Of late mostly working with dry recordings from the desk at live events.

Workflow:

Make several copies of the audio track and setup three busses, one for any speech, one for live audio (singing etc.) and one for pre-recorded audio. I add volume envelopes to each track and assign each track to the appropriate buss.

FXs:
At the track level I may use the included track Eq to limit the bass on speech and the Track Compressor as a soft or hard limiter. On the busses speech gets a little Wave Hammer treatment as does live vocal or live acoustic music, maybe a little iZtopes Mastering Reverb, I find the included reverb not very pleasant try as I might.

Other thoughts:
The included Track Noise Gate is horrid. If I do need a gate I use the Graphic Dynamics FX that comes bundled with SF.

Bob.

As I am always willing to learn, and I KNOW just how important Audio is, thanks for sharing Cineform and Bob and for SCS for asking.

Grazie

I use a combination of Sony and third-party plug-ins including the Sound Forge iZotope bungles. Typically, EQ, compression, peak limiting, noise reduction (if needed) and ATSC/EBU loudness metering are used.. amongst others for 'effects' if warranted.
Sound Forge is also crucial for my audio post work.

Addendum: I should point out, I'm a pro audio person not.. video centric.

I usually tweak Compressor a little and add Wave Hammer. If necessary I use the Sony Noise Reduction plugin which works very well.

John

For me its pretty much internal fx all the way. You can do a heck of a lot with the supplied compressor and EQs. But it requires skill to get the most out of the supplied fx. Using external fx, like better compressors etc does help and can be useful for quick fix scenarios.
Much more of a concern is the video levels workflow (0-255) in Vegas, its simply not right for video work. The audio side pretty much does enough as is.

Paul.

I use same plugins - both internal and external VSTs, including the SF Izo ones - for video as audio-only, as most of my video work is music-related..

I do wish 32-bit VSTs were NOT displayed when there is a 64-bit version also present, especially as there seems no way of easily telling which is which (depending on the info in the plug-in itself).

Also wish the was a Favourites Folder in the Plugin Manager, and/or user-configurable folders.

geoff

All i use are the FX included in Vegas & Sound Forge. My two most common projects are live stage recording and transfer from older media (tapes, records, etc.). For the first i tend to use Wave Hammer, and occasionally a small amount of Noise Reduction and possibly a little graphic EQ. For the transfers i use primarily Noise Reduction, often Wave Hammer, and sometimes a little graphic EQ. The same set of effects for both, but not with the same priority.

I suppose i should note that for these projects, video is rarely involved.

I use the FX included in Vegas & Sound Forge as well as 3rdparty VSTs. Its a shame VegasPro does not support Surround VSTs in Master Buss when working in surround.

I use Vegas' EQs and Wave Hammer a lot on dialog, but not much else. I'm not a big fan of Vegas' other compressors, and would love to see higher quality dynamics plugins, especially multiband compression/expansion (emphasis on expansion) available with a better GUI. Izotope's multiband is used a lot. WAVES RCL and C4 were used a lot until the last few versions of Vegas (at least on my machine) stopped playing nicely with them.
I use fairly old versions of the WAVES plugins, but when more than 2-3 audio tracks are involved there seems to be a delay in triggering dynamics when the thresholds are exceeded, making the dynamic changes quite audible as "clicks." I believe a few others on this forum have mentioned the same with newer versions than mine. These are the "quality" compressors I've found quickest to setup, and would love to see Sony model some dynamics plugins with these as a target, both in sound quality and GUI.

For video work, I mostly use the Sony FX supplied with Vegas Pro even though I have quite a collection of 3rd party plug-ins that I use for music.

For Broadcast work I'll use the Track Compressor to tame individual dialog tracks along with EQ. If needed I'll use Multi-Band Dynamics to reduce plosives and sibilants. I always place Wave Hammer on the master audio bus as a brick wall limiter to make sure I don't exceed the stations maximum limits.

If the station has separate limits for Dialog, Music, and SFX, I'll create 3 buses and route the appropriate tracks with Wave Hammer on each of the buses set to limit them individually. In all cases I place a loudness meter on the master audio bus to ensure that the program is within average loudness specified by the station. I use to use the loudness meter from T-Racks but now I use the one in iZotope Insight.

For my Internet tutorials I'll place iZotope Nectar on my narration track to punch it up. It has great dialog settings. Sometimes I'll just use the Male Voice Over setting in Ultimate S Pro which uses Sony EQ and Track Compressor. The Female Over Setting adds Multi-Band Dynamics to that mix to help the vocals cut through.

