In the Production Expert 10th Anniversary Christmas Competition we offered the chance to win a copy of iZotope’s RX 7 Advanced worth $1,119, as one of over 30 great prizes on offer worth over $30,000 in total.

The competition closed on December 31st 2018 and the winner is Alex Barba.

“My name is Alex Barba, I am from Ukraine. I have been working on TV for about 20 years. I started as a sound engineer working in OB vans. Now I work as audio director of live shows (e.g. The voice of Ukraine etc). I also do a lot of audio post-production content (shows, movies, concerts) as audio mixer.

Usually I prefer to work on “fast to do” TV movies. Its profitable and exciting for me but the quality of recorded sound which comes from the field is often terrible. The only way to deal with it is using RX. currently I am using RX5. It has really saved a lot of field recordings and I am looking forward to all the new features that iZotope have added in RX6 and RX7”.

What Is RX 7 Advanced?

RX 7 Advanced has new Dialogue Contour and Dialog De-reverb modules, new AudioSuite plug-ins and multi-channel support up to Dolby Atmos 7.1.2. It also as the RX 7 Standard new machine learning powered features like Music Rebalance and Repair Assistant. We have exclusive demos and you can find out we think of iZotope’s latest release of RX.

Which Version Of RX 7 Is Right For You

With RX 7, iZotope has continued to build on their years of extensive research in digital signal processing and machine learning. They are focusing RX 7 Advanced and the RX Post Production Suite on the needs of audio post-production professionals.

What Is New In RX 7 Advanced

This update brings the audio post community even more control over dialogue and time-efficient workflow enhancements including…

• Dialogue Contour - Ever wanted to change the intonation of a re-edited sequence?With RX 7 you can now reshape the intonation of dialogue to rescue or improve a performance, powered by pitch correction tailored to speech and designed to adjust the inflection of words within a phrase.

• Dialogue De-reverb - iZotope has taken the excellent De-reverb module and produced a version designed to reduce or remove unwanted reverb from dialogue clips using a machine learning based algorithm trained to separate spoken dialogue from reverberant signal content.

• Pro Tools AudioSuite plug-ins - iZotope has taken some of the processes that could only be used as modules in the standalone version of RX 6 and made them into Pro Tools AudioSuite plug-ins saving you time when fixing production audio by staying within Pro Tools to access features like De-Rustle and Dialogue Isolate.

• Multi-channel support - We can now process audio issues that come up in any or every surround channel up to Dolby Atmos 7.1.2.

• Repair Assistant - iZotope has taken the ‘Assistant’ technology, which they have already introduced into Ozone and Neutron to produce what they claim to be an industry-first intelligent repair tool analyses audio to detect defects like noise, clipping and clicks, then offer three processing suggestions, each with three different intensities to help make fixes faster than ever.

• Music Rebalance - Using a machine learning based algorithm, Music Rebalance performs source separation by identifying vocals, bass, percussion, and other instruments. You can then individually enhance or reduce elements of a stereo audio track, making it possible to adjust a mix when you don’t have access to the multitracks or stems.

• Remove/Isolate Vocals - iZotope has designed it so you can take push the Music Rebalance module even further to create instrumental versions of songs by removing the vocal elements, or isolate the vocal to prepare a remix when you don’t have access to individual tracks or stems.

What iZotope Say About RX 7

What We Say About iZotope RX 7

It is great to see that iZotope have included 2 of the flagship features in the standard version of RX 7.

Repair Assistant

Repair Assistant is very clever and will be useful for the newcomer and specialist user alike. I really like that having analysed the audio, it offers 3 different solutions using different module combinations and a simple and easy to use audition window be able to compare the 3 recommended solutions with the original. In addition from the same audition window you have 3 options for each recommendation. A version with less processing, the recommended amount of processing and an option with more processing.

In addition if you want to be able to go in between the recommended settings there is an option to open it as a Module Chain and be able to tweak individual parameters, making it accessible to the newcomer as well as helpful to the specialist by offering 3 options that you can then choose to refine exactly to your taste.

