Nick uses the Digi 001 with ProTools, which is good and it supports VST plugins, in fact Waves now do the plugins for ProTools, and I was saying he ought to go out and get them because I use 'waves native power pack', excellent for post-production work. http://www.waves.com

Trueverb - Room Simulator

I first encountered it as a demo on one of the versions of cakewalk, it has compressors, the L1 limiter that is used on the Madonna albums to make it louder without clipping on the CD's, more EQ than you can shake a stick at, and Trueverb which is basically a room simulator.

Trueverb isn't very intuitive it has a sort of graph which indicates the frequencies that are being rolled off, or accentuated.  When I first got it, I wasn't able to run stuff in real-time, I had to do everything offline, which took ages of trial and error, mostly error, whereas now I can run everything in real-time, with several reverbs, several compressors, several EQs without everything grinding to a halt.

So I use that on all the Doctor Who's, throughout the entire process. 

I have it as a plugin in cakewalk as inserts, or auxiliary sends or on the master output etc. Now it's available for the Mac I want to recommend to Nick that he gets it, because it's massively useful.

When I'm editing normally I put a standard compression on voice, but with certain environments I have an exterior compression set-up which is slightly harder and a standard exterior EQ set-up, to make the voices sound like they're outside, or even sometimes in a large room.  The further you get away from a microphone, the less bassey you sound, and so I fake that with EQ. 

I even have a standard TARDIS reverb, my little joke I make it sound like the BBC studio acoustic, obviously the McGann TARDIS is different, it's more like a big library.

I now have 750MHz P3 with a 40Gb hard drive, as well as my 10Gb drive, as I knew this year I'd be needing it, I've still got Summoning of the Scourge on there as I haven't had time to archive the sound effects from it.

At the end of a play if I've generated new sound effects or whatever, I'll archive them complete, and then break them down into several little components, so that if I'm in a rush and I need a sound I can get it off CD rather than recreate it. 

I keep my own index of CDs in a word document, so I can just search by name of sound for the correct archive CD and track.