Izotope RX8 Spectral Repair Tool - Explained in detail

hey everyone today i want to take a quick look at izotope rx8 spectral repair tool and specifically how it can be used in both music and sound design post-production kind of workflows um but specifically rather than just talk about how it works kind of overall i think it's a fairly established tool i think what we're going to take a look at today is really the nitty gritty of how it works and understanding what all the little different controls do and so to do that we're going to start by taking a look at a couple of instrument files these are some instruments that i recorded and just some little things that we can do to tweak it using the izotope rx8 spectral repair and actually this works with rx6 and probably five as well but i know they've improved the algorithms a bit over time so maybe things are better now so first i've got this clarinet file here and it's me playing clarinet so it's not terribly great so there's actually some performance issues that i'd want to fix um and also you know my room is somewhat acoustically treated but it is not perfect but i think it mostly comes okay comes across fine here the next thing we've got is a cello i recorded in an actual studio so that sounds good to be fair the cello actually sounds quite good overall but i'm gonna just show one little thing uh that you can do if certain notes or resonant frequencies uh stick out um so what i want us to do uh what we're going to start with is we're going to just take a listen to this clarinet file and then we're going to take a look at an izotope and take it from there so [Music] okay so let's start by taking this and sending it over to izotope rx8 and what we're going to see is all pretty normal stuff we've got our fundamental frequency the overtones background noise is fairly low you know if i really wanted in rx i could open up a a low cut and just kind of get rid of everything you see under here if i was really concerned so this frequency around here if we look down in the bottom right where it says cursor it'll show you the frequency so this this little room tone here is at 120 so there might even be some hum so if i want i could just kind of cut everything below 120. again this isn't necessary or could be done at a at another stage such as in the such as in the actual mix itself it doesn't have to be hard baked but just for fun let's do that so um next up the other things that i heard were occasionally my attacks on the clarinet aren't so good so you can actually kind of see it here so this is our fundamental frequency and these are the overtones and i've got these little frequencies here that stick out for my attack again you know this is just kind of not great playing on my part it's the the strong tongue of the attack i don't i don't particularly like that so that's something i want to take a look at um the next thing uh is a little bit [Music] later there are these little clicks there um those are actually quite easy to take care of [Music] so uh final thing here is this um breathy airy sound from uh my my lips opening a bit while blowing into the instrument so we can actually take care of that half decently the problem the the the challenge of this area is actually going to be that you can still see some harmonic content from the clarinet itself in there so we're going to kind of run the risk of maybe losing some information and we'll take a look at different options it's all about how much time you want to spend on this you know theoretically i could kind of go through and just isolate every little bit in between to reduce the the effect that could take you know upwards of five or ten minutes and for a two second part in a much larger context of orchestral context for the piece it might not be necessary so we'll come and take a look at that uh and then other little things is you know you could maybe see like ask if you want how much you want these click sounds that's clearly a key click you know um that's part of the beauty of live instruments so does it make sense to get rid of it maybe in the silent context here you know we could take a look at uh reducing those so let's just get started and the first thing i want to take a look at is uh this this sort of bad attack or this attack that at least i don't like so what we're going to do is we're going to open up spectral repair and let's just take a quick look at the the knobs and stuff here so we've got attenuate replace pattern partials and noise we're mostly going to be using attenuate here but replace and pattern um can be helpful as well let's but for now we're going to focus on attenuate so the idea of attenuate is that it's going to reduce the volume of a selected region of whatever you're selecting so in my case i can see that these little frequencies here are sticking out more than i would like all right and so those are the ones i want to bring down overall surrounding region length you can see when i make a selection this affects how much the surrounding area is the strength is how strong the algorithm will be applied um before and after waiting you can see there's left and right here and that just affects how much of i'm selecting from the left or right and then direction of interpolation vertical or horizontal or both now this might seem like a lot of stuff uh if you just go to the the help file like if you click on here for help it brings you here you'll see that there's actually decent decent information that will give you quite a good sense oh yeah i didn't even talk about bands that's how many frequency bands are being used so basically how much how much information you want to sort of uh compare with um it's kind of like surrounding region length but a little bit different um you'll see if i select on a lower frequency if i'm on vertical if i select a lower frequency it's a different uh relative thing so if i make that 4096 if i make that 512 it's all kind of relative so the two actually kind of go hand in hand and you can see like this bottom one is bigger uh because it's because of the frequency scaling so we don't have to worry too much about that but you can kind of