Cedar VoicEX vs Hush Pro?

[JingleDjango]

I've been doing more dialogue editing for non-scripted television series and so I've been comparing the latest wave of algorithmic noise suppression tools. This has included Supertone Clear, Accentize deRoom, Cedar VoicEX and probably some I'm forgetting. So far the standout winner is VoicEX and Clear is a near but distinguishable second place.

I wanted to demo Hush Pro but was disappointed to learn that it's available only for Apple Silicon macs. A workstation upgrade is planned for late this year or early next year but the $6-12k CAD expenditure will have to wait.

I'm currently struggling with two projects featuring some very challenging audio: a tv series and an audiobook narrated by a senior with a sticky mouth and containing an inordinate amount of cloth/movement and room sound (despite having been recorded at a commercial studio).

• In the case of the tv show, Clear has performed well, retaining lots of crisp top-end detail. In contrast, VoicEX seems tuned to output a very smooth signal with minimal gating artifacts. In most scenes, either tool produces useable results but my ears prefer VoiceEX.

• For the audiobook, VoicEX vastly outperforms Clear. There are many problem spots where Clear simply cannot subtract the offending rustle while VoicEX disappears it completely (and sounds good doing it). Of course I could manually finesse the passages in RX but for a lengthy program like this it would be a punishing exercise.

I'm curious though whether anyone here has made the comparison for themselves. If you have, could you please share your opinion? If you have a license for Hush, maybe you could spare a few minutes to process a couple test clips so I could evaluate its performance against the Cedar tool?

Somebody, please talk me out of paying $1200 for a plug-in because it'll only delay the much more exciting purchase of a new mac workstation.

[Cheesehead]

Hi there.
Having derailed your last thread, I thought I'd chime in here as well.

I'm using Hush pro at the moment on a mac pro 2019 and it does work although it's a bit slow and clunky. The results are very good, better than Clear IMHO.
I haven't done a direct comparison with VoiceEx, but when I demoed it I found it a bit underwhelming in comparison to other cheaper options.
However, maybe you have found the thing it is really good at fixing?

Why not try Hush on a demo and see if you can live with it for now and if it does the job?

[JingleDjango]

Originally Posted by Cheesehead

Hi there.
Having derailed your last thread, I thought I'd chime in here as well.

I'm using Hush pro at the moment on a mac pro 2019 and it does work although it's a bit slow and clunky. The results are very good, better than Clear IMHO.
I haven't done a direct comparison with VoiceEx, but when I demoed it I found it a bit underwhelming in comparison to other cheaper options.
However, maybe you have found the thing it is really good at fixing?

Why not try Hush on a demo and see if you can live with it for now and if it does the job?

I don't remember another thread? But thanks for replying in any case.

I tried to demo Hush but it won't work on my intel i7 cpu. It returns an error when I try to render even a very short clip.

[Cheesehead]

I don't remember another thread?

Sorry my bad. I was thinking of the other one about Voice EX In 'Post surround video' that covers some similar areas.
Sorry to hear Hush doesn't work on your machine.
I'm pretty much in the same boat and now thinking of biting the bullet and upgrading my main rig a bit early to get proper access to Hush etc.
The price of voiceEX is a fairly substantial chunk towards a new Mac Studio for instance.. food for thought?

[JingleDjango]

I wasn't aware of the other thread. Giving it a look, thanks.

[inspire]