For live stage shows I'll use iZotope Ozone to enhance the stereo separation and dynamic range of the live music. It adds a bit of "sizzle" to performance and really gives it a more polished sound.

There isn't a single project that I don't have Wave Hammer on the master audio bus to control overall volume. IHMO it should be there by default just like the Noise Gate, EQ, and Track Compressor on each track.

When I got Sound Forge for Mac I was shocked that none of the Sony FX were included. I still can't use Sound Forge for Mac for my ACID beatmapping work because it doesn't have any way to Time Stretch like the PC version does. Very disappointing!!! I've been using the Sony FX for over 10 years and have come to depend on them. To me the audio FX are a big part of what Vegas Pro and Sound Forge are.

~jr

I mainly use the Sony EQ and track compressor.
Occasionally I will use Izotope RX2, Wave Vocal Rider, NS1 and EQ10.

A while ago, I was using the Izotope Mastering Bundle from SoundForge 10 inside Vegas 32 bit. But now that Vegas 12 is 64 bit only, I can no longer use these great plugins which I liked very much.

Since SoundForge 11 is only 32 bit, I assume that the Izotope Mastering Bundle, Nectar Elements and Restore and Repair won't work inside Vegas 12?


Rob

I use Waves Gold exclusively. Vegas does A LOT of things exceedingly well but the audio fx are of very average quality in my opinion. That being said they are fine for fx to be included in what is really a video-centric application. In addition high quality audio plugs are so personal they're better left to be purchased by the user rather than having Sony spend any money developing them further. The included ones are good enough to get people going with audio processing.

I use the Waves vintage Neve style eq and compressors and L1 limiter most frequently.

By no means an elite audio (or video for that matter) guy, I find myself using a few of the Sony options (mainly Sony e.q, but I have settled on Tone boosters, mainly as they are "accessible" (meaning a good GUI for beginners like me).

I happen to really like most of the Vegas plugins.

For fast and simple projects, I use:
Dialog tracks:
1. If it was a stereo mic from a camcorder, I choose the best channel.
2. normalize it
3. use track EQ as a high pass filter as well as general EQ
4. Waves Vocal Rider to even out the volume.
5. use a compressor if there is still too much dynamic range
6. use wave hammer if the dialog still isn't loud enough.

For a more involved project, I usually open each dialog track in Wavelab where I have access to a spectral editor, and more powerful tool set. I'm also more proficient in Wavelab.
In Wavelab:
1. manually reduce audio peaks to even out the waveform.
2. normalize
3. if needed, use the spectral editor to remove unwanted sounds i.e. cell phones, p-pops, sirens, etc.
4. Plugin chain:
-Waves LinEQ lowband (as a high pass filter)
-Waves LinEQ broadbnand (as a low pass filter, and also to remove nasty frenquencies)
-IF NEEDED, iZotope RX noise reduction
-Waves Vocal Rider (to even out the level)
-Waves V-Comp (vintage compressor that make things big, fat, and loud)
-Waves VEQ4 (vintage EQ with lots of character, usually to boost the highs.)
-in the master section, Waves L2 (set the limit to -0.1, and use it to make the dialog as loud as you need it to be.
5. Render in place and save, then it will open up back in Vegas.
6. my, now perfect, audio might need some minor EQ and dynamics to fit in the mix, but it's a lot easier to work with after the Wavelab treatment.

Another thing I do is with there is music under dialog, I'll usually drastically cut the midrange in the music so the dialog has a place to sit. That way the music does't try to compete with the dialog.

(BTW- I also do this in a live setting. If there is function where background music is needed, I remove all the midrange from the background music so there is room in the "mix" for guests to talk.)

As my friend who is a re-recording mixer for high budget feature films says "dialog rules!"

~Jay

For Music mixing, I have a Universal Audio uad2 card with the LA2A, limiter and a few other nice plugins like their Studer Tape simulator. I also use the BBE plugin and this interesting little bass enhancer. way in the past (vegas6/8/uad1) I had some rendering issues with it. The 'real time render' seems to have solved it.

When I'm doing video I tend to stick to the stock stuff because I'm just doing simiple lo/hi cuts + expansion (using the graphic dynamics) here and there for dialog. BBE can be useful in some fit-it situations. I do like using the UAD dream verb instead of the stock sony verb, which is not all that great. The dream verb is nice because if you are trying to match an exsiting environment it's relatively easy to dial in.

the waves stuff is nice, I just went down a different road years ago.