DialNorm and audio levels

[Tyler Smith]

does anybody have an idea of how I can achieve a -24dBFS in adobe premiere? I have a music video to dump to beta tomorrow and aint sure how to do it.

[Ann Clark]

Hey Ty, and the rest of the group,

So, over a year later the CALM Act stuff is still a mystery. I have workarounds to attain a complaint signal, but there just isn’t an easy plug-in or low-budget meter that does the trick. It’s all hand work and guess work.

We had a production recently (30-sec spot) that went to the dub house in good shape, then to the network — which made a point of rejecting the ad for “low volume.” They wouldn’t tell me what they meant (how low?), but they made quite a stink about it before telling me they raised it a little bit and went ahead with airing it. Indeed, broadcasters have mostly abdicated responsibility to output a good signal.

Long and short – got the tape back and the dub house reported that the dub itself was just recorded a little bit low, not wildly low, just a bit.

Since our productions are often budget priced TV spots, we won’t be buying any $4,000 sound equipment any time soon (we’re not an audio post house, either). Going to an audio post house would actually be great, except that it would be an expensive thing to do, and unappreciated by our tight-budget customers. We’re hoping for some simpler, cheaper solutions that can be added to the current workflow without a lot of hoops.

Anything new out there? 🙂

MacPro 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 14GB memory – OSX10.6.8 FCP7

[Ty Ford]

Hello Ann,

How about something like this?

https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/68/loudnesschange

Regards,

Ty

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
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[Ann Clark]

Ty,

An interesting find. Downloaded the demo version.

The Loudness Change test drive…

This could be a good tool for finding peaks and overall level problems. It does what it says it will.

What the tool does quite well is point out a potential problem, and you can do the math in your head to reset the level for the flagged item, since LKFS measures in decibels.

I may go ahead and buy the real thing, but I do have a few reasons to hesitate:

* It’s set up for the European standard, so you have to manually type in US info. (I sent them the US broadcast standards that I’d received from a national network – maybe they’ll create a new US template)
* The screens and reports are a bit clumsy, as they’re designed by a non-English person and with European designations for all the things it measures.
* It requires a WAV file as input, an extra round-trip for us.
* There’s a technical translation that must happen between the many new flavors of information that make up the CALM Act standard and what systems like FCP tell you about your levels.

I’ve been tweaking the audio within FCP and other software such as Soundtrack Pro and ye olde Soundbooth. All of these systems have no clue as to LKFS. So I’ve followed the rule of keeping the peaks below -6dB on the FCP Audio meter, and keeping the lows around -12dB, and the overall levels pretty even throughout. Aside from the tape dub problem, I’ve been doing okay with this method.

Loudness Change provides data, but it’s up to the editor to interpret, make corrections, re-test, etc.

What I’d really like (and which will never happen) is a CALM filter within FCP (or another Mac friendly NLE) that’s as simple as Final Cut’s Broadcast filter for luma/chroma level corrections. Drop it in, render, done.

BUT – I’ll see what I can do using Loudness Change – might be the only game in town!

– Ann

MacPro 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 14GB memory – OSX10.6.8 FCP7

[Bouke Vahl]

For the records / future reference.
(I’m the developer of Loudness Change, and i already have off-list contact with Ann, but it might be good for the others to keep up with developments)

Indeed it’s set up for the EU, since i’m from there and did not have any US specs. Thanks to Ann i do have them now, so i’ll build in a template.

But, even with a template, there is no guarantee YOUR broadcaster has the same specs (oh, the joy of a standard…)
So, it still is the end users responisbility to see if the settings are right. (Not that hard though.)
And, the settings will remain the next time you start up the application, so you only have to do this once.
I’ll build in an option to save the settings you like under a custom name, if you have different broadcasters to deliver to.

For the English/American, quilty as charged. (I’m not a native speaker…)

For a plugin for FCP, / wave roundtrip, it ain’t going to change. Few reasons:
FCP 7 is dying. New NLE’s are on their way.
Even if i got that covered, there is a shift to MXF for delivery.
For most NLE’s that means track one goes to track one, not to left / right.
So with lots of channels (as we all have), it won’t work anyway.
You need a mixdown to put under your final video, then export.

It’s not that many roundtrips. As the manual (well, that’s mostly on the site now, still have to work on the manual) states, if you make a decent mix and let this thing render out a new file, it should be up to specs in one or two tries max.
(if not, i would love to see some examples!)

Bouke

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pros