Audio too low after export

[Mike Smith]

Quicktime player issue? Have you opened in PPro and checked the actual levels in the file that way? Or open in Audition, which will let you see what the audio level is in your file.

[Ahmed Sulaiman]

Yes I did. When I opened the exported project in Premiere Pro and Audition and checked the audio levels they were too low compared to the original file. The audio levels in my original project ranged between -20dB and -6dB, but after exporting the project and importing it in Premiere Pro and Audition, the audio levels are now ranging between -50dB and -30dB. Also When I play other videos in VLC & Quicktime player I can’t hear any difference in audio levels. It’s just my file that’s playing too low in Quicktime player but perfect in VLC.

[Ahmed Sulaiman]

Update: I exported my project choosing AAC as my Audio Format and it turned out perfect in both Quicktime player and VLC. Audio levels are the same as my original file.

The problem only seems to happen when I choose Dolby Digital as the Audio Format. I still don’t know what’s causing audio levels to drop after export. It must be something in the Dolby Digital settings but I can’t figure it out yet. 🙁

[Ahmed Sulaiman]

Ok guys I managed to fix the problem by turning off “90º Phase Shift” option under the Pre-Processing tab when I chose Dolby Digital format. It was turned on by default. To be honest I don’t know exactly how this option was affecting my audio tracks when it was turned on, but turning it off brought the audio levels back to normal. I hope this helps someone in the future. 🙂

[Chris Borjis]

one other thing that can make dolby audio quiet is if dialogue normalization
is not set for -31

apple compressor was notorious for this in it’s default configuration.
(it would lower audio substantially)

[Trig Simon]

I thought that was what Ahmed did:

“So I created another sequence in Premiere and I imported the exported video to the new
sequence to check the audio meters and compare them with the original project, and I
discovered that the volume of the exported video was in fact much lower than the original project.”

I found the same problem in exporting to DVD.

Trig

Trig Simon
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[Ayan Banerjee]

This happened to me once. I was exporting uncompressed wav of a single track (I muted all the other tracks) , and the volume was very low when I put that exported audio clip back into the original track. But this did not happen when I exported all the tracks together as a single track and put it back on a single track in premiere. I have seen people posting this problem on the net. I figured out the problem so I would just explain it here.

It was not a problem of premiere, but just my ow mistake. The single track I was exporting had an audio level set to (-10 db) in the audio mixer. Now I was expecting the exported clip to play at the same volume when I put it beside the original clip in the same track. But that should not be the case, since the original track is already lowered by -10db, it would additionally lower the volume of the new clip by 10 db again. So the exported clip will only sound the same as the original clip, only if we put the exported one, in a track with volume at 0db. (This is why the problem was not there when I exported all tracks together and put it in a new track with track volume 0db).

So my suggestion is, if this happens to you, just check if the volume of the track you are exporting, is set at a lower decibel.