Master bus : level to aim for…

[Mike Kujbida]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Beautiful!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge Mike.
I’ll definitely follow this recipe. I love recipes!”

Always glad to help Gilles 🙂

There’s a slim chance that I’ll be up your way sometime after Christmas but nothing has been firmed up yet. I will definitely let you and Tom know if I do plan a trip.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Sounds good Mike.

Gilles

[Stephen Mann]

Here’s a new tool I am trying out. It’s a screen capture program that’s absurdly cheap, but works fine for demo videos. The audio is crappy because I used the mic in my PC. No, it’s really crappy because it’s my voice….
It’s called a hard limiter because of the fast attack time, but some fast loud sounds can still get by.
Anyway, this is how I add the -6dB hard limiter.

Vegas Hard Limiter

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Well done Stephen! It doesn’t sound bad at all 🙂

Just tried it on the master track as you mentioned. I love this compressor with the -.6 db limiter!

Is it simply a limiter or does it actually boost low volume audio as well?
and… how does it differ from Wave Hammer?
G

Gilles

[Stephen Mann]

Strictly a limiter. I’ve never used Wave Hammer something to learn.

There is a free program called “Levelator” that works miracles on leveling the whole track. I use it often.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Haynie]

[Stephen Mann] “Normalize tries to increase the volume of quiet audio and decrease the volume of loud parts. It’s imperfect but it works best in dialogue, worst in music.”

That one is incorrect. Normalization is applying a linear gain to get your audio to some specific reference. A normalization function will scan some unit of audio (a clip, the selected region, your whole file) and make a gain adjustment based on that. The Normalize check-mark in Vegas just sets your peaks to just below 0dBFS (the actual peaking level is a setting the options menu). More meaningful to how you hear sound is RMS normalization, which puts the average energy of your sound at a specific dB level… for example, music is typically normalized to around -16dBFS (real music, not the hypercompressed garbage sound made for pop radio). RMS normalization usually works together with a limiter to bring down peaks that would otherwise clip, and it had to be used with care across very dynamic music or speech.

What you’re describing there is compressor-expander combination. A compressor sets a threshold… anything below that threshold is given unit gain, anything above that threshold is adjusted by a gain ratio relative to its volume (eg, one dB increase in output for every 2dB increase in input). A limiter is the device/plug-in which actually prevents a signal from exceeding 0dBFS. It’s really just a special case of a compressor, with an infinite or near so compression curve. If the compressor is described as “soft knee”, then there’s a gradual transition from the linear range to the compressed range.

An expander does kind of the opposite … it applies a gain ratio to the audio below a certain specified threshold. One classic use of a compressor/expander has been in noise control: you shrink the dynamic range of a signal by compression, transmit it, then expand it back to the original when received. Every modern LP record uses frequency-based compression and expansion (companding) together… to drastically cut the low frequencies (so LPs can hold 22 minutes and needles don’t go skating off the disc) and drastically boost the high frequencies (which can noisy and lossy on a the disc) before being recorded to vinyl. The reverse transform (called the RIAA curve) is applied when playing an LP back. But I digress.

A noise gate is another dynamics processor… it’s basically a volume-driven switch. Below a certain input level, the switch is off, above that level, it’s on. A little bit like the opposite of a limiter.

[Stephen Mann] “Dialog Normalization (I.E. Dialnorm) is a different bird altogether. Many people, including me, don’t completely understand it. But I try. “

I have been working in audio since I was a teenager. I’ve taken college courses in audio production, and I’m an EE on top of all that. And even I’ve been confused by the particulars of “dialnorm”, aka, “dialog normalization”. This is very much a setting for Dolby AC-3 only, not found anywhere else in this form anyway. And there’s even a Wikipedia entry on this, but it’s not all that satisfying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialnorm.

-Dave