CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 69 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 69 OUTSTANDING PRODUCT – POST-PRODUCTION iZotope RX8 by MATT FOGLIA CAS Meet the Winners When situations can't be fully controlled on location and noise rears its unwanted voice into our tracks, RX can act as an audio post ER or fine surgery center—depending on how much time you have. You know a product has made an impact when its name can be used as a verb. "Hold on while I RX this," is a common phrase in audio post. In a field of some extremely impressive and influential audio post developments, RX keeps receiving recognition and collecting awards—and deservedly so. To learn some more about the software, I reached out to iZotope's Principal Product Manager, RX, Mike Rozett. Each version of RX since RX2 has been recognized with a CAS Award. Relative to post-production, as the program's features grow, how are new features decided upon? We always start by speaking directly with our customers and understanding what problems they face. Once we understand the magnitude of a problem, we rank it against other issues we've identified and decide on the set of solutions we want to pursue. Sometimes technological capability lags behind customers' needs, such as some years ago before we implemented machine- learning to automatically separate noise from dialogue. And there are always more problems to solve. When we can't get to something, we'll try to come back to it later and tackle it fresh with the latest research. When developing new features, are folks put together in teams to tackle a proposed feature—kind of like how there are different artists working on various aspects of a frame of animation? We break feature work down into sub-teams, which we call streams. A stream of work is led by a product manager who decides what problems to go after and why it's important to solve them, and a tech lead who determines the approach we'll take and manages a small team of software developers and quality assurance engineers. This approach gives the team a lot of room to be creative in how they build a feature. In many ways, our teams are crafting a production for release similar to the way a creative team delivers a television series or a feature film. The new Spectral Recovery feature seemed very timely with this release given the remoteness COVID forced on the industry and the potential for receiving lower quality audio in post. The initial work on Spectral Recovery was started before COVID- 19, but we accelerated production after the pandemic hit. The need to re-synthesize missing frequencies above a cutoff is a trend we

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