Volume levels my responsibility or my Narrators?

[Scott Francis]

This should be your responsibility, unless the audio he sent you has distortion that was from his end, you should take the lead on this. You can insert a compressor on the track as an effect, to help level out the overall track, as well as reduce the volume with the slider as needed. If you find that certain parts of the narration are too hot or too low you can do one of three things to balance that out:
1) Insert a volume envelope and adjust the volume by inserting points and raising or lowering the bar at the appropriate spots as needed.
2) Split the track at the section that need to be lowered and lower then by grabbing the top of the audio clip and pulling it down (just like you do with opacity levels).
3) Automate the volume levels by turning on automation on the audio track and using the volume slider.

Any of these ways will work, I usually use 1 & 2 the most.

Also, it would be a good idea to do this with any music beds you are using as well…

Hope this helps!

Regards
Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio and Video Studios

gotscottgreen

[Leon Burgher]

Hi Don,
To get to the nub of your problem really depends entirely on two things:
1. How good your audio monitoring is.
2. Do you trust those things attached to your head. No, not Bluetooth,your ears!

As you may know, with digital audio, there is NO such thing as ‘headroom’
in the normal sense. Typically, analogue systems incorporated an ever-increasing
limiter to deal with ‘hot’ audio levels. You’d sacrifice a bit of clarity but still have
something you could use. In digital, once you hit the clipper, that’s it. Distortion and
all kinds of nasties. I don’t know how accurate the audio waveform readers in Vegas are
but you should expand a ‘suspect’ one as much as possible and check for flat spots in
the place you’d expect to see clean peaks (say, on the letters ‘T’ and ‘P’), AND listen VERY
carefully with good headphones or studio monitoring. If it sounds harsh, then you’ve got
a problem.
There may also be an issue with importing the VO talent’s audio files. If he’s supplied them
as Audio CD files, they’ll be 44.1 Khz and peaking around 0dB. They really should be 48 Khz
and peaking around -12 dB. If they’re not, get him to ‘under-record’ the levels a bit. You can
always boost to get more level but can’t extract information that’s not there.
Regards,

OzBurg

[John Rofrano]

I agree with Scott, this is your responsibility. In looking at the visual audio wave in the screen shots they look perfect. the narrator did a great job. I noticed you have the Track volume for the narration set at 0dB. Definitely drop the track volume down to make the voice over fit within the sound bed.

Audio is additive. If you add a second audio track you must lower both tracks. Add a third and lower all three even more. Otherwise you will go into the red as your screen shot shows.

Don’t forget to lower any other audio even more while the narrator is talking. This is know as “ducking” the audio. You use a Volume Envelope to lower the audio on other tracks for the duration of the narration. It should look something like this:

~jr

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

[Kevin Mccarthy]

Guys, this is very simple…bring down the level in your audio track. That’s why they say fix it in the mix. If you are going to use a music background I can almost guarantee you you will have to adjust the VO volume level.

Your professional audio guy probably gave you a good track that is most likely already compressed and normalized. If you compress it again, you MAY lower the level, but you will definately over affect the audio. It will either be like the Sunday, Sunday dragstrip commercials or very muddy with no presence or you will hear every breath he takes..or all of the above.

The less processing you do to a properly recorded VO the better it will sound.

[Don Kimball]

Great suggestion Kevin. First of all hats off to the guys here that pushed and shoved me unwillingly into learning about volume envelopes. New Territory and now I am using them! When I used the volume envelope it appeared to me that the narration audio clip was nice and crisp and the narrator didnt lose any presence. As opposed to when I simply reduced the height of the volume/audio event by making it smaller/shorter myself by hand.

Okay now that I used an envelope to govern the audio levels and keep them out of the red I noticed something. I had unwittingly preset the volume level knob previously to something that was simply comfortable to listen to. If I raise the master volume knob now to full volume… even with the audio envelope in place I go back to levels into the red.

Sorry not as succinct a question as I had envisioned but it boils down to this. Is there a professional benchmark/standard place to keep the master volume level before one even inserts audio envelopes and starts working with that?

Here is another screen shot to show you folks where I normally have the volume level.

Thanks!

Don

http://www.polytelismedia.wordpress.com

[John Rofrano]

You still have your track volumes at 0dB. You need to lower the track volumes. Keep the Master volume at the default and lower the tracks. Always make a rough mix using track volume and then fine-tune with a volume envelope if needed.

~jr

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