Spot,

Great to meet you in person.

At the "Demo" show in Las Vegas each year, they give out a "demo god" award to the best demo of the show. You would win it easily. You are a demo god.

Many thanks to Gary also. Tell him he should spend more time showing Excalibur. He didn't even get around to showing Neon. This was the free day, and you guys should be allowed all the shameless plugs you can possibly work in.

For me, it was very interesting seeing someone from an audio background use the product. I got some very useful workflow ideas.

Finally, I shall not soon forget your zinger to me invoking the nom de plume of "He-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless." Touché!

As to your demo of the sound reduction module demo that elicited that exchange, I have used that program almost as long as you have, and have used it on tapes, 33 rpm, 78 rpm, DV footage, and old Jerry Lewis telephone transcription discs from 1955. On most material -- especially using mode 0 -- the flanging and "crinkling" noise gets pretty hairy when I go much above 20 dB of removal, yet you went to 100 dB, and the flanging -- while audible -- wasn't horrendous. I think what helped in your example was the total lack of impulse noise in noise sample (it was otherwise very clean audio, with very smooth, high frequency pitch noise), and also the lack of sustained harmonics (as you would get with musical instruments).

I did one project with over fifty one-hour tapes of an old man speaking into a cheap tape recorder recorded on the worst Radio Shack Type I tape ever made. The noise was far, far worse than your demo so that may be part of why I couldn't go too high with the NR.

However, I did notice one thing you did differently is that you used the default for the number of samples when taking your noiseprint. I usually increase the number of samples when taking the noise print. Maybe that is a bad idea. I'll try it with the default next time.

Thanks again!

And I actually generally DECREASE the number of samples....

It was great meeting you in person as well. Wish we'd had you in the VASST class. The person who won the Bella keyboard had used your card w/his name written on the back, made me laugh that it had your name on it.
We did quite a session on the NR plug today, used some really horrendous audio to clean up.
I'll also articulate that John Feith, writer of Noise Redux for Sony, taught me a few things to look for a few years back. Looking for/finding zero impulse makes all the diff in the world, as you noted.

Thanks for the "he whom shall remain nameless" :-) Can't let folks know we talk about them in RW now, can we?

he whom shall remain nameless ...

I thought it was reasonably obtuse.

Looking for/finding zero impulse makes all the diff in the world, as you noted.

Hmmm. Perhaps I could take the area I am going to use as a noise sample and apply "full strength" click/crakle and/or vinyl noise reduction (just the impulse part, with the NR part of vinyl turned off). Then, take the sample (and restore the impulse noise to the small sample area). Use this "impulse reduced" sample, which should have roughly the same spectral imprint, as far as the noise I'm really trying to eliminate, without the spurious spectrums introduced by all the impulse noise. I'll need to experiment with this on my next restoration project.

Thanks for passing on the insight from the guy who designed it.

I just got home from the VASST Vegas day. JohnM, good to meet you on the first day (Showcase) but sorry you weren't there today. Spot went into more detail about how he achived the success with noise reduction today. He also went through another more challenging source file where the results were not as good as the first file, but still pretty good considering the problems on the source file.

It was a great day of training. I learned a bunch of things that had evaded me in my previous Vegas editing and various tricks and tips about the general processes and workflow.

I got VV5+DVDA here a week or two back but haven't had time to spend with it yet. This was a good intro to new features that I should look for, and I'm sure will have saved me time jumping right in with DVDA2.

So the class was great, but it got even better when at the end of the day, I won the drawing for the ADS dual port external drive box. I had actually purchased one a couple weeks back. It solved the problem I had (posted here) using my WD drive in a cheapo external box. USB2 did not work on one of my machines but when I moved the drive to the ADS it worked on all my machines. I had already planned to buy a second box for my other drive. So, thanks again VASST!

Spot, your knowledge of all things Vegas, and video, and audio is amazing. After today, though, the thing that really blew me away is your ability to multi-task. It boggles the mind to see you driving the PC -- finding and starting a new project, or searching for something -- AND at the same time talking about something previous, or to come, or answering an unrelated question. Wow, man! You aren't normal! Is that a musician thing?

Oh, one last thing I should mention. Some of the deals available from other vendors might be worth the price of admission if one was in the market for any of that. I think I'll definately take at least one of those opportunities.

All good, and I'm going back to take Acid tomorrow. No... not 60's San Francisco 'electric acid koolade test' acid --- the Sony make your own music Acid program.

>reasonably obtuse

As in HWSRN?

Rex, it was so great to meet you in person! It's fun meeting the faces behind the names in the forums. Most times, I'm absolutely surprised at who owns those faces. I guess when I sit in here and type questions and answers, I have my own ideas of who is who....and especially in the case of John Meyer and yourself, I've been so far off base of my preconceived notions....I'm embarassed.


has pix of the tour thus far....Some folks are asking about the gear we travel with. Take a look and see what the load looks like...You'll see why it takes 4 guys to lump all this around.