matching audio levels across an entire sequence

[Scott Davis]

You can raise or lower all levels at once. I’m not at my system and will have to get back to you on the how. But it sounds like you are saying some clips are different than others. All I know is to change those clips. Painstaking and tedious but; its the only way I know how.

[Maria-luisa Meredith]

Ok, thanks for that reply Scott

[Todd Reid]

There is an audio filter that could do what you want (I’m rendering so I can’t get in to see exactly what its called) but I think its EU Peak Limiter.
Start with these parameters in the 4 boxes 0, .04, 20, 10. Then MOST IMPORTANT take you level down to say -12.
If this doesn’t get what you want, start by changing your levels, before you change parameters.
This is the setting that I use and it works about 90% of our programs.
Sometimes it tries to raise and lower at the same time due to music under or such and it sounds a bit weird, but I think this will get you started.

[Maria-luisa Meredith]

That’s great Todd, I’ll try that now. Thanks so much
Maria

[Andkin]

If your clips are named appropriately you can do a search in the timeline for all the clips from one camera, select “Find All” which will highlight all matching clips and adjust that audio relatively to the other cameras and do it for each camera.
Throwing filters on every clip in a sequence to fix levels is something I would only suggest doing for off-line cuts or something before final delivery. You’ll still have to go through and listen to every clip to make sure the filter isn’t doing anything wacky and you might as well just do that and adjust levels as you go.

[Maria-luisa Meredith]

Thanks, I’ll give that a try too.
Maria

[Maria-luisa Meredith]

Thanks, I’ll give that a try too.
Maria

[Sherwood Ball]

Apple pretty much wants you to export to Soundtrack and do your mixing
there. A pain but better way to go.

If Apple put an aux send and receive on the master fader, then
you could assign a limiter to the whole project playback, which would
also affect the music and efx tracks.

So, ultimately efx send/receive on each audio track would do the trick
of being able to assign AU (audio unit) limiter to just the dialog track,
compression, eq, whatever…..

G5 Dual 2.5 GHz
4G Ram OSX4.6
Sata drives
Final Cut Pro 4.5HD, Logic Audio 7.1
PS CS2, AE CS2

[Ron James]

Maria, I’ve had the pleasure of doing this many times. And it’s NEVER FUN! But, here’s a tip or two that can maybe help make it easier:

Don’t worry about reference level first-off (like -12 or whatever). Concentrate first on getting everything in the same general ballpark, then you can export them if you wish as an aif that you can import again and adjust that file to your reference, just to make it more manageable.

As far as evening out the audio, you’ll find that some clips are really far apart, such as some that are recorded at pro levels and some possible at consumer levels (softer and much louder). For the softer levels, in the old days, I’ve had to stack the audio tracks to increase the level. Apparently, there’s no need to do this now, though. In a thread last week, Thax added this great tip (which I haven’t tried yet, but am going to as soon as I can):

“No need to stack multiple copies of the same track to increase the level.

Add the Audio Filters > Apple > AUPeakLimiter and adjust the “Pre-gain” to any level you want.”

Now, this tip will get you working faster: select all the clips in your timeline that you want to adjust at once. For instance, you’ll find as you go along that you’ll have large chunks that you’ll want to adjust all at once, louder or softer. Select the multiple clips, either by drawing a marquee around them or command-clicking them, etc, and then hit:

Command-Option-L

Then, you can adjust for all the selected clips by entering a + or – value. I’m not at FCP right now, but I’m pretty sure that’s the key combo.

Hope that helps make your life a little easier.

[Keith Koby]

You could also try nesting the sequence and applying the compression filter to the nested stereo pair.