using audio gain “normalize” in PPro 1.5

[Tom Scoville]

When you Normalize an audio clip, You are just adjusting the overall level of that clip so that the largest peak hits right at zero, or 100% modulation. If all your talking head clips are on the same track, you can normalize them all and then make the gross adjustment for that track relative to music or sound effects with the mixer. Normalize is not a compressor so it shouldn’t cause any pumping of background noises. If you have a word that someone hit hard for emphasis that is pulling the level of the whole clip down too far, you can try cutting the clip into sections around that word and adjusting the levels of the sections of that clip. Hope that makes sense…Listen carefully for any snaps or pops on the leading edge of the razor cuts though. I have had to use very quick audio dissolves to solve that problem in the past.

Good luck,

Tom S

[Ruby Gold]

Thanks for your explanation of normalizing. I’m wondering then, why normalizing some of the quiet clips makes them too loud–if the peak is put right at 0, it should sound appropriately loud not too loud, right?

Also when you say I can normalize all the clips on the track–is there a way to do that other than right-clicking on each individual clip and hitting normalize? I still have to individually adjust these ones anyway thoug, because, as I said, just normalizing them makes some of them too loud.

And–is there no danger of a “blown-out” sound to the voices with all this gain on them when played over loudspeakers if they sound okay in the editing environment? Call me paranoid… Thanks again-
Ruby

[Steve D]

[Ruby Gold] “if the peak is put right at 0, it should sound appropriately loud not too loud, right?”

Normalizing will put the loudest peak at 0vu and proportionately raise the rest of the levels.

[Ruby Gold] “I’m wondering then, why normalizing some of the quiet clips makes them too loud–if the peak is put right at 0”

This will happen if you are normalizing the quite clip individually, because it is adjusting it’s overall level to the loudest peak of that clip, NOT the loudest peak of the overall soundtrack. You can normalize the whole audio clip as a last step, and this would keep the dynamic range in tact, or normalize seperate clips individually, and adjust their levels as a last step.

[Ruby Gold] “And–is there no danger of a “blown-out” sound to the voices with all this gain”

No,If everything is normalized at the same time, everything will keep it’s original dynamic range. Yes, if the music is normalized, and the vox tracks are not. I hope I’m understanding your question, and not just adding more confusion..

I use Adobe Auditon for this, and it works well, you can group normalize, and remove the noise very easily.

Steve D

[Ruby Gold]

Thanks Steve. Is there a way to normalize all the voice clips as a group in PPro 1.5 (since that’s what I’m working in)? Also, if clips are normalized as a group–does the normalization account for the variance in the loudness/quietness, different pitches, etc of the individual voices?

Also–on the last question–I’m not normalizing the music–it doesn’t need it, but I am normalizing all the voice clips. Problem?

thanks again-
Ruby

[Steve D]

[Ruby Gold] “Thanks Steve. Is there a way to normalize all the voice clips as a group in PPro 1.5 (since that’s what I’m working in)?”

No..not that I know of..

[Ruby Gold] “Also, if clips are normalized as a group–does the normalization account for the variance in the loudness/quietness, different pitches, etc of the individual voices?”

Normalizing only deals with amplitude (volume)it has nothing to do with pitch or anything like that. A good example of group normalizing: Last week I had to normalize (among other things) 66 seperate clips that were produced for a PC tutorial for DVD. Instead of normalizing each clip seperately,which would have only made them all louder but still have the same volume variances, I chose to group normalize. When you group normalizing, you literally load all of the clips into a window then have the program analyze all of the clips to find the loudest peak, then average all of the clips to be the same percieved volume. The average high peak may come out to be -7db or something like that instead of 0db.

It’s all a lot easier than it sounds. Even though PPro has some nice audio features, you should really invest in a seperate audio editor..(Pro Tools,Adobe Audition, Nuendo etc.)You will eventually need to time stretch something or de-noise or what ever.

Digidesign has a free version of Pro Tools that you can download from their web site (8 tracks). I’m not sure of the URL.

Steve D

[Tom Scoville]

I would agree with Steve that if you have lots of individual clips to process, Audition (or something similar) may be a worthwhile investment. There are some free tutorials to help ease the learning curve too. For now, you may have a tedious task in front of you and I hope you don’t 66 clips to process!

I didn’t know about the free version of Pro Tools and looked it up on their site. It won’t run on XP but I do have an old Win 98 box laying around somewhere. I’ll bet there is another free or shareware program out there that would let you batch normalize in a fashion similar to Audition and will run on XP. The trick is finding it out on the web.

Good luck,

Tom S

[Ruby Gold]

Thanks Steve and Tom! My main concern, really, was any kind of “blown out” sound or bad artifacts from using audio gain/normalize showing up on these voice clips once they were played over a loud speaker at this premiere. It sounds from what you say that I don’t have to worry about that.

I have no moolah right now to invest, but also sounds like I should get something like Audition when I do. Since I have Win XP, it seems the best choice–do you guys feel that that’s a good audio editor (relative to what else is out there for the PC platform)?
thanks-
Ruby

[Steve D]

[Ruby Gold] “do you guys feel that that’s a good audio editor (relative to what else is out there for the PC platform)?”

It’s one of the best out there, it’s used widely in Radio, Forensics, and a lot of recording studios. It used to be Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro. Adobe bought them out a couple of years ago. Audition was tweaked to work especially with PPro, and AE.

Steve D