 10dB. You may find that with some form of analogue clipping you may need to make things quite a bit worse to get them better.
Once you've got nice flat tops on your waveform THEN it'll work.

Hope this helps.
Bob.

There is also in the tool menu a clipped peak checker tool which you can adjust to any level and after you run it markers appear where the clips are located.

JJK

JJ,

I don't see a clipped peak checker tool in the Vegas 4.0 tool menu. Unless you are talking about Sound Forge which I do not have.

Most of the replies assumed I owned Sound Forge I think. I have Vegas 2, 3, and 4 and have NR loaded into Vegas 4.0. I don't "hear" a change when I apply it unless I am doing something wrong.
Thanks,

John

If you only have Vegas then you'll need to do a bit of trial and error stuff.
Bump your levels up in Vegas on the track, have a look see how far below OdBFS you are and add a bit. Then render your audio out to a new track / file.
In that you need to see nicely clipped peaks at 0dBFS.
Now apply the Clipped Peak Restoration FX. You might need to fiddle with that a bit too. You need to give yourself enough headroom so it can build decent new peaks.

If your problem file isn't too big you could email it to me and I'll fix it in a flash in SF. My email address can be accessed from here (now).

farss,
I can see the clipped peaks easily enough when I stretch out the timeline. I added the FX to the entire track and clicked the check mark on and off. I CAN hear the difference now. The manual said to use one of the presets. Which one do you recommend? I thought -3db with limiter seemed to kill it too much so I tried a custom -1.5db with limiter which was a little better. Do you usually attenuate or just restore the peaks with NO attenuation?

John

I use it at -1.5 if it's heavy clipping, and at -.5 if it's a sibilance clip. -3 is good if it's a musically driven clip such as from a kick drum.
In all cases (almost all, I guess) I use the limiter. For dialog, as you've found, -3dB is a bit heavy. I'm sure Bob will kick back in, but you can always render a few new tracks or takes, and make comparisons. I don't think there is a good hard rule you can follow.

I'm with DSE on this one. It depends totally on what you're tryin to fix. Usually by the time someone gives stuff to me it's in very bad shape.
Typically some numb nut did a 1/4" to CD transfer with the levels set 12 dB too high (ouch) so I might have to go for 6dB headroom.
On another job it was audio from a lav that was picking up sound from a PA stack which was overdriven almost to destruction. So it was being clipped at mulitple points, by the PA amps, by the speakers and by the front end of the wireless transmitter but the gain on the camera had been set WAY down.
So I had to crank the gain up 10dB in SF to get hard clipping and chop off the distortion and then give the FX 12 dB headroom. Hardly a stellar result was obtained but it was a miracle compared to what I had to start with.

Bob,
It is a musical I shot last year. The vocals were too hot in the mix and many are clipped pretty badly. The videos came out fine, but now a year later they asked for a CD. When I loaded the rendered Avi into Vegas I noticed the clipping. Nice flat tops on the female vocals in particular.

John

If they are the loudest things in the tracks then I think you've got a chance. Just do as I said before so that the tops are at 0dBFS, otherwise the FX will not see them as clipped, even if they're -0.5dB below FS it will not kick in.
It's usually pretty easy if the clipping happened in the A->D converter. If it happened in the analogue side fo this you sometimes need to push it a bit higher to get rid of the rounded edges just before and after the clipping.

Where it becomes hopeless or at the best not very effective is when you've got lots happening in the mix and that's clipped. If you look in an unclipped mix you'll see that very few of the peaks look like sine waves, they've harmonics or whatever combined in with them. Now when that gets clipped the data is just plain chopped off. The restoration tool can only assume it should have been a fairly regular wave shape and will rebuild it as such.

I'd simple suggest you work at it, maybe take a small segment out and work on that until you get a few seconds as good as you can and then apply that formula to the whole thing. All this is much easier to do in SF of course! If it's a separate track of female vocals some Eq might also help to mask some of the distortion.

This is also one reason why I don't like the idea pf recording a mix, if you've separate tracks of everything and just one goes a bit bad you've got some show of fixing it, when it's all mixed I'd say it's nigh impossible to fix.

Nearly a year ago I borrowed a friend's DAT and recorded some dialog with an AT4073a mic. Even though the levels were safe, I heard clipping. Tried lowering levels and backing off more, but clipping on certain words still occured.
Finally found out that we should have been using a pad for that kind of mic and the dat. Thought it was hopeless until farss worked on it for me. Applying his formula really did the trick (THANKS AGAIN, FARSS!!). My friend who had been shooting a feature zombie film "Hide and Creep" had experienced these problems occassionally and didn't know this was why. We used farss's formula (slightly modified), fixed the problems there, and now they're negotiating with BlockBuster Video. It's not a done deal yet, but there is a moral to the story. farss and the clipped peak restoration tool rule. Oh yeah, another moral is know your equipment really really well before hand. Oh well.

Nice to hear it worked for you guys. Would have been even better if the documentation explained it better, eh.
And yes, get to know your kit is such good advice, doing dry runs is a good idea too.

Oooops! Forgot to mention that the tool was in Forge. Sorry.

JJK