• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Audio – Keeping Levels Consistent Within And Between Sequences

  Posted by Steve Crow on April 20, 2009 at 2:27 pm

  This one comes up for me quite often. Here are the two situations I have trouble with:

  1) within a sequence, keeping each of the clips at the same audio level (clip to clip consistency)

  2) between sequences, keeping the overall audio level consistent (sequence to sequence consistency)

  So far I have been relying on my ears which must not be too good because I do get comments back that audio levels are inconsistent.

  I had thought the Normalization audio filter was the key but I just did an experiment and it confirmed my experiences that the solution is something else. If I have two audio clips next to each other in a sequence and one was recorded louder than the other, applying the Normalization filter to each of the two clips does nothing to make the audio levels between the two clips to be more consistent. All it seems to do is to make each clip independently either louder or softer but the one that was louder to begin with will still be.

  What’s the solution? I guess what I want to be able to do is to say “I want all the selected audio in this sequence to maintain a consistent -8db level” so that no matter which of the selected clips I listen to they all sound equally loud. In other words it would bring softer parts up to -8db and audio that is louder than -8db down to that level so that everything remains even. Is that possible?

  I have found the free program called “Levelator” that attempts to do this but is there a better way inside Final Cut Pro perhaps?

  Steve Crow replied 17 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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