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Working with audio to make all levels the same?
I recently completed editing a video for a client – all talking heads. When I filmed it, I had to increase the volume/gain on the camera to compensate for the individual talking heads depending on their voice level.
Well, now in post – when I turn the TV up, I can tell the amount of white noise in the background is completely different. So my question is probably complex and simple at the same time – is there a good way to make all the audio levels the same? I am trying to look at the waveform and use it as a guide to match up with the other ones using the gain control. Unfortunately I learned a lesson too late that more volume is better than less volume. A few of the talking heads are great, there is little or no white noise behind them because they talked loud, but others who talked soft, I turned up the volume in the camera and now when it is turned up louder, there is white noise.
Any experience in this matter? Any advice? Thanks -
2 Replies
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What I’ve done is to right click on all the audio files, choose the “switches” and click “normalize”.
Then I used Sony’s Noise Reduction and put a hard limit of -6db. All the audio was then quite equal. Actually I prefer to use a -3db but the -6 worked okay also, and that’s a preset.
Then I followed Ed Troxel’s instructions about rendering to AC3 for DVDA. Changing toe dialog normalization to -31, and in the Preprocessing tab, changing both the Line mode profile and RF mode profile to “none”.
The audio on my resulting DVD’s is equal.
AllenASX Media Productions
https://www.asxvideo.com -
“Normalize” can be tricky. What it does is bring the audio uniformly up, until the loudest sound in the clip is at 0dB.
If there is any audio in the clip that’s ALREADY at 0dB, Normalize won’t do a thing to it. The loud part can be very brief…a single pop or clang.
Also, Normalize won’t do anything to reduce the background noise problem. For that, you’ll have to try a noise reduction plugin.
Regards,
Doug Graham
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