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Audio setting
Hi this is my first post. I have been using Sony Vegas 11hd just for audio purposes and I was wondering if anyone can give me some advice with settings. I have recorded 3 CDs of music of myself playing classical guitar at at home using a rhode nt45 mic and a Tascam digital recorder and the result here is excellent. I upload the raw files to Sony Vegas and usually add a little reverb and render it at cd quality. My difficulty is that I simply don’t know enough about such things as compression etc. and usually leave all these settings unticked. So does anyone have any tips as to what settings I should use to help make it as close to a recording studio output I can get as I just can’t afford to have this mastered professionally. I appreciate that this question is loaded with a lot of thins that are dependent on the recording itself but if there are some standard settings I can safely use I’d appreciate knowing these.
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3 Replies
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[Brian Farrell] “My difficulty is that I simply don’t know enough about such things as compression etc. and usually leave all these settings unticked. So does anyone have any tips as to what settings I should use to help make it as close to a recording studio output I can get as I just can’t afford to have this mastered professionally.”
I know you realize that it would be impossible to teach you how to master audio in a forum post. I recommend that you do a bit of Googleing and reading on “audio mastering“.
Vegas Pro doesn’t have any quick fixes. You really need to know what you’re doing to apply the right amount of EQ and compression. A basic starting point in Vegas Pro is to place Wave Hammer Surround with the “[Sys] Master for 16-bit” preset on the Master Audio Bus. You can then adjust the Threshold and Output Level on the Volume Maximizer tab to add some compression and limit the overall volume. But that’s not mastering which includes EQing to smooth things out or make things bite depending on the sound you are looking for.
You should look into buying a mastering plug-in like iZotope Ozone 5 that will give you a lot of presets that can be used to enhance the sound. I really like the “4-Band Master – Excitation and Widening” preset in Ozone 5 as a starting point. Obviously there is no plug-in that can take the place of learning how to master but an All-In-One plug-in like Ozone 5 will get you a lot closer than the do-it-all-yourself approach of Vegas’ plug-ins.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
As a follow-up to John’s suggestion, here’s a link to two excellent books on the subject of audio for video.
https://www.dplay.com/book/ -
Thanks very much for the replies and I appreciate all the tips very much. I think I’m getting there but it’s a steep curve!
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