I like that when you open Repair Assistant on another file it still has the previous settings saved, making it very easy to process a batch of files with the same problems and saves the time of re-analysing another file the the same issues. If you working on a different file then all you need to do is click on the Start Over button and Repair Assistant will go to work afresh.

It’s good to see that they have also included a streamlined version of Repair Assistant in RX Elements single repair suggestion with a choice of three intensity levels, although I think I would have preferred the 3 repair suggestions with no intensity options as different solutions work better with different problems.

Music Rebalance

Music Rebalance is the sort of feature you would normally expect to be an RX 7 Advanced only feature so hats off to iZotope for including this new feature in RX 7 Standard as well as RX 7 Advanced from the get-go.

I first tried in on a track, which I unfortunately cannot share here, but I was very impressed with the way I was able to reduce the percussive elements so they didn’t obscure the speech, as well as increase the bass elements which wouldn’t fight with the speech and so produce a version of the mix that was much more suitable as an underscore for the speech and as a consequence be able to retain a good level of music without compromising intelligibility.

On trying to remove the speech altogether, I am afraid iZotope haven’t quite found the golden bullet yet, as you can hear the hole created by the removal of the speech but it is streaks ahead of any technique we have had to date, so maybe there is still some work to do on the machine learning algorithms to improve this even more.

Multi-Channel Support At Last In RX 7 Advanced

Moving onto the RX 7 Advanced only features, at last we have multi-channel support. You may remember when I reviewed iZotope RX 6 back in April 2017 I said…

My only disappointment with the RX 6 release is we still do not have multi-channel support. With the advent of VR and ambisonic acquisition with the likes of the Sennheiser Ambeo mic we really need multi-channel support even more than ever, because we have more and more content being acquired in multichannel formats now. I just hope that we don’t have to wait until RX 7 to finally get multichannel support.

Well I did have to wait until RX 7 but I am so pleased that it is here now. The implementation has been well thought through and we have multi-channel versions of the RX Connect and RX Monitor plug-ins too. What is also nice is that if you have say a 5.1 instance of the RX Monitor plug-in and you audition a mono or stereo file, they are routed through to the front left and right channels. It would be nice if mono files could be routed to the centre channel only and quad files be routed to the front left and right and the surround left and right, but hopefully this can be resolved soon in a future update.

Dialogue De-reverb

I remember when I demoed RX4 in front of around a 1,000 folk at a Super Meet event in Amsterdam that the demo of the then new De-reverb module had a 1,000 jaws on the floor. Back to RX 7 and with the help of more machine learning algorithms iZotope has produced a dedicated dialogue version of their de-reverb module and straight from my first test my jaw was back on the floor. Make sure you check out the demo to hear for yourself. I especially like that it has the same ambience preservation control that we have seen on modules like De-rustle.

Dialogue Contour

The idea of being able to adjust the intonation of speech is another on of those golden bullet moments in audio post-production. We often reorder some audio to help an edit to make sense but although it works on paper it doesn’t work so well with the audio because the intonation isn’t right. Dialogue Contour has been designed to enable us to fix this. I have to say that although it can fix mild changes of intonation and putting some life into flat, read’ script it doesn’t quite get to the golden bullet of being able to completely remove a vocal or extract a vocal completely cleanly but it is getting there. Now in the relatively short time I have had RX 7, I may be asking too much of the Dialogue Contour module but for me any significant changes in pitch ended up with artefacts and also for a convinced end-of-sentence dropping inflection, we need to be able to adjust the time as well as pitch, but currently Dialogue Contour can only adjust the pitch. Let’s hope that this module can be improved some more, but as of now it is up to small adjustments of pitch to give a monotone ‘read’ delivery a little more life.

More AudioSuite Plug-ins

It is great to have some of the machine learning based modules as plug-ins in Pro Tools, so we can get access to modules like Dialog Isolate and De-rustle without having to go through the round-trip out of Pro Tools into RX and back to Pro Tools.

Want To Win?

If you would like to win a prize like the copy of iZotope’s RX 7 Advanced worth $1,119 then go over to our Win Page and see what prizes we have on offer.