I am thinking about purchasing Unveil (de-reverberation and signal focusing plugin), is anyone using it and if you are, how successful is it?
I mostly use RX2 and expansion techniques when I am working, but am wondering if I my working practices are now out of date.
I've toyed around with the demo quite a bit, and it's on my "to purchase" list. There are just a couple of higher priority items ahead of it at the moment. It's an impressive piece of software. Like RX2, I always describe it as a "reduction" tool, not a "removal tool. While it's got a bit of learning curve before you start getting the best results, those results can be impressive. It's far more effective than any expansion or multi-band expansion tricks I've used in the past, and those were always the ones I turned to.
Colin is working on a review which we hope to have up on Designing Sound sometime soon. In the meantime, why don't you try out the demo. Just make sure you read through the (short) manual. It's not a plug-in you can really make sense of just by looking at.
I did a test drive with this plugin, and I honestly didn't like it at all. Call me old fashioned, or say that I may enjoy a pleasant bit of organic noisefloor in my dialogue tracks, but I wasn't turned onto this tool. I was turned onto the concept, but in implementation I didn't like it. The interface although cool looking, I didn't find very intuitive.
The ability to do what it does, sort of 'meh' in my opinion at this point. It felt and sounded more like a glorified EQ than actually doing something to suppress noise or clarify dialogue or both.
And this thing is I believe is an unnecessary resource hog - I hope that this is not because of the fancy graphics. And my thought is that when you have to blatantly warn customers on your website about it being so re-source heavy (so much so that even though my computer far exceeds the required specs, it still buckles under one plugin instance), that's just poor/sloppy design to begin with in my opinion. I'd prefer no fancy graphics or frequency response curves etc if it means the tradeoff is that the plugin just runs efficiently.
Maybe I'll try it again in the distant future, but for now I'm honestly happy using my C4 method and/or working with a Cedar - even if it means a little residual noisefloor. And I have no intention of investing in this, I'm hard pressed to change my mind. Less is more here.
I wonder how this compares to SPL's DeVerb tool. I admit I'm lazy and I don't want to test the demo, so maybe someone has used both and can enlighten me.
Like shaun said, unveil is quite impressive and specially for its price.
When I tested it and were looking for alternatives I found also some Japanese stuff that made use of hardware tools (of course I couldn't test it). From the description looked like almost scifi. But again I couldn't obviously try it, it costed thousands of dollars and I don't remember the name of it (I can check my archives if you want to know more about it).
About the spl's deverb: it's a baby toy compared to unveil. Ridiculous performance when I tested it. Unveil is also on my next shopping list.
The demo clips look really impressive, but I'm a bit skeptical as to what it can actually accomplish until I have some hands-on experience with it. But yeah, looks impressive.
