Old Record: I got great results in minutes. I love the ability to easily tailor the amount of reduction for the various frequency bands in the Broadband tab. The rumble filter quickly got rid of the "subsonic" sounds, and the click/crackle filters worked well.
Living Room: Good results, very quickly! Using it as a plug-in in Vegas, I set the loop points to either edge of a spot where just the noise is being heard. Then, I inserted just the SS Pro plugin into the track FX chain. Having clicked the "Learn Noise" button, I hit play and let Vegas loop the noise section a few times. SS Pro's automatic threshold and reduction settings worked pretty well. There is still a little bit of the PC fan whining in the background while the subject is speaking, but I think if I had played with the band that represented that freqency I could have gotten it completely out.
Large Foyer: Again, very solid results in a short period of time using the same technique described above. SS Pro took out the background A/C noise without compromising the natural ambience of the space. Then I added a bit of noise gating using its nifty waveform display.
Outside: Good (actually considering the problems with this clip, I'd say great) results after tweaking for about 15 minutes. SS Pro was able to keep the dialogue sounding more natural that some of the other NR solutions I tried, though there is still more cell phone buzz left in the track than I would like. I think for a final product I would use another NR algorithm in conjunction with SS Pro. If I added a process that just focused on the buzz and didn't automatically lessen the reduction when the volume is louder, I think I could almost save this awful clip! :-)
The Rumble filter took care of most of the wind noise and yet pretty much stayed out of the way of the dialogue. I got a pleasant sursprise when I discovered that the Click & Crackle filters actually reduced the buzz a little bit! Of course, the Broadband tab was my bread and butter on this one, reducing the buzz , the crickets, and a little bit of the wind as well. It was very easy to go too far in this tab and take out so much that I actually started taking out part of the desired dialogue! Fortunately, the Noise Only button let me listen to just how much NR could be applied without doing this. Finally, the Noise Gate was used to push the buzz down a bit between sentences, etc. Again, its waveform display came in very handy in setting the threshold in just the right spot as to affect the buzz but not the softer parts of the dialogue! One could "close the gate" on this noise more than I chose to, but at the risk of sounding choppy. The bottom line is that yes, there may be more buzz left than I'd like, but the processing affected the desired material much less than many other products I've tried on this clip!
