Had this tool for quite a while now. Done quite a bit of work with it and generally very impressed, definately recommended.
Then a couple of days ago another Vegas user rang me with a problem. He'd gotten a "bit of hum" in a recording. He'd taken all the right precautions, tested the gear at home and yet the recordings made elsewhere had "this hum" in them. I put my hand up to help and a DVD with the file on it arrived via snail mail.
The "bit of hum" turned out to be a LOT of hum and not much else, I was having difficulty hearing the dialog under the hum, the meters showed the hum was at least 10dB above the speech, oh dear.
Not holding out much hope at all I tried Rx's Hum Reduction and fed it a sample. It spat it out, too many harmonics and it suggested using the noise removal tool. Holding out even less hope I gave it a go.
I have to say, it performed a miracle, seriously. Watching it work and listening to the outcome this is one very smart box of tricks. Yes, it uses a bunch of very high Q filters but it does so intelligently because they can also have a devasting effect on what is the wanted signal. What Rx does is to backoff the noise reduction based on what is in the wanted part of the spectrum.
So the pauses between words are hum free, if you listen carefully you can still hear quite a bit of the original hum in the words themselves but you have to be listening for it, only geeks like me seem to notice. It did take a lot of processing to finally get the job done. The audio was around 1 hour long, I did two passes of noise reduction in Rx which took over 1 hour each. Then I noticed quite a few annoying clicks in the audio so ran a click removal pass in Rx which took another 2 hours. The result was well worth the wait though.
I held off buying Rx for a long time thinking it couldn't be that much better than the tools in Sound Forge and only finally bought it because it was on special and a few here kept raving about it. I guess I could have done in SF what I did in Rx but as it lacks the smarts of Rx it would have taken ages, well a month at least.
Bob.
Then a couple of days ago another Vegas user rang me with a problem. He'd gotten a "bit of hum" in a recording. He'd taken all the right precautions, tested the gear at home and yet the recordings made elsewhere had "this hum" in them. I put my hand up to help and a DVD with the file on it arrived via snail mail.
The "bit of hum" turned out to be a LOT of hum and not much else, I was having difficulty hearing the dialog under the hum, the meters showed the hum was at least 10dB above the speech, oh dear.
Not holding out much hope at all I tried Rx's Hum Reduction and fed it a sample. It spat it out, too many harmonics and it suggested using the noise removal tool. Holding out even less hope I gave it a go.
I have to say, it performed a miracle, seriously. Watching it work and listening to the outcome this is one very smart box of tricks. Yes, it uses a bunch of very high Q filters but it does so intelligently because they can also have a devasting effect on what is the wanted signal. What Rx does is to backoff the noise reduction based on what is in the wanted part of the spectrum.
So the pauses between words are hum free, if you listen carefully you can still hear quite a bit of the original hum in the words themselves but you have to be listening for it, only geeks like me seem to notice. It did take a lot of processing to finally get the job done. The audio was around 1 hour long, I did two passes of noise reduction in Rx which took over 1 hour each. Then I noticed quite a few annoying clicks in the audio so ran a click removal pass in Rx which took another 2 hours. The result was well worth the wait though.
I held off buying Rx for a long time thinking it couldn't be that much better than the tools in Sound Forge and only finally bought it because it was on special and a few here kept raving about it. I guess I could have done in SF what I did in Rx but as it lacks the smarts of Rx it would have taken ages, well a month at least.
Bob.