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Dialogue is king. No matter how hotly debated Noise Reduction technology can be, having a strong, consistent dialogue track is a hugely important part of the post production process. Noise reduction can be a useful tool to achieve this in ways such as eliminating the need for ADR or simply removing that annoying bird from the background of the perfect take. Today we're taking a look at Acon Digital's latest offering for this; Extract:Dialogue.
Company: Acon Digital
Product: Extract:Dialogue
Price: £80
Our Rating: 4.8/5
Overview:
Extract: Dialogue is a noise reduction tool powered by Artificial Intelligence algorithms to separate dialogue from a wide range of background noises. In the last few years A.I powered plug-ins have become common place in the industry, leading to a huge range of products available on all ends of the price spectrum. However, after just a few minutes with the plug-ins well laid out and incredibly simple interface, it's clear Acon Digital's offering has been designed with ease of use and efficiency at the forefront of their mind.
In their own words:
"Extract:Dialogue is a plug-in that separates dialogue from common types of background noise such as wind, rustle, traffic, hum, clicks and pops. The algorithm works in real time and is based on deep learning. It has been trained on thousands of high-quality voice recordings and an equally extensive set of common noise sources. The extensive training enables the artificial intelligence to automatically distinguish dialogue from noise without user interaction. This makes Extract:Dialogue extremely easy to use – just add it to your dialogue bus and let it do its magic."
Key Features & Benefits
One of the first thing you'll notice upon opening Extract:Dialogue is the clean layout of the interface; made up of a Spectrum Analyzer, a small amount of adjustable parameters, a Solo Noise button and Three frequency band filters, all of which have a small description pop up if you hover over the parameter. This makes the tool quick, easy and doesn't give you much to get distracted by.
The adjustable parameters are small in number (5 in total), mostly due to the fully automatic nature of the plug-in. However, they do cover everything you'll need to have control over in order to get some good results in a short amount of time. These controls are: Sensitivity, Maximum Attenuation and Frequency Band Filters.
What It's Useful For
Extract: Dialogue will be of great use to anybody working with dialogue not just in film and TV but also radio/podcasting, games and live broadcast. The real time and automatic nature of the plug-in can allow you to get the settings you need very quickly, whilst also being able to make adjustments on the fly if needed.
The simple and well laid out interface makes it incredibly accessible to creatives of all levels who may not have the time or budget to dig into other advanced noise reduction tools such as Izotope RX or Cedar DNS.
We would use this plug-in for Dialogue Editing tasks. Particularly when noise cannot be attenuated through other methods or if another plugin is not providing the expected result.
The Bottom Line
Acon Digital's approach of developing a tool with a very specific use case makes Extract:Dialogue a breath of fresh air in the Noise Reduction market. The powerful algorithm is well developed and paired with its simple (all be it a little dull looking) user interface, users can easily adjust the settings to achieve the desired results in a quite impressive amount of time.
In regards to the U.I, it would have been nice to see more colour and perhaps a 3D spectrogram to separate it from other tools with less than inspiring colour schemes and graphics.
As a team who use products that fall in a variety of price ranges, the value for money you get with Extract:Dialogue is one of its strongest selling points. Acon Digital have managed to create a product you can achieve comparable results to the most expensive noise reduction options with, at a very small fraction of the cost.
Extract:Dialogue is available as a stand alone plugin or as part of Acoustica - Digital Audio Editor.
For more from Acon Digital and the purchase information for Extract:Dialogue follow these links:
If you enjoyed this post please check out our ultimate guide to audio post-production:
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