Waves Clarity Vx noise reduction - whoa

[Guy Rowland]

You all know how jaded and cynical I am about almost every release these days. This genuinely seems incredible - two new real time Clarity Vx plugins. One is aimed at musicians for $30 intro price, the Pro version is for post and is $249.

If you're familiar with NR, you'll know the artefacts and gotchas to listen out for. On the basis of these videos, they seem massively better (and cheaper) than Cedar, and the Pro version may even top RX's offline mode.

First, the basic Vx aimed at vocalists:



The Pro version has advanced controls to get multiband control, and the ability to remove dialogue altogether to retain noise (this can be really useful in post, believe it or not).



Here's an example working on the dialogue from Dune



As if all this isn't enough, they currently have an extra deal of free plugins:

Spend $50 get 1 free plugin

Spend $90 get 2 free plugins

Spend $120 get 3 free plugins

Assuming no calamities, I'm going demo the Pro version tomorrow - I have some horrendous material to try it out on.

[tack]

Impressive results for $30!

All the demos were covering fairly persistent background noise. I wonder how it deals with intermittent noises like chair movement, background clicks and other transients.

[lofi]

@Guy keep us updated.
I have a funeral to attend this week, my mother in law, so I will not have the time to demo it myself.
But at the same time I’ve already agreed to take on a show so if this is amazing, please do share any findings that might speed things up.

For the last few months I’ve been using the UAD Cedar plugin. So far the best de-noise plug-in I can afford. Swedish members of this forum can hear the Cedar at work in the new season of “Husdrommar”.

If the new waves sounds better and handles itself better, I’ll switch in a heartbeat. The online material do sound good but I get a slight “synthetic” taste in my ears.

/Anders

[Guy Rowland]

There's a ton of videos online already. Clearly Waves were confident enough to get the pre-release version out to a lot of people. This one is quite good and methodical on a bunch of different material. Nice nice use on a singer songwriter's voice and guitar, cleaning up the two mics to make them phase less (apart from anything else).

[Guy Rowland]

Clarity VX Pro - let the testing begin!

First observation - it is thirstier than any plugin I own. On a 256 buffer, PT couldn't cope at all even using it in Audiosuite. Even 512 was glitchy, I had to increase to 1024 to make it useable even as an offline process.

REAL WORLD TESTS ON EXISTING MATERIAL (no audio examples)

Test 1
A presenter wearing a muffled mic over the loudest boat engine in the world. It's a constant noise, but with a ton of low mids that overalap speech frequencies. It was a lot of patient work in RX and the end result was still not great. Clarity, using default settings on maximum, got rid of all the noise completely (and the noise component had essentially no dialogue element at all, just punching holes in the noise). The quality of the voice was far richer than I was able to ever achieve with RX, but it wasn't completely natural in those low mids, you could tell that there was boat in there modulating with the pitch. Top end was muffled, but that's what the mic was, so it needed to be brightened as a matter of course.

UAD C-suite (CEDAR) was much thinner and couldn't eliminate the noise and pumping effects, but by leaving out the lower frequencies it actually sounded a bit more natural in this particular case.

Test 2
A presenter wearing a very muffled mic buffeted with extreme buffeting wind noise. Clarity entirely eliminated the wind noise. It's quite breathtaking actually - control at one end - gone. control at the other - only wind, not a trace of dialogue. It left the awful quality mic intact. Compared to the heavy RX work I did, it is cleaner, and using EQ to remove the lows and boost the highs made it sound much nicer than I was able to achieve in RX.

C-suite couldn't touch this, but if I reduced wind noise first by other methods it helped, but got nowhere near Clarity's results.

Test 3
A presenter wearing a muffled mic buffeted with wind and the sound of a drone. Getting used to this by now - Clarity gets rid of the lot. All of it. NR artifacts at the high end for what remains feel quite minimal, so that means that corrective EQ works fairly smoothly. This lack of artefacts is perhaps to be expected - listening to the clean noise reveals just how little high end speech components are thrown away. This particular line had to be ADR'd, but that wouldn't probably be necessary with Clarity.

Drones are challenging for RX with their constantly fluctuating frequencies. Sometimes Dialogue isolate works, but typically you get odd frequencies bleeding through. Clarity works much better, much more quickly.

Test 4
A presenter on a hydroflyer (a fireman's hose basically). Again, coped great, though you have to watch human non-speech sounds - on this the presenter whooped and screamed a lot, and some of those sounds were partially detected as noise depending on the algorithm.


TESTS OF ME PUTTING IT THROUGH ITS PACES WITH AUDIO EXAMPLES

Test 5
Me mucking about in the studio. Put the aircon/heater on full blast, stood miles from the mic, clapped, jumped up and down and smashed things about. WARNING - some loud sounds in here compared to my voice, so watch your speakers and ears.

RAW - https://www.dropbox.com/s/caq0q4qvcgj16 ... W.wav?dl=0
CLARITY VX - https://www.dropbox.com/s/av8ordtipjqqa ... 1.wav?dl=0

Interesting results. The aircon has gone of course. The roomy sound of my voice is largely intact with few artefacts. Some claps get through, the jumping is gone, smashing the sofa with the cushion is gone but left some holes.

