Sony SpectraLayers 2 & Sound Forge Pro 11 Video Tutorial

For those of you who don’t know, SpectraLayers 2, is the newest upgrade to the revolutionary award-winning audio software application. It has created the new standard for AudioSpectrum editing. And now SpectraLayers 2 is faster and easier than the original program. In addition you can now perform Spectral Casting/Spectral Molding and un-mix audio files into discrete component layers. For you Mac lovers out there it now is available for both Mac and PC. But perhaps the biggest advance is the inter-operability with Sound Forge Pro 11.

Sound Forge Pro 11 is the newest version of an application that has been the choice for a generation of creative artists,  producers and editors. Record or repair audio quickly, address sophisticated audio processing task with surgical precision, and run and render top-notch master files with ease. New features include one touch recording, metering for new critical standards, more repair and restoration tools, and exclusive round-trip inter-operability with SpectraLayers Pro 2.

Additionally Sound Forge Pro 11 has added some exciting features. Modeless recording and plug-in chain offering significant workflow enhancements three new audio repair and restoration tools and the inclusion of iZotope Nectar Elements, a US $1 29 value.

What we’re going to look at today is a real world example of how these two fantastic programs dovetail together to solve audio editing problems.

In the field you don’t always get to record audio in the pristine conditions that you would normally have in the studio. This can cause many problems not the  least of  which is ambient room noise that sounds like a  hiss or hum.

Let’s start out by opening this wave file in Sound Forge Pro 11. I cut this clip from the main clip in order to show you how quickly and easily you can solve this type of problem.
Let’s have a listen. (Please pause to listen.)

As you can hear at the beginning we got some good audio to work with we’ve even got some chirping birds in the background and then we got a pretty good sounding announcer. But I’m sure you could hear that hiss.  Let’s expand the view so we can see the hiss, easily in the graph.
Normally we would just mute the areas in between the announcer speaking to get rid of this. But that still leaves it floating behind his voice.
Let’s see how we would handle this with SpectraLayers Pro 2.

To do that we go to the “Tools” tab drop down and notice down here at the bottom we have “edit in SpectraLayers Pro”. Click on that and the process automatically open SpectraLayers Pro 2 and creates a timeline with the clip.

It already looks different but now let’s click on the 3D Displace button and move our waveform around so that we can see a 3D view of it. Next, let’s increase the Gamma so that we can see more detail in the low volume areas that are on the timeline.
 Let’s use the select button and highlight and the area to listen to the hiss that we want to get rid of.
Our first step is to create a duplicate wave file so that we don’t accidentally damage our original.
Right-click on the wave file in the “layers bin” and then click duplicate.
Now let’s turn off the audio on the original by clicking the speaker icon.
Since what we’re going to do is extract that sound were going to need some place to put it.
Right-click in the open area of the layers bin and then click ‘new’ in the menu.
Finally double-click on the “Layer Bin” and let’s change the name to ‘hiss’.

On the left side of the application let’s click on “Extract/Noise “. You  now see “Register Noise” in the area above.
To create a good noise print we need to register what that noise is made of. Click on “Register Noise” and let’s use this area where we can see there is no other sounds overlapping.
Toggle close “Register Noise” and we are ready for the next step.
We can go anywhere in the clip where the unwanted noise exists and highlight what we want to get rid of.
We don’t have to do all of the clip. Just the type of  noise that we want to eliminate.
Next, we go to “Process”, “Extract” and “Noise”. SpectraLayers Pro 2 takes care of the rest.

Notice that the area of noise that we highlighted and other frequencies associated with that noise have turned a yellow color.
In fact, if we turn off the sound icon on our voice-over you can see now in red exactly what we have extracted to the “Hiss” layer.
In order to remove the sound from our original we now need to invert the “phase” of the “Hiss” later.
With the “phase” at negative  for the “Hiss” layer we can now click in the empty area of the “Layers Bin” and see what has been removed.

Let’s listen to what we created.
Notice that our “Hiss” gone but we kept the bird sounds and our announcer. In fact his voice sounds cleaner than when we started.
All that’s left to do now is to save our project. Let’s call it “hiss” and then close SpectraLayers Pro 2.
 When we do that a pop up window appears asking if we want to save this back to our original editor.
Click okay and then decide on the specs that you want to save it as.

 And here we are back in Sound Forge Pro 11 with the changes made to our clip.
Let’s play it one more time.
You notice we have made the corrections between the two programs and now have a much better sounding clip.
There are many other things that we can do with this clip to sweeten the sound, but we’ll  cover those in another tutorial.

This is Digital Samurai, Al Caudullo’s , follow up on his series of Sony Creative Software Video Tutorials. For more, please checkout our video tutorials page.