Best known for her work in gaming, streaming and TV/film, recording, editing, mixing and mastering engineer Ayako Yamauchi counts Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, God of War and Sekiro: The Shadow Dies Twice among her many credits. As a freelance engineer she works in a variety of studios, using Nugen Audio’s Post bundle for sound effects editing.

‘In my experience, Nugen provides the very best and most reliable plug-ins,’ she says. ‘I have mastered more than 10,000 dialogues for video game projects, and Nugen plug-ins have been the most consistent solution for me while using Mac OS and Avid Pro Tools. This kind of job needs precise accuracy and I am happy with the results I get using Nugen.’

Yamauchi has been using Nugen’s AMB and LM-Correct software since 2016, and now also incorporates the ISL True Peak limiter for dialogue editing in video games, streaming services, broadcast projects and mixing. She regards turnaround time as crucial to many of her film and television projects.

‘Nugen has consistently provided stellar processing speeds, along with the presets necessary to meet the ever-changing audio specs for streaming services,’ she explains. ‘After Netflix changed its standards in 2018, many streaming services followed suit – opting to no longer use the simple broadcasting specs, and instead adopting new standards. This left audio post editors needing to work with new LKFS/LUFS, dBTP and LRA standards. AMB and LM-Correct make this easy for us and saves a lot of time.’

In addition, Yamauchi says that studios have been undertaking frequent upmix tasks: ‘Broadcasters and streaming services, alike, require 5.1 audio or above,’ she says. ‘Old movies and TV shows are being added to streaming platforms, but these were originally completed as mono stereo mixes, so they need to be converted to 5.1 or higher. Nugen’s Halo Upmix does a great job for this process; the presets work very well, and it is very easy to use. I don’t know any other plug-ins that can do it easily without coding or artifacts.’

Gaming projects present a unique set of processes: ‘When mastering dialogue in video games, we need to process the loudness by the type of dialogue,’ she continues. ‘This includes normal conversation, yelling and even breathing, among other things. You want to make sure there’s a consistency between the loud and quiet parts, and loudness is often specified by the sound supervisor.

‘I really love that I never run into technical errors with Nugen,’ she adds. ‘I have run into bugs with other solutions that cause a lot of headaches because I have to do a lot more processing. That’s never the case with Nugen.’

Originally hailing from Fukuoka, Japan, Yamauchi earned seven awards and 13 nominations for the music video Eternally. For this project, Yamauchi served as recording engineer, composer, sound effects editor, mixing engineer and producer.

More: www.nugenaudio.com