Creating long reverbs which replicate the acoustics of large spaces such as halls and churches is quite easy to do these days. We’re spoilt for choice for reverb plug-ins which are able to create pretty believable sounding reverberation for these bigger rooms and locations. What’s much more tricky, however, is reverb for smaller rooms.
Acoustics is a complex subject to say the least, and authentically re-creating a space with a plug-in is no mean feat. However, in audio post, it’s common to have to do this. ADR and foley are perhaps the most obvious examples of recordings which regularly need to be placed into an acoustic setting which accurately matches the space depicted on screen.
When it comes to realistic sounding room reverb, LiquidSonics Cinematic Rooms is by far my favourite choice. For film work, where the goal is often to create something which sounds as ‘real world’ as possible, Cinematic Rooms does a great job at creating superb reverbs for everyday spaces.
If you think about some of the factors that govern the acoustics of a space, we have room size, the absorption coefficient of materials and furnishings within the room, how smooth or irregular the surfaces are and the general layout and geometry of the room. Having at least some knowledge of each of these, along with the effect it has on how reflections and reverberation in the room actually sound is of great benefit when working with reverb plug-ins.
Cinematic Rooms provides a wide variety of controls for dialling in and tweaking a reverb which is exactly right for the space you’re trying to represent. It’s definitely a plug-in which is worth spending some time familiarising yourself with if you want to fully understand all of the great features it includes.
There are times, however, when you just want to get started quickly. Fortunately, Cinematic Rooms includes a good variety of presets which cover a range of rooms of various sizes. In the Post category, presets are included within three subcategories, Mediums Rooms, Next Room and Small Rooms. These are extremely useful for film and TV work and they really help both ADR and foley to sit correctly within a mix, sounding as though they belong in that acoustic setting.
When I want to get to a great sounding reverb for a small to medium space as quickly as possible, I start with the presets within one of these categories. Quite often, the preset itself is well suited to my requirement with no tweaking and I just control the amount of it with the send control on the track feeding the reverb. If some adjustment is required though, I’ll usually start by changing the reverb time, followed by the pre-delay. Pre-delay is an important control because it sets the amount of time which elapses between the start of the sound itself and the onset of the first reflections. As you might expect, smaller rooms will have a shorter pre-delay time due to the short distance between surfaces. Roughly speaking, sound travels at speed of about 1125 feet per second at standard temperature and pressure, so to approximate the time it might take for a sound to travel to a surface and back again, take the total distance travelled (in feet) and multiply it by 1.125 to get the pre-delay time in milliseconds. Let’s say that a sound happens 5 feet from the nearest wall and then gets reflected back. That’s 10 feet travelled in total so a pre-delay of 11 milliseconds will be about right.
Although smaller spaces typically have shorter reverb times than larger ones, more reflective surfaces will increase the reverb time. You’ll notice this when decorating a room. Once you’ve taken all of the furniture out, it’s much more reverberant due to the removal of the absorbent soft furnishings. So, pre-delay has to be considered alongside reverb time. I find that adjusting just these two settings after recalling a small or medium room preset in Cinematic Rooms is usually enough to get to the result I want. My next port of call would be the high frequency roll off settings. Cinematic Rooms provides these in both the reflections and reverberation sections. Rooms with more soft furnishings typically have less reflected high frequencies than rooms with hard, smooth surfaces.
Take a look at the video below to hear some of the presets for small and medium rooms in Cinematic Rooms.
Summary
LiquidSonics Cinematic Rooms is one of the best sounding room simulation plug-ins available. For small to medium spaces it’s unmatched in my opinion. I’d recommend trying it for yourself and comparing it to your other reverb plug-ins. I often struggle to achieve authentic sounding reverbs for small spaces with other reverbs as I find that the results tend to stray away from realism and sometimes have a strange, artificial sound to them.
By using the presets in Cinematic Rooms and making adjustments to reverb time, pre-delay and sometimes high frequency roll-off, superb results can be achieved for smaller rooms. In audio post-production this makes the job of placing foley and ADR into the scenes a lot easier, saving time and allowing the process to be more efficient.