Audio levels within FCP

[Chris Borjis]

well one quick solution, if you own a betacam sp deck.

use those meters.

[Mark Clem]

The setup is pretty complex… it is within an analog production suite that is interfacing with an all-digital Master Control facility (SDI with embedded AES audio). I know it is good going into the digital realm. But what I want to know is–after FCP editing, do the levels match other assets from other sources? I want the editors to have the necessary tools to make this judgment from within FCP if possible, and what I have been told is that we need to look at both the VU and the peak levels.

Thanks.

[Michael Gissing]

I am not sure why it is necessary to have VU meters. They were designed to measure analog tape saturation and although many people use them to get an idea of loudness, there are better ways to meter that.

I run sound post production as well as onlining with FCP and I haven’t used VU meters for over 20 years. Broadcast legal can only be judged on a peak meter. I would recommend an external meter that gives you the ability to view a variety of metering options including phase, phons, peak and average. This should connect to the AES outputs of your I/O card. I would also recommend an external peak limiter if you are feeding straight into master control.

A plugin is not useful as plugins are clip based in FCP. You do no have the ability to drop on onto a track or master output. Also those sort of plugins have display latency which is useless in critical metering.

These brands are well recognised. Expensive, but accurate & reliable like any good quality external. They also have specific loudness metering options.
https://www.rtw.de/english/produkte/stereosichtgeraete.html
https://www.dk-technologies.com/products/selchart.php?prodgroup=msd

[Chris Borjis]

I find it quite useful to monitor the VU levels with my beta deck and the peak
leavels with another deck.

I don’t do this everytime, but I do find it useful from time to time.

You can tell on a VU just how “hot” the audio is. it might be too hot
if your really up there and looking at a peak meter won’t show you that.

my 002 cents.

[Michael Gissing]

Like I said, some people are used to seeing VU and making judgments about loudness, but it is not an accurate way to do that.

I have mixed over 800 docos without a VU meter and I can judge loudness using a peak meter that also lets me view phons which is an accurate measure of apparent loudness.

I also demonstrated years ago to a broadcaster QC department how I could make signal levels that were illegal appear legal on a VU and also legal levels that pinned the VU to red. After that they agreed to never tech reject a program based on VU metering and they changed their QC setup to use proper peak & phons metering.

[Simon Pegg]

Actually the meters in Final Cut are not even true peak meters, they are only peak sample meters and this can result in them under-reading by several dB in certain circumstances. We have a new audio plug-in for final cut called KARMAudioAU (https://www.eyeheight.com/KARMAudio.asp) which provides automatic ITU-R BS.1770 loudness levelling as per ATSC A/85 and performs 8x oversampling true-peak limiting so you can guarantee to meet all your audio requirements just by applying the filter and it’s quick too. It can correct a 30 second spot in about 3 seconds.
There will be a free trial download available in the next few days.

Simon Pegg
Eyeheight Ltd.