I shoot multicamera panel discussions that are recorded ISO and edited later in Premiere, with the audio handed off to Audition for finishing. There can be anywhere from two to seven participants in a panel, each recorded on an individual lavaliere microphone and resulting audio track. Exchanges can be rollicking from time to time - one person can talk or EVERYONE might, for a moment or two, be talking.
In the audio hardware environment there is a device called an "automixer." You plug your lavs into this device and it automatically and seamlessly switches on the mic being used by someone talking, switches off the mics by those who are not, and reduces overall gain when several people are speaking at once so you don't overload the output. An automixer is a lot more than a noise gate. It has the built-in intelligence to determine that although it is hearing the same voice through three or more mics, one of them clearly has the higher-quality signal and therefore it and it alone is the one being worn by the person speaking, so it switches to that mic and leaves the others off. Likewise if three people are speaking at once it will bring up all three mics, but only to a level that does not overload when you add the three together. There's a LOT of intelligence built into a good automixer.
Because of the way we work I'm looking for a software equivalent - a plugin that can be used in a multitrack session, where you can route two or more tracks to the plugin, it will execute an automixer function, and send you an output that can be routed to the output or to a submix.
I've seen only one such item so far - Waves makes a Dugan Automixer plugin that works within their Multirack environment. Multirack and the Automixer plugin are $500 each, and are intended for live applications. Although compatible with VST I'm not sure if they would work in Audition, and even if they would, $1,000 is a lot of money.
At the moment I'm hand-editing the audio. I can't use noise gates because they're not smart enough. I can produce great sounding mixes, but I'm looking for greater efficiency - so a reasonably priced automixer would be wonderful if it exists (or if there are tools integral to Audition that I haven't thought of).
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Regards,
Pete