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Edit Review: Adobe Soundbooth CS3

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Gary Eskow

Pared down from Audition, audio app is still a powerhouse for video pros.

Adobe's new Creative Suite 3 program Soundbooth is intended to give video producers a variety of sophisticated sound-editing tools, accessed from a simple-to-understand user interface. The program replaces a more extensive audio application, Audition, in the CS3 Production Premium suites. In making that switch, Adobe's idea was to give video guys, rather than audio pros, tools that they could dive in and use right away. Performing surgery on blemished audio tracks, adding a musical score, and recording new material — functions once reserved for the experienced audio engineer — can be overwhelming. How does the functionality of Soundbooth compare with audio software designed for the experienced engineer? More importantly, are you — the video producer who's looking to expand your skill set and save money by working on audio as well as video — likely to find this product inviting or intimidating?

I feel inclined to offer an opinion immediately: I think Soundbooth is a terrific product. As you'll see when we get into a few detailed examples, its sound-sculpting does not meet the standard set by the premium products on the market (unsurprisingly so). However, Soundbooth offers so much, and makes it so easy for the non-technical audio engineer to record and clean up audio clips, that it deserves high marks.

For starters, if you've worked with other Adobe products, Soundbooth (available in Mac and Windows flavors) will appear familiar as soon as you open it up. A series of dockable panes allow you to customize the workspace and save templates that will optimize your workflow. If you're installing the required audio hardware for the first time, you might spend some time establishing the proper connections; otherwise the process is straightforward.

As I mentioned, Soundbooth has a score-composition component, and you can record audio — voiceovers, for example — inside it as well. But let's start out by addressing a common problem. You return to your studio from a shoot and notice that your principal interview went well. However, there are some problems: The overall level is too low, and you'd like to get rid of some intermittent audio intrusions.

With no hard manual (one can be purchased separately), Soundbooth users will rely on the Help component. Stay online while you're studying, because the video tutorials that the Help file links to are excellent. They offer a tutorial that shows you how to remove unwanted sounds, using a cell phone ring as an example. I asked Adobe to send me the same audio clip they used so that I could remove these three rings from the clip using Soundbooth, and then replicate the task using Steinberg Media Technologies' WaveLab 6.

Both applications use spectral analysis to weed out the undesirable audio from the good stuff. Although the multicolored pane may seem confusing, the concept is simple when you invoke a spectral analyzer. When they are represented by different colors, audio bands are easy to distinguish. Thus, three cell phone rings are a cinch to spot. Once you have them in view, all you have to do is grab a Hand tool, draw a box around them, and tell the application to zap them. Easy. Soundbooth and WaveLab 6 handle the assignment in nearly identical fashions. However, WaveLab 6 offers an outstanding set of filters — I chose a low-band pass filter that minimized the effect on the male interview subject — and its algorithms are superb. Comparing the post-surgery files, it was easy to hear that Soundbooth, which successfully removed the cell phone rings, slightly altered the upper frequencies of the male interview subject's voice.

But let's keep things in perspective. The damage was very slight; for almost every audio post application, zero percent of the listening public would notice the difference. The verdict? Matched against one of the premier audio applications, Soundbooth came in a respectable second. Ditto goes for the comparison between Soundooth's normalization functionality and that offered by the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer, for example. The normalization within Soundbooth retains a relative balance between soft and loud data while bringing everything closer to 0dB, the optimal level.

OK, let's stay on this theme of matching Soundbooth — a veritable Swiss Army knife of audio tools — against a premium audio product. Do you know what convolution reverb is? The rage in audio sweetening, the convolution reverb process begins when a sine wave or starter pistol is recorded in a space such as the Grand Canyon, to use a dramatic example. Back in the lab, the sound of the “impulse” is removed, leaving nothing but the reverberant space itself, which may then be applied to your wife's a cappella version of Barbara Streisands' “The Way We Were,” or any other audio event. When this technology first became available about a decade ago, the hardware devices that housed it cost about $12,000. Today, a number of software applications, including some freeware programs, offer excellent convolution reverb presets. Audio Ease's Altiverb — the consensus favorite — is remarkable.

As you have already guessed, Soundbooth offers its own convolution corner. How does it stack up against Altiverb 6? Not great. But if you want to place your speaker in a stadium, that preset is good, and so are several others. In other words, you'll benefit from Soundbooth's convolution reverb, even though it isn't the best on the market.

I could go on, but you get the point. Have you worked with equalizers? If not, start out by choosing the descriptive presets that come with Soundbooth's EQ package and its other filters. As you become more experienced, open up the Advanced dropdown menus and begin experimenting with the reverb, chorus, pitch change, and flange settings. Soon you'll be stumbling on parameter combinations that sound good and saving them for future use. Bam! You're an audio engineer.

Score composition — or score generation is a more accurate term — is one of the hot areas in the audio (and video) post industry these days. As direct competitors to stock music, scoring tools work with pieces of music that have been embedded with data that allows for manipulation of the track. You can adjust the length of individual sections and in most cases automate parameters. Besides automating volume adjustments, you can tell the software that you want to start out with a simple arrangement, for example, and have it build over time or dramatically increase in intensity at a specific SMPTE location. In the May issue of Digital Content Producer, I compared three of these programs: SmartSound Sonicfire Pro, Abaltat Muse, and Synk Audio MusicBed DV. (See digitalcontentproducer.com/soundforpic/revfeat/compose_own.)

As you've guessed, Soundbooth has a feature for score composition. It's very promising. The effectiveness of a composition program depends on several things, and the number of base compostions available is one of the most vital. The musical selections for Soundbooth are well-recorded and, in general, of high musical quality. The range of styles is fairly wide, and previewing them inside Adobe's Bridge asset management module is a breeze. But the number of cuts needs to increase dramatically if Soundbooth is ever to compete with a premier product such as Sonicfire Pro. As an initial offering, however, this feature is excellent. The new music is well-written (the Wedding folder features chestnuts from the literature, such as Johann Sebastian Bach's “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring”). Keyframes make it simple to customize the tracks to meet the specific needs of your video, and you can easily output the scores so that they can be imported by other applications. You cannot, however, add multiple WAV files to AMC scores in Soundbooth, which is a limitation. Similarly, you can't create effect racks and use other effects that you may have in your computer.

Soundbooth is a self-contained system meant to interface easily with other Adobe applications. As we've seen, its individual components do not match the standard set by the crème de la crème audio applications. Focusing on these comparisons is a mistake, however. Affordable, easy to use, and of high quality, Soundbooth is an extremely attractive professional audio-for-video application.

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bottomline

Company: Adobe
www.adobe.com

Product: Soundbooth CS3

Assets: High-quality musical selections, non-technical audio recording and editing.

Caveats: Can’t import multiple WAV files to AMC scores.

Demographic: Video pros wanting to expand their skillset in audio work.

PRICE: $199

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.