If you look through your plugin list, you will no doubt have dozens, hundreds or possibly even thousands which you hardly ever use. I recently uninstalled a load which I just don’t use any more and I still have 55 plugins in the dynamics category alone. Most of us use just a select few for our day to day work. This article is the first in a series in which the Production Expert team highlight their own shortlists of favourite plugins.

For my work in audio post, the plugin choices are continually evolving as technologies change and improve. Currently though, some of my favourites include the following…

Accentize dxRevive Pro

This powerful speech restoration and noise reduction tool has proven itself invaluable on many projects. With a simple set of controls and 4 algorithms to choose from, it gets the job done with minimal time and fuss. In addition to the reduction of noise and reverb, it also provides restoration of missing frequency content, vastly improving thin sounding or badly recorded dialogue.

Hush Pro

No single noise reduction tool is perfect in all scenarios, and they all offer something slightly different. It’s a good idea, therefore, to have a few at your disposal, especially for cleaning up dialogue. Hush Pro is an AAX Audiosuite plug-in which provides separate faders for dialogue, reverb and noise. Optimised for Apple Silicon Macs, it gives very impressive results with minimal audible artifacts.

FabFilter Pro-Q 3

This is a favourite plugin for a lot of people in both music and post production, and for good reason. It’s an EQ with an intuitive and easy to use interface which provides static and dynamic processing, along with a responsive and clear spectrum analyser. What’s more, the EQ Match feature works very well on dialogue in cases where you either need to match ADR to location dialogue, or where a dropped in line of VO just doesn’t quite match the tonal quality of the rest of the recording. I thought I’d never buy another EQ, until I found the Pro-Q 3.

Avid Pro Compressor

The Avid Pro series of plug-ins are some of the best Avid have ever made, in my opinion. They include the Pro Compressor, Pro Limiter, Pro Expander, Pro Multiband Dynamics, Pro Multi-band Splitter and Pro Subharmonic. They’re all great, but the one which I use the most often is the Pro Compressor. The interface is straight forward and well laid out and it allows compression to be applied which doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, but it gets the job done to a high standard. This is my go-to compressor for dialogue.

iZotope Neutron 4 Unmask

Preventing masking in a mix used to be quite a manual process of carefully carving out frequency content from one sound, so as not to conflict with another. In some cases, especially where something which might vary in its frequency content, such as music, sits under dialogue, it’s a lot more practical to have a tool which detects and reduces overlapping frequencies for you. This is precisely what iZotope Neutron 4 Unmask does. Using the side chain input from the dialogue, it’s an effective tool for sculpting the frequency content of the music to reduce conflicting overlaps. Used lightly to moderately, this does a great job at improving dialogue intelligibility whenever music is present. The range in which it operates can be restricted with the low and high frequency sliders, allowing the extremities of the audible frequency spectrum to be left unaffected when required.

Nugen Vis-LM

A loudness meter is something which is absolutely essential in any post production mix. There are several out there, but my personal favourite is Nugen Vis-LM. I like the fact that it includes all of the major loudness standards, and the loudness history graph provides a useful scrolling view which allows me to identify problem areas on the timeline. Couple this with the option to export loudness data as a text file, along with visual warning alerts if loudness parameters deviate from desired values, and you’ve got a full featured loudness plug-in which does everything you need.

FabFilter Pro-L 2

The FabFilter Pro-L 2 is a true peak limiter which also incorporates loudness metering, advanced algorithms, linear-phase oversampling, a variety of dither options and surround support up to Dolby Atmos 9.1.6. I use this on various components of my mix, whenever I need to rein in peak levels. The real time level display with peak gain reduction labels is also a handy feature. I find the Pro-L 2 useful in cases where I need to raise the overall level of a mix to create a louder version for Vimeo or YouTube. The transparency of the limiter means that it’s a great tool for adapting a mix which was perhaps done to the EBU R-128 or ATSC A-85 standard, to bring the level up for online delivery. Sometimes I’ll instantiate the limiter to use it purely as a dither too.

To see how I incorporate these plug-ins into my own workflow, check out the video below.