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where should I set my audio levels to?
Using Studio6.
I have a short 10 min video with music, pictures and folks talking. The talking registers at between 27-18 on the master volume control, the music between 15-9 (with the chorus at about a steady 6), noticably louder than the talking.
How much louder should the music be than the talking, or should it be louder at all? Any general rules of thumb? I don’t want to annoy folks who watch this (from too loud of music once the talking stops) and I don’t want to have to adjust the volume of the TV during playback.
Thanks,
Rodney
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6 Replies
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You are correct that you want everything to be consistent. You can either lower the music or raise the dialog but you don’t want there to be too much of a volume jump. One thing that might help is to add the Track Compressor to the dialog to smooth it out a little. Start with 2:1 compression and increase it to 3:1 or even 4:1 to get less of a variance in levels. Then raise the whole thing to match the music. If you are doing this for broadcast, you want the overall loudness to be around -24db. If it’s just for home use, I would keep it around -12dB (which is about where your music is now).
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Reference your comment “you want the overall loudness to be around -24db”. Is -24db where the volumn peaks or is this more of an average?
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[Larry Cole] “Is -24db where the volumn peaks or is this more of an average?”
It’s the average. So it may be peaking higher but overall you want the average to be -24dB usually +/- 2dB.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
is there any good way in Vegas to accurately calculate the average or is it pretty much guesstimating?
Also, when moving audio over to DVD Architect, do the sound levels move any?
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[Larry Cole] “is there any good way in Vegas to accurately calculate the average or is it pretty much guesstimating?”
No, Vegas doesn’t have any way to measure this and No you should not guess. You’ll need to purchase a meter that can display average loudness. I use IK Multimedia T-RackS 3 Metering. It has a “Perceived Loudness” meter that gives you the average loudness.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.comhttp://www.vasst.com
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Oops, I forgot to answer your second question:
[Larry Cole] “Also, when moving audio over to DVD Architect, do the sound levels move any?”
Yea, they will be lowered. If you want to avoid this, when you render your Dolby Digital AC-3 file, you will need to click on the Custom button and on the Preprocessing tab, set the Line Mode Profile and RF Mode Profile to “none”. If that is still too low, you can also change the dialog normalization to -29 or -30.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.comhttp://www.vasst.com
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