[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’ll agree with Chris. It’s a higher quality algorithm for rescaling and, possibly, frame blending if you’re adjusting framerates.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Ronford Baker Sticks + Riser columns + offset + a head that can tilt down a full 90 degrees (O’Conner should do the trick, I think it’s 90 degrees on the tilt down).

Risers and offsets run about $20-40 a day, a piece (If you’re a student, I’d be surprised if they don’t have these in the department anyways). Safe, easy and I assume you’d be working on Ronford Baker/O’Conner or similar anyways. Since it really throws off center of balance, make sure to throw some ball busters on the sticks and prepare to use the camera in a minimal configuration.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Without listening to your audio or knowing how exactly it was recorded, I would try the following:
1. Sweep a wide Q filter around 500Hz-2kHz and give it a cut to see what muffles the presence of the crowd.
2. Once you have that in place, try a slight boost at approximately 3kHz to get some high end percussive back into the sound.

You could also try some multiband compression or, if this was recorded with stereo mics for ambient, try some mid-side compression and eq in the center of the ambient and let the far stereo kind of come in clearly.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

In “Single File” mode put a marker at the beginning and end of your file (press f8… the shortcut should be the same for as version as old as yours).

Add more markers to where you want the track splits, I assume about every 5 minutes.

In your Markers panel, select all your markers and make them range markers (click the icon that looks like this https://crl.ucsd.edu/~buff/audition/images/marker-merge.gif )

Select all your newly created range markers in the Markers panel and right click for “Export Audio of Selected Range Markers” and it will batch out the multiple smaller files.

I have Adobe Audition CS5.5 but the operation should be very similar to the manner I described it. Adobe hasn’t changed much of the core program, just built onto it.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Try upping your color bit precision to 32 bits in After Effects.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It should also be mentioned that I based my answer against hardware based solutions like Dolby’s LM100 that uses Dialogue Intelligence technology.

If you have clean, dialog only/dominant audio then your world opens up.

But yes, in general there are some software meters like Wave’s PAZ, Sonoris Meter, and so on that will show A-weighted results.

I like Audio Leak since it shows a graph over time rather than a live readout.

Alternately, if you have Adobe Audition you can apply an FFT filter graphed using the table from https://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/a/w/aweighting/source.html (at the bottom) and then read the Average RMS in the Amplitude Statistics window.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I was all excited until I saw the $999 price tag.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Dialnorm is quite a bit different than that. It’s the “absolute value of a power sum of the A-weighted audio level in all digital channels” and any broadcaster I’ve dealt with usually measures it as dialog/voiceover only.

https://www.channld.com/audioleak/ is probably the only non-hardware based way I know of to easily measure dialnorm.

It’s basically the amount of “power” in dialog… the main chunk of volume in dialog hangs around -24db with occasional peaks (depending on how compressed the signal is). It’s a decent indicator of overall program volume as music, sound effects, etc are mixed around dialog levels.

With a music video you should get a recommendation from your broadcaster. Music tracks are usually mastered “hot” which means it’s consistently powerful with a good amount of compression… and you can’t really judge dialnorm off of it.

-10db tends to be the max audio level, but your broadcaster might have you normalize audio to -18db or something as a compromise to dialnorm.

… yes, dialnorm is hard to understand, but it’s simply a measurement, not a program setting.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Premiere generates .cfa files because it conforms the audio from the video clip for faster audio processing. It’s a large file because it holds a number of different types of audio streams including AC3, LPCM, and DVD subtitles.

No, you cannot disable or skip this process. It has been a common complain for years, but Adobe probably prefers doing it this way to minimize audio rendering and to help squeeze performance from slower workstations.

I have CCleaner on my windows machine and I it set to clear out any cfa file older than two months. It makes opening older projects a pain, but it keeps space free on my drives as new projects roll in.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

As long as you keep the general folder structure in tact on the hard drives, relinking media is easy (It will prompt you to locate files because PC and Mac file paths are inherently different).

What is the originating footage format? Premiere handles all the same formats on both platforms, but if you’re moving from a CUDA enhanced PC to a non-CUDA Mac, there may be some tricks to squeeze out performance.