go with just what your eyes see visually for what it's going to compare with so the way this really works is actually quite simple it's going to attenuate based on what is around it in those boxes so if i want to get rid of this it's going to look at what's in these boxes and say okay there's something of similar volume or signal level present here and here so i don't necessarily want to bring that down too much because it's trying to sort of it's balancing it in in relation to what is around it however if i hit horizontal it's going to say oh you know what the rest of what's around it is actually kind of quiet is quieter so i'm going to bring it down then and so just let's we're going to keep all these settings the same uh i find 512 bands to be a good starting point for for most uh for most things um so for example let's say i want to get rid of these two little spots here uh actually you know just before we dive into that let's just talk quickly about the different types of selectors you've got the time selection which just selects all frequencies in a given time you've got the rectangle selection which is time and frequency and you've got the frequency selection which is all of a certain frequency uh over the entire timeline i usually find myself working and of course the the the command keys are t r and f so t for time r for rectangle and f for frequency selection there's also a lasso so you can do something like that um and i did my eq there's a brush tool uh for b for brush tool so this kind of lets you paint in a little bit which could be nice we're gonna see that a bit later and then the wand tool is kind of like in photoshop and it just kind of intelligently selects so this is great for like selecting an entire note uh region here you can see um it actually selected three notes so you know you can kind of and you just like in photoshop you can actually hit shift to add something like that so that's great for selecting entire notes you can see the frequency drift dropped on that on that overtone so it kind of separated to two so anyways you can play around with that and alt um is it alt should remove yep uh and then you can actually select harmonics so if i just remove that and i go select harmonics i can choose how many harmonics i want to select and it does it automatically which again it's a nice little feature and i can select all and you'll see it kind of ignores some of those higher ones and then if i want i can just start to to mess around with the sound so let's not worry too much about that for now let's just focus on uh the rectangle generally with rx what i like to do is i like to focus uh on lots of small steps rather than large sweeping steps because it really allows you to make sure that you're only removing what you want to remove um and so what we've got here is like i said we want to kind of take a look at some of these things this might be sort of the fundamental of my my tongue and i don't necessarily want to remove that but let's start by removing this and like i said if i'm in vertical mode it's going to compare this level relative to these levels and i don't think if i hit render you'll see it didn't really do anything right it kind of looks the same so if i redo it and i undo undo it it looks the same so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select that now but i'm going to go horizontal and if i hit render you'll see there was a noticeable change it might be a bit weak so you could say you know what let's boost that strength and it's going to do it more and so that's sort of you always want to be considering how your horizontal and vertical are working which which tool you're using and to adjust the horizontal and vertical as you see fit so we can just select all these and hit render i'm using the key commands so the default key commands are shift 6 to bring up the window and command 6 on mac probably control 6 on pc to hit render and it's always going to go with whatever the current settings are so if i had just done a replace it would do a replace but i'm on attenuate so it's going to do an attenuate so i can just do that and if i want i can even just bring this one down a little bit and so now let's just listen and let's listen to the original so you kind of get a lot of that like initial tongue the lower frequency and it's just kind of not quite right or nice and after all my attenuates it's a much more transparent sound and if i want i can even go through and run those even more um and you know if i if i feel like this area might be influencing the sound too much i can just hit only the after weighting and i can start to really take out what i don't want even get rid of that a bit so you can really do that to really control um little sounds like that uh the next thing i said was there's a little click here [Music] it's a little subtle um so now um i can actually you can tell that i could probably do vertical let's reset let's reset our things you can tell that i could probably do vertical or horizontal because it's quiet all around so for example a relatively quiet all around so if i just hit render you'll see that it disappears and if i switch to horizontal and i hit render it also kind of disappears it disappears a bit more because there is a little less around it you can see i kind of lost some information there but it's so quiet i mean if you look at the the color scaling we're you know minus 100 db so this is really quite subtle and in the context of a full mix it would not really matter that much of course there are other tools for dealing with clicks such as the d-click tool over here i'm using i i find the multi-band random works quite well for many things so i could just select that region uh i can make the sensitivity they default to three which is usually quite good uh it's a little uh high frequency heavy so i could skew it a bit to high frequency but i keep it low i'll keep it in the middle because there is some low if i just hit render you see it kind of gets rid of some things but it's not always perfect either so if i bring up the sensitivity it does the trick but if for whatever reason you really want fine grain control