Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1122868
62 S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y the thing you're hearing that needs to be improved or that needs a little bit of EQ, that's what makes what we do pretty special. I hear the word "finesse" a lot from dialogue editors. They don't actually want to go in and clean out every single bit of noise that they hear. They want to clean out the most objection- able parts and they want to make sure that what they retain matches the performance and, for example, the movement of an actor's mouth. Sometimes a mouth noise is part of a perfor- mance. Other times a mouth noise is totally distracting and not right. I've heard that a lot of folks who use our software really like that balance of being able to drill down, being able to apply heavily when noise is really objectionable or to be able to work really within a microscope and try to just take out what's objec- tionable and let dialogue tracks breathe or let a performance come through and choose what they keep and what they get rid of. What are some of the most unique ways that you've heard of sound teams using your software that you wouldn't have thought of? That's a good question. We had a dialogue editor do a demo for us a while ago, where there was location sound that had a seagull in the background, and the seagull was squawking at almost like a mathematical rate, just continually making this sound in the background. And you could go in and you could see it pretty easily, and you could just do the "Find All" func- tion and find each time that shows up and you could do a blanket process and you could remove them. But what this dialogue editor did was, since there was some actual character to the bird in the background, he selected every instance and pulled it out of one track.So, he had sort of a pristine track. Then he created a second track and pasted it back in. He reset all the levels of the seagull and then effectively mixed it back into the dialogue track, but not at the original volume and not while it was landing over dialogue. To be able to isolate it, strengthen the dialogue so that it stands on its own and yet give that performance a life that sometimes when we're work- ing on the processing we're all thinking, "Yeah, just get rid of the seagull, just throw that out." But that's always fascinating to me, the things that people want to retain and use our soft- ware to retain and put back in, but with full control over it. Yeah, that really blew my mind. So, it was more distracting to listen to when it was uniform and like a metronome, but it was less distracting when he had control over it to make it sound like it's happening more ran- domly. Amazing. You get it to sound perfect and then you go, "You know what? I can now choose how this real-life location element sounds and I can place it how I think it serves the scene." So, we constantly get stories like that, from folks who aren't just wiping out noise, but they use noise as part of the story and part of the perfor- mance. And I'm not even talking about sound design, per se, I'm just talking about how, for example, a dialogue read gets cleaned up and really feels like, not only does it sound good, but it feels who know what we've done, know what we can do, and start to figure out the things we haven't even thought about doing yet and how we can put those into products or features that will really help people with the work that they do. My friend, Jacob Riehle, is a sound editor and uses your product every day. He said that what he loves about RX is that it gives editors the ability to perform magic on production dialogue and ADR. And, interestingly, that they are usually able to do things that filmmakers assumed they could do anyway once everything moved to nonlinear. What's your take on that and how do you feel about being a part of something that gives somebody that level of ability? Well, that's a great sentiment and I'm really glad to hear it. That is a lot of what we're trying to do, and I've heard that from other editors and mixers who have said the very same thing. They can't believe what the software can do, and it is kind of magical. Once you've had one of those experiences where you're looking at something that used to be impossible to salvage, like maybe pulling dialogue out of an incredibly noisy background, and being able to run "Dialogue Isolate" for example on it and have it really, clearly pull that dialogue away. Something that used to be tons of time, at best, with EQ and gates and hand cutting out pieces of noise, in the very early days. People are always talking about how they really appreciate that and how it is magical and how it saves time. We love hearing that and it's really important to the team here. Stories that range from getting rid of the cicadas and the crickets in the background to the plane that ruined the take, to the dog barking in the background, to an amazing performance but just with a ton of noise behind it. How do I pull that dia- logue performance out? Hearing those stories never gets old. Whether it's me or the sales folks, we always bring it back to the team and share it with everybody here. It gives people a sense of how well their work is going and how much it's appreciated. To have those kinds of reactions and that connection to the post- production community is wonderful. They have been really supportive of what we're doing. Tell me about RX in terms of analogies that might best describe it to the layman. Think about RX as kind of like a microscope for sound. When you're looking at the waveform or if you switch over to the spectrogram, you can see the intensity of the sound, as well as the frequency and how much time it takes up. You can use our tools to start diving into the split-second between 1 kHz and 2 kHz where you're hearing something that doesn't sound right, and you can drill into that spot and make very, very fine edits across the frequency spectrum, for whatever duration you feel is necessary as an editor. And you can do things that weren't possible even a few years ago. Each year, we get better and better at what we can deliver in terms of processing. But that basic functionality of being able to drill down into your sound and to get right at the heart of