DAWs and Plug-ins: thanks to today's array of DAWs and plug-ins, audio pros have access to more flexibility and speed - Audio - digital audio workstations

Post, May 1, 2002 by David John Farinella

The Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Question this month is: What did audio post engineers, mixers and the lot do before digital audio workstations? If you can come close to answering that question, you've either been around for 10 or more years or you're a student of the science.

From nearly the day that digital audio workstations (DAWs) debuted, the face of audio post production dramatically shifted. Nowadays the tools serve as the norm rather than the exception and it would be a challenge to find a post facility that didn't feature at least one. Just as the popularity of the DAW has grown, so have the number of manufacturers. And that's nothing to speak of the host of companies that provide services and add-on products to manufacturers and customers alike.

Perhaps a fact that Digidesign's post products manager, Scott Wood, points out is most telling about the proliferation and future of DAWs in the market: "The Shrek release made more money on its opening weekend of DVD then it did in its initial theatrical release. When you start looking at numbers like that people see that it's real important to create your media at the highest resolution possible to enable that type of future returns when you need to re-purpose it," he says.

Michael Reddick of AMS Neve has seen an explosion of the popularity of the DAW and an increased pace of technological evolution. "The advances that have been made in the last two or three years across the board for DAWs have been quite startling," he says. The ongoing rate of change, he adds, is quite dependent on the improvement of PC technology. "I know that people do predict that we're going to hit a point where [there are] diminishing returns, where it's going to be harder to make things faster or bring in new innovations, but at the moment we're up to over 2 gig CPUs. I think the DAW rate of change of development is linked to that and there doesn't seem to be a slow down yet."

That said, Reddick is quick to point out this is an exciting time for DAWs. "Oh definitely. Things that three or four years ago were just out of reach now are, in fact, very easy," he states. "It's a great time."

With that in mind, this month's Post looks at the state of the DAW market and two of the most popular plug-in providers.

THE PLUG-INS

TC WORKS: The TC Works (www.tc-works.de) collection of plug-ins -- and there are many of them -- are designed to work with just about any flavor of DAW. Users of MOTU Digital Performer, Cubase and Logic will be better suited to purchase the Powercore set rather than the TDM plug-ins, explains Fred Kores, TC Works tech support for software and sales. "You can run TDM plug-ins with Digital Performer and Logic, but then you have to buy the TDM cards," he says. "You have to buy a whole Pro Tools system to work with that, so Powercore gives an easier and less expensive way to get quality plug-ins."

As for the new Pro Tools HD system, Kores reports, That's going to take a few months to get ready, but Master X will be coming out at the end of summer and TC Tools is coming out at the end of fall."

The Powercore suite of plug-ins (version 1.6 was released in April) includes TC MegaReverb, TC Chorus/Delay, TC EQSAT, TC Vintage CL (a compressor/limiter) and the TC Voice Strip (a channel strip with a dynamics, gate, EQ and desser) and is built around all of TC Work's best algorithms, which takes a DSP card. "We also have the third parties developing for Powercore," Kores explains. "We don't have as many as Digidesign right now, but that's the direction that it's going. We're just trying to give the VST users the same ability to use the same plug-ins." To date, the third parties that are developing plugins for TC Works include Sony (Oxford EQs), Emagic, Access, Waldorf and the Desound VL2 multichannel valve interface.

Spark is TC Works' mastering suite that is a standalone, two-track editor that includes 22 plug-ins for analysis, distortion, synthesis, filter, as well as reverbs and delays. "Specifically for post production, Spark is designed for mastering and finishing," Kores explains. "It does have the capability to sync to video. In terms of SMPTE and timecode, it doesn't really stay locked like regular SMPTE stuff should, but if you have your video synced and you want to finish some of the audio in Spark, then you can take it in there and use it!,

WAVES: According to Bob Reardon, VP of sales for North and South America, Waves (www.waves.com) has two new products that will help post professionals: the Masters Bundle and Restoration. "Restoration is a suite of tools that does declicking, denoising, decrackle and hum and DC removal," Reardon explains. "People may look at that and say, 'Oh, that's for vinyl. 'Yeah, we've had some people use it for vinyl quite successfully, but really it's been the post people who have saluted us on this."

It's been used to repair things such as digital overloads with declick, he adds." I've had people use it for an offending thing like a bad transfer where the original SMPTE was not locked to the work clock It drifts out and you get that click, then you get the high frequency scattery stuff and then you get another click," Reardon says. Then in a DAW the audio can be stretched to correct the sync. The plug-in runs on the CPU and is available for Mac and PC.