i do recommend the spectral repair tool where i can just select that and just go if anything for real fine grain control i can just go like that like that and if i was really concerned about that i'm not but i can just do something like that [Music] so um again if for some reason these clicks here bothered me i can just select that and just go um we're not doing d-click we're doing the spectral repair and it just gets rid of them even you can even hear on this on the end of this note my my lip popping off with a breath [Music] so if i wanted to get rid of that i can just select that now you'll see here maybe this isn't going to work quite the way i want okay it did end up working [Music] yeah that did that did work but if for some reason there was too much content i could also consider vertical here and do it like that and you'll see it just gets rid of it a lot more [Music] so those are some options i don't think that's necessary i think that one's fine the real trick here is going to be this breath here right so again if i select this entire region and i just go uh you know say vertical you'll see that there's less on top and there's more signal on the bottom so if it's completely normal before and after waiting i might get just a bit too much i might it either won't reduce enough or i'm going to reduce too much so that's something to just consider so let's just see what happens i'm going to leave it at strength 1 which is a usually a good starting point again i find working smaller subtler changes and working up to be much more beneficial so if i just hit render you'll see not much happened so let's bring up the strength and see what happens like that [Music] that didn't seem to do what i wanted either so let's see what happens when we go horizontal okay so now we can see a nice box where everything got removed [Music] it sounds not great again because we're losing some of these harmonics that you can kind of see the little lines here um that's not really what we want but you know again it's you're going to have to kind of balance how much time you want to spend on on micromanaging this sound and say doing something like you know like that and going render you know really making sure that you don't touch the harmonics uh and actually just just for the sake of it if you wanted to what you can also do actually that's you can also move your region up like that if if you want so uh and so you could kind of keep doing that let's just do a quick and you could try and just deal with a few more of the aggressive spots and maybe you know we care a few a little less about those ones up there so it's not perfect but in the context of the mix it might be fine um but in any event that's kind of the process you would take to to get rid of that um you're going to be balancing how much noise you're moving versus how much core frequency and sound you're removing and that's that's that's always going to be the trade-off in these kinds of things um you can try the myriad of different tools but the focus of today's video was really on on um on on spectral repair so that's what we've got for the for the audio files for these for this clarinet file so if i want i can just send that back render and there we go so the next thing that i want to show is this cello file and specifically something near the end here so you can hear that note right there kind of sticks out so let's just say i want to send just this second part of the file and you can even see where that node is right you can see like if you just look at the file overall you can see that this note sticks out a bit compared to the other ones now it's okay if the note is naturally a bit louder and it's an ident it's a dynamic performance that's that's a fine and very good thing but sometimes it's not always what we want so what we're going to do is we can use spectral repair i'm going to bring up the window again we can use spectral repair to just take that one note that gets just a bit heavy-handed and we can use some some reduction on it and we can get rid of that little bow change there as well [Music] and we've kind of got this like nasally sound so if we just take a little bit of thing there's actually two play buttons on our x8 and there's a regular play button and a frequency selection uh play button and your spacebar transport always remembers the last selection you had so if you were on frequency selection it'll do that and if you switch back to normal play it'll remember that so i've got to find out what it is there's a sound that's just kind of not a great sound there so you can see that a few frequencies are kind of poking out and so if i wanted i could select those um i could you know even zoom in my um where that's not what i wanted to do uh something like that yeah that's fine uh maybe back up a little bit so sorry um there we go that's what i wanted so you can see that a few of these are sticking out a bit and so if i want i can select those and just start to reduce them a bit and you can see that some just get a bit aggravated part way through and again this this is a case where the bands on either side are going to be really helpful in how much you're reducing because it's relative to what's inside there right because if i did vertical here and i you know let's say i reduced the surrounding length and i made the bands smaller oops uh if i really wanted to to focus in here and then so now it's a little hard to see but my bands are like kind of like that if i did a spectral repair like this it's going to like mute it practically and that's not what we want at all right so i do i do think horizontal is the right call here we'll just reset to our sort of defaults and i can just i can even you know reduce the strength a bit and i can just do these light applications and just really something like that you know and and i can play around with this if i want like to really reduce all these higher frequencies i could do something like that i'm only going to spend so much time on this but i think you can kind of get the idea so and of course i could do something like that as well here that's starting to sound really bad but you get an