Test 6
Test 5 led me to wonder how it coped with ambient voices. So I codded something up, giving it an absurdly difficult test - in a concert hall, clapping and generally beating myself up.

RAW - https://www.dropbox.com/s/n55q4e7peftvx ... W.wav?dl=0
CLARITY VX - https://www.dropbox.com/s/nodybw0r0kbfp ... y.wav?dl=0

Because I'm closer to the mic the aircon isn't as loud, but it is there. Or rather it isn't, again it's gone completely. Most significantly - the reverb is preserved intact for the dialogue, it sounds near perfect. Remarkable. Of course when I start beating myself up it falls apart a bit, but even there it's better than I expected.

Test 7
I think this might be leaving the best til last - voice in a crowd. I codded up me talking on a crowded boardwalk - lots of wall, running and screaming.

RAW - https://www.dropbox.com/s/1l35acjn8bvxw ... W.wav?dl=0
CLARITY VX - https://www.dropbox.com/s/3gxubg59zv2uj ... 2.wav?dl=0
RX9 Dialogue Isolate (best quality) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/zfhs9pdgb0piw ... I.wav?dl=0

That's unbelievable, especially the running and screaming. Note - this uses algorithm 2 which is skewed towards working in random noise. You can hear what RX9 makes of it - also impressive in getting rid of the unwanted sounds, but the quality of the voice is nowhere near as good.

I'll do a couple of music tests next.

[Guy Rowland]

A quick test to see how it copes with removing a vocal from Amy Mann's Stupid Thing - a task that it's not really designed to do as such, but I was curious.

Clarity voice - https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yd1gd38ubl32 ... g.wav?dl=0
Clarity backing - https://www.dropbox.com/s/pg3elmoqrmb75 ... g.wav?dl=0
RX9 Music Rebalance voice - https://www.dropbox.com/s/8cthip2fe4d3n ... g.wav?dl=0
RX9 Music Rebalance music - https://www.dropbox.com/s/8cthip2fe4d3n ... g.wav?dl=0

A very clear winner for RX9 in this case, not surprising as Music Rebalance is specifically tailored to this task.

It leads me to conclude that Clarity - at least for now - is squarely focused on clean-up.

[lofi]

Thanks for sharing!
Sounds like a instabuy, have a few upcoming projects that would benefit (especially the crowd bit... amazing!)
Still think the Cedar sounds the best of the three as a light cleanup de-noiser, but as you mention it can't really cope with extrem material.

Waves has just or are about to release new soundgrid servers.
I wonder if they would be able to handle a few Clarity plugins.
Or would you say that the old way of several passes with light de-noise is a thing of the past?

/Anders

[Guy Rowland]

Or would you say that the old way of several passes with light de-noise is a thing of the past?

It's so material dependent it's hard to generalise, but I doubt I'll be doing multiple passes much any more. I found with the material on that previous series - which is very much at the extreme end - that being aggressive with it worked incredibly well. Once you have a clean version of the original, I often then EQ, add in other elements to make it sound natural, and because the artefacts are so low it works well. One common thing these days is to deliver a complete M&E, with all the noise around a presenter intact and with the voice magically missing, this tool is perfect for that, obviously. No place for subtlety there!

The comparison with Dialogue Isolate was particularly revealing. In both cases controls were turned to the max. My voice on Clarity sounded just fine - not so with DI.

However, it's all a different story if you're doing a show with a more even constant noise - aircon, say - where you definitely don't want to be too aggressive as it will sound unnatural.

Anyway, I bought it, obviously. You can get an additional 10% off if you use my referral code - https://www.waves.com/r/899898 . For me it ended up as £175, which is brilliant really. The main draw over the basic version is being able to remove dialogue. The tweaks are handy, but it's auto settings on one of the algorithms was normally so good that feels like a much smaller detail.

[soundbylaura]

I'm sure I'll buy it but not until they put it on sale for $29 (ok, maybe $49), which is inevitable.

[Guy Rowland]

I'm sure I'll buy it but not until they put it on sale for $29 (ok, maybe $49), which is inevitable.

I may eat my words - goodness knows Waves have form at making everything the price of a burger in the end - but I don't think Pro will go that low. The basic version is $30 with a significant price differential between it and Pro. I can't remember a precedent for a product line structure like this, so my guess is they're trying something new here. For once I think Pro is well named, it's aimed at jobbing Post professionals and suites, and the cost for them is already pretty reasonable compared to the competition. UAD C-Suite is $349 IIRC and nowhere near as good. And needs UAD hardware.

It'll be interesting to see what they do, anyway. I'm hoping they will apply this technology to other new products.

[Guy Rowland]

Incidentally - I'd forgotten this but you now get a "free" second license that you can put on a laptop etc. There is a catch though, that's only free as long as you pay their WUP subscription on the product.

