News

• CEDAR Studio is indispensable in post at SnowGhost Music

  

  31 May 2018: A couple of years ago, Brett Allen of SnowGhost Music made us aware of an up-and-coming independent film co-operative that spans the whole of the USA. They had brought him a recent film, A Morning Light, which he liked a lot, but which had numerous problems with the production sound. He told us, “The film they had brought me was fantastic, but they were in over their heads with the sound. All sorts of handling noise, clipping, ambient noise… you know how it goes. The film was getting a lot of traction at early screenings so the director, Ian Clark, flew out to see me in Montana, and gave me a couple of days with the film and the CEDAR Studio 7 software, which was new to me at the time.”

  “After working with all of the different tools, especially Retouch 7 and all of its modules, I was confident that we could really help these young but talented indie film makers. For instance, with Retouch, I could start with the Volume tool to reduce the low frequency rumble, audio that is often inaudible but which causes problems with the woofers. They must have had a bad boom pole, as this noise was constant throughout the film. I then followed this by painting and erasing all of the finger taps on the boom pole. This removed the main transients, but not the low-mid range rumble that followed the transient, so I used the new Cleanse tool to break up those ‘fat globules’, as I call them. I then followed up by cleaning the overall dialogue range, and finally inserted DNS One on a track to find yet more clarity. (Sometimes I found that Auto dehiss was just as effective and even more foolproof.) Every once in a while I found bad edits which I didn’t have access to because I only had a consolidated file, but I was able to use Declick to fix these, with fantastic results!”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to give you a really good progress report – we may have made a SnowGhost / CEDAR evangelist of this director, and hopefully a lot of his young filmmaker friends.We’ve got to replace the old guard with the new someday, and I don’t know a lot of young people with access to CEDAR – so maybe I can be that guy! This is the first time that I’ve really been able to master a software suite during a project, to the point of saying that it has become indispensable. I have other plug-ins from elsewhere and all have their merits but, so far, CEDAR Studio wins hands down on ease of use and simplicity – basically these tools get out of the way and only limit me to my imagination. I’m very impressed!”