idea of how you can use the spectral repair to really isolate problematic frequencies and this is sort of just a really neat tool to to focus small mistakes so that's mostly what i wanted to show you with that this is actually really handy if you're doing if you're often recording uh lower frequency instruments in small rooms um in my home studio here i've once i've occasionally recorded an upright bass and you know just the sheer physics means that the frequency the bass frequencies just don't have enough room to really travel properly and so they get a bit muddy and so this is a really great way of controlling lower frequencies in small rooms and this could also be really good if you're say recording your voice or something in a in a small room and it gets a bit boomy or boxy because in the typical mixing workflow somebody might pull up an eq and and just try and dial down certain frequencies or they might even do a dynamic eq and say oh when those frequencies get activated above a certain threshold then just dip them down a bit and those are neat but it's not as precise as this and that's what i think is really kind of cool about the rx8 spectral repair is that you can be really precise um my my last advice is don't go nuts on it um oftentimes it's better to just let the instrument sing and do its thing because if you focus too much on trying to fix something sometimes you just make it sound unnatural and it kind of becomes the uncanny valley of of audio recording and audio engineering uh so i'd definitely try and avoid that um and so if you're happy with it you can send it back and render it and there you go you can even see that the waveform dipped so there was my frequency that was a bit high that was a bit loud and with it fixed it's a little bit better um again everything is is relative to the context that you're playing in so uh next up we've got some ambiences and this is a request from a friend um proximity sound who wanted to know how to deal with sirens in certain ambiences and this is definitely a tricky one and you're going to see all the same tools that we talked about in the previous thing applying here so let's just take a listen to this so we've got lots of sirens and lots of ambi and sort of a a strong wash of um air ambience um and the sirens are really in the background and this is actually going to be quite tricky because what we want to do is we want to preserve that overall ambience while still keeping while still keeping well reducing this fluctuating sound right if it's a single frequency we'll see that it's actually quite easy to fix but if we're actually this this sound is moving a lot and changing a lot and it's going to be a lot harder to fix so let's just take a look at what what our options are so we'll send this over to rx you'll often see a 16k hertz that comes with some recorders if it really bothers you you can just filter that out so boom done not a big deal but let's take a look at these sirens right so we've got these sirens and you can see that it's really kind of very you can see where the sirens are exactly and how they move and you've got this general wash of of ambience and so rather than you can ask oh do i want to be going through and and like painting all these out well sometimes you might need to maybe you don't need to do it for the entire file but if there's dialogue over a certain scene or a certain moment and the um siren is detracting from that you could take take something like the brush tool because it's changing pitch [Music] the frequency is changing over time something like the brush tool is better than the rectangle tool or the time or the frequency so this is where the brush tool can come in real handy um is there a way i think i can't remember if there's a way to control the size of the brush tool maybe you just have to do zoom ins yeah you can just do a zoom in on the frequency da so maybe i zoomed in a bit much there so yeah you can so now you can kind of do something like this and again using the same uh general ideas before you can start to attenuate these things or like now because it's on a diagonal you can see that it might be getting a bit confused as to whether it's the horizontal or the vertical like it's showing you a bit of the horizontal but it it can get a bit messy so what we're going to do we can try the vertical and see how it compares by doing that let's bring up the strength just to see what we're doing right so that that looks like it might be working let's just do uh you can also use the shift tool here to add in um for the problematic frequencies uh whoops so whatever's sticking out is bright you can really kind of come in and just select that and then we could do something like that and let's just take that and we can see it kind of ramp up there and you can just kind of go one at a time or you can shift them in it doesn't really matter this is not going to be perfect i'm just going to say that now right um because again the frequency is changing so much over time that it's really kind of hard to to to to make it perfect but let's just take a listen to what we've got right now we'll go back to the original so we've reduced it to some extent and that's not bad um it's not again it's not great but this is kind of the the painstaking process if you were to do that globally of course someone decides to start running some machinery while i'm doing this but um it can help and in a pinch it does the trick as always it depends on how much time you want to spend on these things right so let's let's go back to our original and let's look at another option i can try selecting say this entire region here and if i pull up the spectral pair let's try replace because with with replace what it's looking for is what's on either side and we can say we want more on the left more on the right um and i can say you know what let's look a little bit more and i can also choose number of bands etc so if i make that extra wide let's let's see what we get like this that's not very good see selection too long used attenuate algorithm with vertical directions so that's that's not good what they want for replace they want small parts