Hush Pro, AI-powered dialogue repair, looks very interesting to me:
-
hush mix lets you rebalance speech, reverb, and noise as if they were separate channels, previewing the results in real time. Control the precise signal-to-noise ratio with decibel-based faders, link channels for faster edits, or toggle the mute, solo, and bypass buttons to make a/b comparisons on the fly.
&
hush split uses the same engine under the hood, but prints speech, reverb, and noise into separate lanes. You can tweak the clip gain on each lane, add other plugins, or make non-destructive edits (for example, isolating a section of room tone to fill silence elsewhere in the session).
-
It seems to me that it's similar to the RX 10 (izotope) feature Music Rebalance, where you can adjust everything separately.
It's unfortunate to hear that there is no support for Windows because I am intrigued by it, and I would probably be on board:
--
Will you make a Windows version?
Not anytime soon. Both Hush and Hush Pro are heavily optimized for Apple Silicon Macs, and rely on several Apple technologies (CoreML, Accelerate, and SwiftUI, among others).
Porting my software to Windows would require a complete rewrite, including optimization for a variety of pc and gpu hardware. As a solo developer, I don’t have the resources to pull this off just yet, though I haven’t ruled it out.
--

[Eric Lambert]

We use Hush and have been happy with it.

However, last week we received horrible sync audio recorded via the camera itself (apparently the sound guy just didn't show up to the shoot) and although Hush did a good job we actually got amazing results by first importing it into Adobe Premier, applied its noise reduction (I forget the exact name of the specific plugin used) and it was far and away the best option. It magically took fully unusable audio and made it damn near professional.

It's not addressing your exact question, but if the ultimate goal is to find the best possible noise reduction then it belongs in the discussion.

Other than that, yes, Hush is tough to beat.

[smurfyou]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

We use Hush and have been happy with it.

However, last week we received horrible sync audio recorded via the camera itself (apparently the sound guy just didn't show up to the shoot) and although Hush did a good job we actually got amazing results by first importing it into Adobe Premier, applied its noise reduction (I forget the exact name of the specific plugin used) and it was far and away the best option. It magically took fully unusable audio and made it damn near professional.

It's not addressing your exact question, but if the ultimate goal is to find the best possible noise reduction then it belongs in the discussion.

Other than that, yes, Hush is tough to beat.

Yes Adobe has their "Podcast" processing or whatever they call it now. It can sometimes work but I'm not a fan of their target sound. It's very dark and dry. DXRevive is much better in this regard I think.

But the Adobe can work in a pinch. Just don't let the editor know about it

[ryst]

I recently had a scene to clean up where the 2 actors were outside on a gazebo and there were a lot of weird sounding frogs and crickets. It was very distracting. I demo'd Cedar VoicEX and it did pretty good but Hush Pro won. Needless to say, I couldn't justify spending 1k on VoicEX when a plugin 1/4 it's price did better. Also, I have Extractialogue, DRevive, Clarity, Clear, RX 10....There is nothing VoicEX does that is missing from the tools I have.

I even found a bug in the demo of VoicEX, reported it to Cedar, they acknowledged the bug existed but wouldn't give me a new 10 day demo after they fixed it so that made me think I wasn't good enough to be their customer. Someone told me it was probably because they are just behind the curve regarding demo extensions and iLok stuff but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth.

All in all, Hush Pro all the way.

[gives]

Originally Posted by ryst

I recently had a scene to clean up where the 2 actors were outside on a gazebo and there were a lot of weird sounding frogs and crickets. It was very distracting. I demo'd Cedar VoicEX and it did pretty good but Hush Pro won. Needless to say, I couldn't justify spending 1k on VoicEX when a plugin 1/4 it's price did better. Also, I have Extractialogue, DRevive, Clarity, Clear, RX 10....There is nothing VoicEX does that is missing from the tools I have.

I even found a bug in the demo of VoicEX, reported it to Cedar, they acknowledged the bug existed but wouldn't give me a new 10 day demo after they fixed it so that made me think I wasn't good enough to be their customer. Someone told me it was probably because they are just behind the curve regarding demo extensions and iLok stuff but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth.

All in all, Hush Pro all the way.

It's a great app. I have been in touch with the developer who is a super nice guy and he said this:

"Hey Greg! I’m working on lots of updates — from little bug fixes to some bigger features — stay tuned :)​

Cheers,
Ian


Sounds good to me and I have been using it on some things that it just does the best job on. I also like Clear for some things as it's always a process. i.e. REVOICE Pro update is much better also for certain things.

G