So I'm going to click to deselect, and you can see right away now, there's my shortened waveform. I release the mouse button and the change is calculated and also the entire clip is selected. With nothing selected, if I now click and drag on this decibel scale, you can see I immediately get feedback that shows the changes to the audio level in terms of adjustments to the waveform.Īnd now let's go for maybe -6 dB.
I'm going to move the Heads-Up Display out of the way, and you'll see, now it just stays wherever I put it. Now personally, I find this a little bit intrusive, so I'm going to turn that pin on. Wherever I click and drag, I get the Heads-Up Display. Now, if I turn that pin off, and then maybe make a selection, you can see, when I make the selection, the Heads-Up Display jumps to the middle of it. Notice that it's got a little pin here on the right hand side. This is the so-called Heads-Up Display, and this is here to allow me to make adjustments to the amplitude, to the volume, of either the whole clip or the selections that I've made. What I'm looking for is this little panel here. It's pretty noisy right the way across the frequency spectrum. I've got my left and right channels, and down here you can see my Spectral Display. And once the MP3 has been read, you can see, this is a pretty noisy clip. I'm going to double-click to open this up. Under my Assets, I've got this Millionaire Mix.mp3. Let's take a look at a couple of approaches to this. We’ll cover those tools in a future article.įor now, when considering audio normalization vs compression, the first is an absolute process based on your audio's highest peak, and the second can react dynamically to your audio signal over time.Audition makes it really easy to adjust the amplitude - the volume of a clip that you're working with in the Waveform Display.
We can use EQ, limiting and compression to fix that. If the dialogue peaks into the red zone from time to time, that’s OK. After that, set your dialogue and your sound effects so that the general loudness sits between -12dB and -18dB. Next do the same for the ambience – this should stay in the green zone of your audio meter, just a little higher than your music. Later, we’ll use ducking to automatically bring down the volume of the music to compensate for the dialogue. Use your sliders to bring the music up or down until it’s sitting at the maximum volume that it will be during your video. Those are what we will be using to set the levels for our audio tracks.įirst let’s look at the music. Most audio professionals use mixing boards to set their levels, but most DAWs (digital audio workstations) and NLEs (non-linear editors) have sliders built into the program. After normalizing audio, be sure to review the dialogue and tweak the levels of each individual clip to make sure they have the same general volume.
This is why it’s important to not just rely on the tools you’re using, but also your ears. Any clips that are mostly quiet save for a few loud peaks might not be raised in level very much, while those that are consistent (without peaks) at a medium volume level may be turned up more! The problem with normalizing is that most of the plugins available normalize based on the peaks in the audio, and not the general loudness – this is the difference between audio normalization and compression. At this stage, normalizing your dialogue to around -3dB should be sufficient. Most DAWs and video editor programs have a built-in normalizing plugin, and it’s just a matter of dropping that plugin onto your audio clips or on to the entire audio track, and setting the plugin to normalize audio. Normalizing audio for YouTube or any other platform, ensure that dialogue clips are around the same basic volume. In theory, this would normalize the loudness of each audio clip, but there are some limitations that we’ll cover later.Īudio can be normalized using an enhancement in most video editors, and you can normalize audio in Audacity and Adobe Audition easily as well.Īudio normalization is less important for sound effects, foley and music, but it is imperative for dialogue clips. Audio normalization is a process that raises and lowers the volume of your audio clips so that the peaks of those clips are set to a certain level. The first step to getting the proper levels is to normalize audio clips. When each audio source is put on its own dedicated audio track, it becomes much easier to set your levels correctly. Same goes for sound effects, foley and music. Each dialogue audio source should be on its own dedicated track.
In order to get the full use of both audio normalization and your sliders, it’s important to have your audio organized properly in your timeline. For this task, we use a combination of audio normalization and the basic level slider. The simplest, yet most important part of balancing your audio is setting the levels for each individual sound element.