[lofi]

Anyway, I bought it, obviously. You can get an additional 10% off if you use my referral code - https://www.waves.com/r/899898 . For me it ended up as £175, which is brilliant really. The main draw over the basic version is being able to remove dialogue. The tweaks are handy, but it's auto settings on one of the algorithms was normally so good that feels like a much smaller detail.

Thank you!
Ended up at $205
(Upgraded my WUP and got another $20 off)
/Anders

[Guy Rowland]

I played around with it more yesterday, and I did find a very few very extreme clips it couldn't handle. I had a show with a presenter on a rollercoaster, and the only audio was a GoPro mic. You can probably imagine how that sounded - like a sandblaster pointed right at the thing. To make matters worse, most of the presenter's vocalisations were laughter and screams, with the odd very high pitched word thrown in. Clarity could make no sense of it at all, it detected everything as noise.

RX9 Dialogue Isolate wasn't any good either - the new algorithm in 9 actually worse than the old in 8. I gotta be honest, I don't quite know how I did it, but I got it amazingly clean somehow in RX9 - EQ cut below 700hz, Spectral denoise, magic wand, harmonics, Spectral repair and a lot of massaging I guess...?

It's actually the dialogue detection side of it that is the biggest problem for all these tools. Shrieking rollercoaster vocalisations are so unlike normal dialogue it doesn't recognise them. Equally true in RX, in fact I more or less proved to them that the detection algo got worse in RX9 - the quality improved, but it was detecting less correctly in the first place. iZotope support scurried off thanking me profusely for my A/B comparisons to see what they could do, but I've not heard anything since.

[lofi]

@Guy.
I run both RX8 and RX9.
Something happened with the QC when they released version 9.
/Anders

[Guy Rowland]

A real world update on this. I'm currently dubbing a Bake-Off style show (people compete in a creative task against the clock) which is filmed in a fairly ambient space with lots of fan noise, and the majority of the time has chatter, bangs and crashes off-screen. Last series I found it best to essentially clean everything up and lay a (real) generic hubbub under it all to make it controlled, even and pleasant to listen to. Clean up was all in RX, and I used a familiar combination of many of the tools in their suite as required - a lot of Dialogue Isolate, but others too. It worked well but was time-consuming.

This seemed like the perfect test ground for Clarity VX. As I'm sharing it with a colleague, I thought I'd just use the basic version to see how we go - there's no practical difference between regular and Pro for broad noise reduction anyway. I have 8 tracks in Pro Tools routed to a Clarity group (or aux in PT terminology), and a single instance sits in that. I then automate and display the Amount control, and have that sat under the 8 tracks so if I need more or less at any time, it's very quick to adjust. I also decided - finally - to use the in-built Pro Tools clip effects as a workflow improvement double-whammy (I've always resented how much fixed screen real estate it's taken, but somehow I cope better with it at the bottom of the screen as it now is in 2022.9, and it's only a click to get rid of it).

Well blow me down. The difference is night and day. It's absolutely slashed the time I'm spending on basic clean up and EQ combined. Genuinely revolutionary. Clarity vx just works, I'd say 99% of the time. Small clicks, mic brushes and bumps - they all go along with the noisy hubbub. When used at a not too extreme level, the side effects are small, and I open up with a little Altiverb to compensate. I only need to use RX a handful of times in the entire show. It's the exact same end result for FAR less effort.

And as for the Pro Tools built-in clip effects - I'll never go back. Never mind that it's non-destructive, the real joy is having it always there with 5 presets that are my most-used curves in any project. Select clips, click, done. Tweak occasionally.

Speaking personally, it's such a phenomenal shot in the arm - I'm spending so much less time on the most boring part of my job. There's a lot of music editing involved too, and I really enjoy that - as a proportion of my day, the grunt to fun ratio has improved massively.

The only downside is that it is thirsty. It worked fairly ok at a 512 buffer, but I found for it to be really smooth 1024 was better. When doing this mixing work there's zero downside to a high buffer, it's only that I have to keep remembering to switch if I need to use Cubase for music recording.

I can't think of another plugin that exists that has this much of an effect on the end product. This is cheap version I'm using here - $30 in the right sale. Waves have come in for so much stick in the past decade, but they absolutely knocked it out of the park, all the while iZotope have totally lost their way. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Lawrence]

Clarity has allowed me to abandon my (fantasy?) of making a bedroom into an iso booth.

[Geoff Grace]

Thanks for the reminder about Clarity, Guy. I used RX just the other day, completely forgetting about the option to use Clarity instead. (I have the cheap version.)

I don’t often need noise reduction, so I haven’t used Clarity yet. I’m glad it’s working so well for you.

Best,

Geoff

[Guy Rowland]

Last week Waves updated Clarity to include Silicon support and a new lower latency algorithm. I put the latter through its paces today (I had to update it to v14 before it would work), and it's sadly a little disappointing. Although the overall CPU usage is reduced, it still spiked occasionally causing Pro Tools to stop with a CPU error at 512 buffer, much like the original algorithms did. Also the accuracy of the dialogue detection was significantly reduced, missing syllables and so on.

Oh well, the old algorithms are still there and I'll carry on mixing at 1024.