Audio cleanup tool is an ideal companion for Final Cut Pro 4.

This month, it's time for me (an audio guy) to get adventurous and step into the picture world. In order to review BIAS Peak — or more accurately, the integration of Peak within Final Cut Pro 4 — it was necessary for me to spend some time with Final Cut Pro 4 itself. Not without some trepidation, I must confess.

BIAS Peak 4 DV offers many of the audio cleanup tools included with Peak 4.0, as well as advanced features like time compression.

What a breeze! Installing the software was simple, and securing the FireWire connection between computer and video camera was as easy as any picture editor would have told me to expect. After a quick perusal of Final Cut Pro's main menus, I logged and captured an 84-second clip of my 13-year-old son Brian's semifinal basketball game from last season. Naturally, I chose the spot where he entered the game with less than a minute on the clock and his team up by one point. Deliberately fouled, Brian went to the line and sank two free throws to clinch the game. I was prepared to watch this scene for hours if I had to!

After familiarizing myself with the Browser and experimenting with some video effects, I checked out the audio effects that ship with FCP 4. Not bad! Using Apple and Final Cut Pro effects, plus others that you may have installed on your computer, the user can do a fair amount of equalizing and compression. There's even a reverb and a delay line. I also like the fact that you can record a voiceover directly onto an audio track.

Many video producers will output audio through the computer's speakers, but I use a Hammerfall HDSP 9652 sound card to route audio out of my G4 to my room monitors. Choosing this card from the Audio/Video Settings drop-down menu was all it took to route sound properly. All that was left was to set Peak up as both the audio and video editor.

Setting Peak as my default video editor let me view the clip from within the application while I was working on the audio track. All I had to do was go to FCP 4's System Settings, select the External Editors tab, and designate Peak as my editor of choice, and I was ready to go over to the audio side of things. Under FCP 4's main menu, I selected View Clip in Editor, and Peak opened up a stereo waveform and a synchronized video clip.

At this point, a bit of BIAS history may be in order. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Digidesign, prior to its acquisition by Avid, shipped a great two-track editor, Sound Designer II, with early versions of Pro Tools. SDII was also a standalone application that the music industry glommed onto in a hurry, especially budget-minded folks who wanted to get into audio editing. This program was great for assembling playlists, and its crossfading in particular was extremely effective. Digidesign eventually stopped supporting SDII, and other stereo waveform editors stepped in.

BIAS Peak had some strong selling points, among them the intelligent way it handled batch processing. This feature alone makes Peak or Peak DV a major plus for Final Cut Pro 4 users today. When working with audio clips from different sources, for example, you'll most likely be inputting material at different sample rates. While you go out for a Frappuccino, Peak can easily convert them all to your desired format. Final Cut Pro 4 offers a batch converter of its own, but it works only in realtime.

BIAS has just released Peak 4. This stereo editing package includes several features — direct Redbook CD burning, support for Audio Units plug-ins, and ImpulseVerb, which applies recorded room ambience to an audio document — that aren't included in the DV version of the product. The features that you'll need for most of your audio cleanup work, however, are included in the DV version. I used Peak 4 while working on this review. For a complete list of the features that come with all versions of Peak, including Peak Express, which is bundled with Final Cut Pro 4, visit the BIAS website, www.bias-inc.com.

And so, back to work. What do you do if you've got a narration track that's marred by a cough, a dropped microphone, or some other unforeseen and unpleasant audio event? You won't want to just chop out the sound because you'd be left with a dead spot in the track that's obvious and jarring. Peak lets you set up a region around the offending sound and replace it with ambient noise from another portion of the audio clip. Although FCP 4 offers some excellent audio functions, nothing in the package lets you clean up a track in this way, and this feature alone will make you glad that Apple bundles Peak Express with the NLE.

Peak also gives the user access to VST plug-ins. Developed by Steinberg, the German company responsible for Nuendo, VST is a plug-in architecture adopted by most of the main players in the native platform audio market. If you've purchased any processors from Waves, for example, they are all available to you, via VST, in Peak.

Peak also ships with Vbox, a routing matrix that lets you assemble and chain together multiple VST effects. Most useful in sound-design work, Vbox may not be critical to your immediate needs, but it will let you expand your creativity as you work with sound against picture.

Speaking of Waves, you may recall that I reviewed its Restoration Bundle in May 2003. For $99 you can purchase Bias' SoundSoap, which handles some of the same tasks. If your audio was recorded next to an air conditioner or another source of constant line interference, SoundSoap can be a big help. The software uses an intelligent algorithm that lets SoundSoap read the noise and generate a profile of it. All you have to do is get comfortable with two knobs — the Noise Tuner and Noise Reduction knobs. Once SoundSoap has learned the noise, you dial in to a threshold that seems to capture it alone and then switch over to noise-only mode. Here you'll decide if you'll be eliminating too much of the desired audio in order to eliminate the junk and reach an acceptable compromise. SoundSoap ships as both VST and DirectX plug-ins and as a standalone application for Mac and Windows.

Peak and Peak DV also let you time-compress audio and video. This can be extremely helpful if you're working on a :30 spot and you've come in a second or two long. Of course, you wouldn't want to compress more than about 15% or so, but within this range Peak handles compression (without changing audio pitch) extremely well.

If you work with multiple audio clips, and especially if you begin editing them, sooner or later you'll end up with a clip that has an undesirable click or two on it. These clicks are most often caused by edits that don't occur at a zero crossing point in the waveform. Peak, like any other waveform editor, lets you zoom in to the sample level, select the Pencil tool, and draw out the click.

BIAS has another program, Deck, that is a perfect companion to Peak and Final Cut Pro 4. The mixing features of FCP 4 are very impressive, considering that they are not the program's main attraction. But Deck offers much more track-editing functionality, external control surface support, 5.1 surround mixing, and OMF import. There may come a time when you want to investigate this digital audio workstation, or another, to work in conjunction with FCP 4 and Peak. In the meantime, there is no question about it: Peak as a companion piece to Final Cut Pro 4 gives the user tremendous flexibility and power when it comes to repairing problematic audio. Peak also presents the user with powerful sound-design tools that help videos come to life.

BIAS offers attractive upgrade paths, and a full trial version of Deck 3.5 can be downloaded from its website.