|
For Geezer,
Yeah, for 24 bit I think you're right on that. I usually have
only been mixing down to 24 bit and so I don't process
those files after they're created.
Sorry to take a while to get back, the forums used to auto
notify if there was something new, but don't on this machine
at least.
For 16 bit WAVs though it works out pretty well.
I have done a couple jobs that way, where client sent in
source CDs of long training programs they wanted
to add some new stuff to but original pgms were not
done by me.
One sounded very dull out of the box. I ripped all
the CDs to WAV with M/Studio. I like that better than
other rippers because it is less tolerant of faults on the
CD and won't rip tracks that have excessive jitter or
problems. When that happens, at least I'm aware of
it and can then rip using something else (like EZCD usually).
At least you're on the alert with potential problem tracks
working that way. And sometimes they are very noticable
problems, though sometimes not!
The Waves plugs (Gold Bundle in this case) work very
well within Cool Edit Pro 2.x but have not tried with the
Adobe version though I have that.
In this case, I wanted to pretty much EQ, de-ess, and
otherwise process the source stuff all pretty much the
same, and quite a bit heavier than I normally
would process stuff when I originate it.
So you put all the files onto 1 set of CEP tracks
(could use more than 1 , but no need on this job)
and you can then do processing via plug ins (plus
any of CEP's stuff) real time, which lets you tweak
the same way we all have done analog forever. On a fast
enough machine (Athlon 2500) I was able to run I think
6 plug ins simultaneously, if I remember right it was
a graphic EQ, an expander/gate, a notch filter, some very
light reverb, the Waves de-esser, and their L1 Ultramaximizer,
though likely not in that order for processing.
The machine and CEP never really barked much,
though CEP did hiccup once in a while during the tweaking,
but not too badly.
During tweaking you can A/B, take stuff in/out etc like we all are used to doing analog.
You can also tweak the gain bit by bit though I didn't have
to do that much, it was fairly constant on the source
with some anomalies. (in CEP you can draw a gain
structure, but a bit cumbersome)
Then, when happy with the settings, you mix down each
chunk of the track (in this case about an hour's worth
each time) in CEP, which is a disk operation that required
about 6 minutes to make a new file which it will always
call "mixdown" whether you want that or no.
You save that as another name, and do the next file,
since it will also be called "mixdown" so it will overwrite
the previous one. But to me on that job the big advantage
was real time tweaking to find "average" settings for
all those processers that helped the material, especially
the de-essing since I was brightening the source more
than a little bit due to it sounding so dull -- and real dead
too, but not "nice" dead sounding, if you know what I mean
(likely you do!) In this case the brighenting was more
dipping out low mids and lows than boosting though.
I did some gain automation on areas in the files in CEP
but not a lot, it doesn't come that intuitively/easily and
so unless it was so bad it was gonna mess up the
processing (like the expander) I didn't bother (another
reason the L1 was in the chain, to pull stuff together
better). Where it was too low or high but "in the ballpark"
I left fine tuning for Medit, since it is so much easier.
Then brought everything to Medit, chopped it up and
put in markers for where new stuff is going to go,
moved stuff around, fine-tuned the gain, chopped out
many noises, replaced some lines with others all over
the place, fixed a bunch of bad edits in the source.
(there were a lot of those, surprisingly, since this
had been released previously)
All the processing had (expectedly) brought up some
more noises than you noticed in the dull original, but
losing or reducing them was easy in Medit for the most part.
Next week I'll record the new material in NYC where
I keep one barebones Medit system and bring it
back on a removable drive, and just drop it in and
tweak each area. I might have to degrade the new
stuff some to better match the existing, that as always
will be try and see. I just initially record it flat and
then tweak from there most times, depends though.
All told, reasonably painless - and the big advantage is the real time tweaking using the Waves stuff in CEP. I wish I could
get them to work in Medit, but I've never had any luck
at all with Medit and Direct X despite many beta versions
and trying on many machines, Win98, ME, XP and on.
The other pretty neat thing about the Waves stuff is
that if you use the ILOK key, you can install their stuff on
all your machines, though of course you can only run one
at a time. Way better than the former "you gotta authorize
your hard drive" approach, which put me off real big time.
And they mostly sound good, though I'm still a diehard
analog processing guy for many things. I often process
analog and go back to digital by mixing down to a second
Medit system via a Finalizer, dbMax or an Apogee sometimes.
Hope all this is helpful to you.
|