Hello all. Just wrapping up production on my doc and heading into post and I was just curious about the affordable options out there for audio editing. The pros I know only work with ProTools these days, but I've been considering Sound Forge to use with Vegas in my home edit bay and would like some feedback.

Sound on the doc was a nightmare. If it wasn't chain saws and crashing trees from nearby lumbering, it was compressors firing up pumping water out of a nearby creek, jets screaming overhead, etc., all things I certainly hadn't expected in a National park/forest, and all things that were frequently unavoidable, with people only around and available "now" vs. waiting for a quieter time of day. On top of that, there are a few clips with distortion (pitch issues) and bounce from hard concrete floors.

Being a doc, there won't be tons of $$ being thrown its way to "fix" the audio, but I would like a program that I can use for noise reduction and other tools. Sound Forge looks solid and has a great rep, but I've been told to look elsewhere as it's only two tracks. But I only shot two channels, and if I work on the audio in Sound Forge and bring it into Vegas, does that really matter? I'll put the score under it all in Vegas, which allows for more tracks, so my basic question is, is Sound Forge the best way to go? Do others have favorites they'd recommended that are more bang for the buck? Easier/harder to use? And how do they compare in terms of cost?

Thanks in advance for any feedback,
Marcia

As far as I can tell:
The main benefit from using Sound Forge is that it lets you do things faster. I'm fairly comfortable with doing things in Vegas so I haven't bothered to learn Sound Forge.

In Vegas you right click a problem clip and select "open copy in audio editor". Edit the clip in SF, save it, and it comes back into Vegas as a new take. This means the 2-track limitation of Sound Forge isn't really an issue.

Sound Forge also lets you edit waveforms at the sample level. This would only be useful for very short sections of sound (i.e a click or something).

2- You should probably spend some money on a noise reduction plug-in instead. NR plug-ins work on constant noises (i.e air conditioning). On some of the noises you describe I think you'll have to do something else as they are not constant and are likely overpowering the dialogue.

see http://www.digitalpostproduction.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=25455

Alternatives to the approach above is to add subtitles or to do dialogue editing. You could spend lots of time to replace ?phenomes? (the parts that make up words) with good ones from other takes. There are limitations to this and probably won't work when you have sentences that are bad throughout.

Forge is (IMO) the ultimate 2 channel editor. While multi-track applications CAN be used for deep editing much audio, nothing really beats the power of 2 channel, master-oriented audio. On the Mac, this tool would be Peak, on the PC, it's Sound Forge. With Noise Reduction, and armed with a few good plugs such as the Ozone from iZotope, you'd be shocked at what you can do.
Sample level editing, where you can draw out sounds manually, not to mention incredible sound design that tools like Vegas, Audition, Nuendo simply cannot do, Forge is a VERY intuitive and fast editing platform. The only reason it's no longer bundled with virtually every NLE out there is because Sonic Foundry (now Sony) jumped into the world of NLE. Prior to that, it was bundled with Adobe, Canopus, Ulead, Avid, and many other app.
I know, sounds like a marketing scream, but it's true. Even when I was a ProTools user, I used Forge, jumping back and forth between platforms. Forge just celebrated it's 14th birthday.

Right on

"I know, sounds like a marketing scream, but it's true. Even when I was a ProTools user, I used Forge, jumping back and forth between platforms. Forge just celebrated it's 14th birthday."

YUP.. pretty much like me.. lol
and since vegas 4 came out with all teh Forge linkage, ive ditch my pro tools and jsut use Vegas and Acid for multitracking..

extremely powerful..

Wow. Sold. Will go order it.
Thanks guys!

Folks, Sound Forge is fine, but don't forget Sawstudio. It's more expensive ($ 300 - 2500) I think but it's so amazing. The best bet is to look at the promotional videos on their web site.

There are about a hours worth of material to look at, plus on the site, there's a user forum that's excellent.

I swear by SAW. I've done over 70 long form documentaries using this family of products. It's as fast as vegas, and allows you to do REAL TIME mixing, with no latency whatsoever.

http://sawstudio.com/LiveVideoPromo.htm

here's the link. I hope you check it out.

Milt