Spectral display in Adobe
- Thread starter skg
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Massive Master
www.massivemastering.com
Have you tried - The Manual?
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
That's like asking how to perform surgery on a patient using a CT scan.
One uses the spectral display to help identify the exact nature of a frequency response problem - usually one already ID'd by your ears, you just want to use the spectral display to pinpoint the exact, specific nature of the problem so you can target a surgical response.
Check out this thread for an example of this kind of diagnosis in action.
G.
tarnationsauce2
Welcome to the jungle.
Ahh but you are forgetting the patient here is digital. Adobe has indeed figured out how to do spectral editing. Pretty cool stuff. You can see it in action on this video, you can see him starting with some spectral editing around 1:55. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE3If4y7IE0
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
That is kinda cool. But you still gotta know how to read it before you can use it, and that's not something that can be taught as a step-by-step process - in any way I can think of, anyway. That's what I was referring to.
One can teach the mechanics of the spectral display - i.e. that it's an energy distribution by frequency over time, and all that - but I have no idea how to teach someone how to spot what's right and what's wrong, what to edit and what not to edit, in any given display. It takes having an ear first, and knowing how to correlate what you're seeing with what you're hearing.
Just like reading a CT scan. it takes a keen knowledge of both human anatomy and a comprensive knowledge of the actual symptoms of the patient to know whether this white spot or that black smudge is relevant or not.
G.
tarnationsauce2
Welcome to the jungle.
Verry good points Glen. It took me a while before I understood what sound looked like what in the spectral realm.
My only advice is to watch while listening. In the video hel istened in waveform mode and cleaned it in spectral. probably because his computer wasn't all that powerful and the spectral drawing takes a lot of CPU power.
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Well, I just watched that video a couple of times, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why he's switching over to spectral mode for most of the edits he does. It looks like he's simply removing unwanted extraneous noises - clicks, bumps, etc. - from the audio by erasing their footprint from the spectrograph in some instances, and by applying a region mute or gain reduction in others. I'm at a loss to see in the instances he chooses how it makes a difference which way he does it. Maybe it's just a matter of style and he's working the way he feels most comfortable, and that's fine.
Maybe he's just trying to look fancy in the video so that - in his own words in his comments on the right - "Now hopefully you will all validate me and say how awesome my work is." in reality there is very little of what I would call "awesome" in the simple clean-up of a VO track that he's doing. In fact - though it's hard to tell because of the poor audio quality of the clip - there are even a couple of edits that just don't look right (example: the waveform mute edit at 00:26 looks to me to have missed the mark).
To his credit, I will say it's nice to see there are still some out there that use the keyboard shortcuts more than the mouse, and work much faster that way. This is a practice that I admit that I have been slipping on lately myself. It was good to see a reminder of how fast keyboard editing should be, even if (unless I'm missing something, and please correct me if I am) he does appear to be making an easy job look "awesome".
G.