Scott Kramer Turns to NUGEN Audio to Bridge Creativity an...

Sound Director and Audio Product Manager Scott Kramer has built a career around shaping stories through audio, guiding projects across film, television and streaming. From his early years as a re-recording mixer in Southern California to his tenure as a sound director at Netflix, Kramer has held a front-row seat to the evolving role of technology in post-production. Today, he continues to bridge the worlds of creative sound design and technical innovation, relying on NUGEN Audio's trusted suite of tools to support his work.

I spent 15 years in Southern California working as a re-recording mixer for feature films and television, and then eight years as a sound director at Netflix, says Kramer. I've always enjoyed being deeply involved in projects where I can have a real impact on the sound. Now, in my role as both a sound director and product manager, I get to combine that hands-on creative work with bringing new ideas to the market and inspiring others in the process.

Kramer's relationship with NUGEN Audio began nearly a decade ago, when the company emerged as the industry standard in loudness measurement and conformance. Dolby had provided the original industry standard loudness meter, but when they moved out of that space, NUGEN stepped in, he recalls. About a decade ago, they became the de facto standard, and I quickly came to trust them. The rigor the NUGEN team puts into its products is unmatched, and I rely on NUGEN for the best technical audio performance.

Among the many NUGEN plug-ins Kramer uses, several stand out in his daily workflow. A pivotal introduction came while working alongside CEO of IMN Creative, Mark Binder, on the Netflix film Extraction. Binder introduced him to NUGEN's Monofilter plug-in, which Kramer describes as the simplest plug-in in the world, that no one else came up with. All it does is take the low frequencies below a certain threshold and sum them, making them dual mono. When you run the plug-in on a stereo mix, it makes the low end absolutely huge because it doesn't cancel out at all. Monofilter is elegant in its simplicity, and that's what I love about NUGEN; they create tools that are trustworthy, effective and fundamentally smart.

In addition to Monofilter, Kramer relies heavily on NUGEN's ISL True Peak Limiter and the VisLM Loudness Meter. ISL and VisLM are daily tools for me and always have been; I use them both on all my deliverables, he says. As a sound director at Netflix, I used VisLM on a weekly basis to check nearly every film or series that came through. It was my go-to for ensuring conformance to the Netflix spec.

Kramer adds that one of his most meaningful contributions to the industry has been his collaboration with NUGEN on DialogCheck, a pioneering tool designed to help mixers ensure speech intelligibility. At Netflix, we had the idea to bring together Fraunhofer IDMT in Germany and NUGEN Audio in England, and we kind of played matchmaker, he explains. We wanted to combine Fraunhofer IDMT's incredible research with NUGEN's product development, and it worked. DialogCheck is an industry first.

Kramer highlights the real-world challenges the plug-in addresses: Mixers are constantly threading the needle between creative goals in a dubbing theater where louder always sounds better, and the reality of how content plays back in the home. DialogCheck provides an objective nudge to help mixers strike that balance. It even gives them something concrete to point to when discussing mix choices with showrunners or directors.

Importantly, Kramer stresses that the tool is designed for mixers, not for quality control. Distributors would not use DialogCheck to set specs, but they can encourage their team to use it to evaluate the audio. It's for mixers by mixers: a helpful, supportive tool to make the job easier and ultimately improve the experience for audiences at home.

Looking across his years of collaboration with NUGEN Audio, Kramer says what stands out most is the company's design philosophy. The trustworthiness, the rigor and the elegant simplicity of the tools is what makes NUGEN unique, he reflects. They don't try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they give us plug-ins that are intuitive, reliable and fundamentally sound.

For Kramer, that combination has been essential to supporting both his creative work and his broader mission to improve the way audiences experience stories. At the end of the day, distributors, mixers and creatives all want the same thing a mix that works for people at home so they can truly enjoy the story, he says. NUGEN's tools help us get there.

LINK:	https://kitplus.com/news/scott-kramer-turns-to-nugen-audio-to-bridge-c...
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