All the sounds were recorded on a Tascam DR-40 with a small variety of mics (Built In Mics for a surprising amount, SM57s, and AKG c451/ck94 on a jury rig for a M/S combo). Everything with one exception was done on Linux with Ardour3.3, or git versions near that, the exception being cleaning up the audio (Noise reduction primarily) which fact of life is that there isn’t much on Linux to compare to even basic tools on Mac or Windows sadly, but will comment more on that some other time.
Many thanks to Robin Gaerus for putting up with me over the past couple weeks as I broke and he fixed his wonderful work on the Video Timeline of course:)
A couple of things. One Bob Katz is a mastering engineer for Music primarily, and much of his material is written from that standpoint, which has a very different set of requirements than SFX many times. This is one of them. Two I am definitely aware of how useful a simple downwards expansion can be for cleaning things up, I do it all the time in fact. However a few things to note is that there are limited options for true downwards expansion on Linux (See MRGate from WaveARTs on other OSes for examples of what I am referring to) and in general I am not happy with what limited options there are (I believe CALF has one and maybe a multiband expander, but I wasn’t impressed with audio quality).
Three is that there are many different tools for noise removal and picking the right one is critical. In this case it is more than a simple wideband downwards expansion, and even in that article what they are talking about sounds like a basic 3 or 4 band expander, which matches my memory of the TC Finalizer they are referring to. Most dedicated plugins for broadband noise reduction consist of a multiband (20 or so) downwards expander and can achieve far better results. Then you also have Hum/Buzz reduction, broadband expansion, click reduction, etc. Even more fun when you get to applying processing directly in the frequency space instead of just the time space, something just not possible on Linux right now easily(Writing up your own program aside as I am not a master DSP engineer;). He is right in that you can’t try to remove all the noise, and that being conservative is best, however.
All that being said, I was just having a conversation with someone else about the trailer, and was telling them Bassam can be real fun to work with because he knows what he wants, and will get detailed, but will still let you be creative, and will just get detailed in your creative output, so long as it is good of course;)
