Production Expert

11 stories

Production ExpertVideoThe In-Session Decisions That Actually Make A Better Vocal Recording Photo by Amin Asbaghipour on Unsplash Modern recording tools offer endless ways to rescue or rework a vocal.

11.06

Production ExpertVideoToontrack LA Sessions SDX - Tested By Pros Carrying on a tradition of meticulously captured sounds for Superiour Drummer 3, LA Sessions SDX calls upon the talents of Niko Bolas.

11.05

Production ExpertVideoAcon Restoration Suite 3 Analyses Your Audio And Builds The Repair Chain For You #offer ends 17/11/26 Acon Digital has announced the release of Restoration Suite 3, an update to its audio restoration bundle built around a new plugin that listens to a recording, identifies what is…

11.05

Production ExpertVideoHave FireWire Audio Interfaces And An Apple Silicon Mac? You Might Be Able To Use Them When macOS Tahoe arrived without a FireWire stack, it looked like the end for a generation of interfaces that still sound perfectly good.

11.05

Production ExpertVideoUAD Capitol Studios Puts Studios A And B, Four Echo Chambers And A Decca Tree In Your DAW Universal Audio has released Capitol Studios, a $249 native room modelling and reverb plugin. It models both of Capitol’s tracking rooms, a locker of vintage mics, the large-format consoles and four…

11.04

Production ExpertVideoDynamic Grading 2.1 Adds A Peak Limiter And Listen Modes #offer ends 30/11/26 Playfair Audio has released Dynamic Grading 2.1 with a peak limiter and listen modes. The free update also drops iLok for accounts with four activations per licence.

11.04

Production ExpertVideoSteven Slate Audio Releases VSX Horizon One Headphones And VSX 8.0 Steven Slate Audio has announced VSX Horizon One, a new closed-back reference headphone, alongside VSX 8.0, the latest version of its speaker modelling software.

11.04

Production ExpertVideoiZotope Photon Brings GPU Stem Separation And Dialogue Cleanup To ARA2 iZotope has released Photon, a $349 standalone app and ARA2 plugin that runs a set of machine-learning models locally on the GPU to split mixes into stems and clean up noisy dialogue.

11.03

Production ExpertVideoHow Bogren A-Class Vocal Recreates Type-A Vocal Sheen After decades of recordings that tolerated some tape noise, designers later developed the ingenious concept of using ‘compansion’ to reduce hiss.

11.02

Production ExpertVideoRME Control 3.5 Puts TotalMix FX Volume, Dim And Mono Controls In The Mac Menu Bar A developer on RME’s user forum has released RME Control 3.5, a third-party macOS menu bar app that controls RME audio interfaces through TotalMix FX .

11.02

Production ExpertVideoKrotos Studio 3.0 Adds Unified Sound Search And Send To Pro Tools Cursor Krotos has released Krotos Studio 3.0, a free update for Studio, Pro and Max subscribers that rebuilds the sound design app around searching and placing sounds.

11.02

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo