Is It Necessary to Normalize?

[John Rofrano]

[Debbie King] “Yes, when I normalized, the levels that I created where thrown off and the levels were everywhere. I literally would have had to go to each clip and make the adjustments again. “

That’s why Vegas normalize has very limited applicability. I would use it sparingly.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Debbie King]

Thanks John:

Great advice. Will do!

All the best,

Debbie

[Kevin Mccarthy]

Debbie,
I have been doing audio for more than 30 years and some of the information you have gotten is completely backwards to the way
I do things. 1st do your noise reduction. Noise is much easier to remove before you boost the noise floor by compressing and normalizing. If you do those first you will be increasing the noise floor and asking your noise reduction program to do double or triple duty.

One thing to remember is that audio recorded in different locations will have different noise levels, so you should do the noise reduction for each location separately.

At this point I render all audio to a single track and go to my external audio editor to work on it as a single file. John is correct that Vegas does normalization piece by piece and that is definitely not what you want to do. It is way too time consuming.

Then I compress the files. Compression levels the audio by boosting low volumes and knocking down high peaks. This reduces the overall frequency band width so I never compress more than a 5:1 ratio. Anything more than that can make your audio sound muddy.

Higher compression ratios will give a thin voice more “balls” but will squish your audio to a point you won’t like.

Now is the time to adjust various volume levels within the file to your liking. Do this before normalizing..more on that later. Then IF, and ONLY IF, you have severe noise problems you might try another noise reduction on only those areas. This is very seldom needed unless you have a really poor audio recording, ie; on-board camera mic instead of a lav or shotgun mic.

If the noise source is similar to a “hiss” you may be able to correct this with equalization by rolling off the high end frequencies rather than another noise reduction effort.

If you have done a good job adjusting the volume of the different areas and then the overall volume of the track, you may not need to normalize.

Normalization doesn’t make your volume levels go “all over the place” It merely brings all the audio, proportionately, to the max level you set.

If you highest volume in the track is at 75db and your lowest level is at 50db and you then normalize to 90db, the high level will be boosted by 15db to 90db and the lowest level will be boosted by the same 15db to 65db. It bring the total volume to a specific level but it does not change the levels between segments by different amounts.

I then open a new audio track in Vegas and place the single file on it and mute the original, multiple segment, audio track.

Rule of thumb 1. noise reduction 2.compress 3. level your volumes 4. normalize if needed.

Cheers

Kevin

[Debbie King]

Hi Kevin:

Thank you so much for detailing this for me. Yes, I did the noise reductions, then compressed. Now I’m leveling everything. I didn’t normalize, because for some reason there seem to have still been noise on the clip that I don’t see on the graph in my noise reduction software nor hear with compression.

It’s refreshing to know that I am moving in the right direction.

Again thanks Kevin and everybody for guiding me on this very complicated process. It took me a while to grasp it.

All the best,

Debbie