A Little Smack Down for Some NON-Constructive Criticism

Alright.
If you've read this blog at all, you should know I'm a snarky, cranky, git most of the time. Also that I produce content all over the place, including my own pet project, a film review webseries called Movies You May Have Missed.
Since the show's creation, people have constantly made fun of the "prop" microphone we keep on the table. This hurts my feelings, as a lot of work goes into making that show look and sound natural.

We made this vid to address a few of those "not so constructive" criticisms...

News Sound Bites - WHOLE TON o STUFF

Yep. There's a lot of news to cover today.

Apple finally gives in on custom ringtones for the iPhone. A not so mysterious "Share ringtone with iTunes" button has popped up in Garageband. It's about time. The ringtone lock down was a stupid, ill advised, arbitrary way to milk customers for extra revenue, while simultaneously providing little to no benefit.

Seibertron.com interviews Frank Welker! Yup, the REAL Megatron. Not to say Hugo didn't do a good job in the movie, but if you grew up in the 80's, this man's voice represented everything that was evil.

It never even occurred to me that they would bother, but apparently they did get "names" for Alvin and the Chipmunks. Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Jesse McCartney voice the rodents in the up coming movie. Why? Really, I mean, why bother? No one cares. They weren't used to promote the movie. You can't recognize the voices. The performances wont be "better" than using true blue VO people. There's no benefit. I don't get it...


The Cincinnati Post takes a look at narration in TV series. I finally saw Amelie for the first time, and Pushing Daisies totally nails the quirky yet emotion tone of that film. Good times.

CNET News has a photo gallery up of Skywalker Sound, a totally drool-worthy look at one of the most advanced post production facilities in the world. Careful clicking on the link, because if you're anything like me, there's going to be a LOT of gear lust...

And lastly (i know right?), Do you own a Wii? Have you noticed an increase in the cockroach population of your abode after your acquisition of said Wii? There's a rumor floating around "teh intarwebs" that the Wii emits a sonic frequency that attracts the little buggers. I don't think it'll stop me from trying to grab one to rock some Mario Kart.

Calling all Engineers! FAVORITE NOISE REMOVAL???

Get it? All Caps, since I'm yelling over the noise.

So, I use two PC's. I've almost always used Sound Forge (currently on v9) to do my sound design work. Recently I've been hearing all about how Audition is awesome, and I should totally switch.
I downloaded the demo and started tearing into it, and it's nice, but I can't see what the advantage is.

Sadly, AudioGuy is developing a reputation as the "GoToGuy" for cleaning up other peoples mistakes. While I'll never speak ill of working, it bothers me that I can't seem to get hired to just prevent the mistakes in the first place. Lately a lot of my work has been in cleaning up audio for low budget shorts and podcasts, and a lot of that cleaning has been noise removal. Bad mics, improper Lav placement, uncontrollable environment, bad ADR, theres a lot of noise out there.
So, throwing some files I'm working on into Audition and cranking up the NR plugin, I have to say I was a little disappointed.

Spectrum view is cool. I haven't seen yet where it really is better than waveform, just brings different information to focus first. Selection of noise to remove is great, but the actual settings to remove the noise just dont do it for me. Compared to the SF/Sony NR plugin, it's just too easy to hollow out the piece I'm working on.

So I put this out there to anyone who might catch it. What NR plugin SHOULD I be looking at? Since a lot of my freelance work involves cleaning, if something can really outperform SF/Sony, I'd love to give it a shot!