so like if you just did something like that if i go render you can kind of see that it just takes a little bit of what's on either side the let's bring that back this frequency here is because it found something there it's not terribly great so if i take that maybe it kind of it kind of feels static a bit it's not really what we want um patterns i don't think that's going to help us replaces a section selection with similar audio content found elsewhere in the file we could try doing that honestly what i think might be a better fit for these for this particular uh case is to just do something like um ambience match and so even even if we take this area with with our sirens let's just focus back in on that uh and we go learn let's just listen output ambience only this is interesting it's actually kind of incorporated all the frequencies of the siren and made them constant tones which is kind of kind of neat actually [Music] but hopefully you're able to take a selection of the ambience where there is no siren and you can just go learn and preview and so now we can just render that there so something like that isn't perfect either but it is pretty good um and it might be better than manually doing every single little thing again all of the options here partials and noise finds harmonics and noises on either side of the selection fills in the selection using interp interpolation um i'm not sure that that's necessarily what we want either again it's really hard with this uh shifting frequency especially such a swoop so i think in all these cases you're balancing a question it's it's a question of balancing uh time and effort versus the quality of the results sometimes the easier thing is to just go out and get your own sound and make it make it better re-record something sometimes the best option is to just look into your own uh just find a different ambience sometimes it's using ambience match so it's you're going to be kind of making compromises at some point but um if you really want you can spend 30 minutes or more dealing with these ambiences using the attenuate tool um it's just a question of is that is that worth the time and energy so let's take a look at a few more examples um and so what i did here was i created a separate i had an ambience file a big drive-by [Music] and then i've also got this siren that approaches and stops a little drive by there as well and then it approaches and stops so i just merged the two uh into one file here uh just to to give a sense if you if this had been recorded in the wild and this is what you were dealing with so let's let's see what we can do with this so again we've we can clearly see what this siren looks like and this one is a little bit easier than than maybe the other one which had different sirens all going at different times but again the process is going to be quite similar and so you're just kind of have to painstakingly kind of go through and just brush them all out [Music] so we'll just hear a quick before and after you'll hear a bit of like artifacts or phasing there um if there's other stuff happening on the scene it might not be too serious um another option is we could try the wand tool so if i select something like that you'll see that that's pretty good at selecting at selecting things but it starts to maybe get a bit messy in these more complex areas so is that really the best tool i don't know um see like that one but we can try we can try reducing it and actually let's just try mixing that with harmonics so you can see we just added a harmonic there it doesn't look like it did it perfectly um so let's try adding a third just to see and if i attenuate all those i do it twice just to yeah so this is a little bit weird and you'll see actually we may also i was just applying this globally to a stereo file you may actually want if there's any kind of uh uh phase difference between the left and right channels you actually may want to do this individually on each channel to avoid um applying the the filters the attenuation unevenly which might cause some weird phase issues so this is where it can get really tricky um you know it's again it's going to be a question of balancing um competing needs but the general tools here are you know not bad it's just about knowing how to kind of balance whether you're doing the horizontal the vertical before and after waiting and just really being aware of uh i'll just put this back into one just really being aware of what this selection box means and what you're affecting right so if you're affecting more before or after on top bottom um and knowing that your change is going to be relative to the signal level in these boxes then that's really valuable to know and that the bands can affect how much is in that context as well so usually with some combination of all of these things you can get something that works pretty well um at the same time it's very easy to start doing too much and it just kind of starts to sound bad so again it's all a question of balance let's just hear what these sounds are not exactly sure what those sounds are but you know spectral repair is great at just taking little things like that and just getting rid of them without affecting too much of the audio signal so this is where this is where spectral repair really shines and i think it's just a great tool this is also really good if you want to isolate bird frequencies because bird frequencies are usually short and precise and usually in in a range much higher that they are much more easily um you can isolate them much more easily than with um uh then say uh you know a lot of human sounds which are much more in the sort of lower frequencies so they're in the higher frequencies and the rest of the ambience tends to be kind of unaffected by removing those specific frequencies so i hope this has been helpful um if you do have any questions please feel free to put them in the question in the comments below and have a good day bye

Channel: Tristan Capacchione

Views: 11,369

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Id: wmojU5niOtE

Length: 41min 56sec (2516 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020