How to check your video is loud enough in DaVinci Resolve (loudness levels for YouTube)

hi there getting your loudness levels correct in your video is super important doesn't matter whether you're delivering an edit for a client or you're editing a video for upload to Youtube getting the loudness levels correct is going to make your video stand out from other videos that haven't bothered to get this correct for example if you're uploading a video to YouTube and your loudness levels are too high YouTube's actually going to crush their volume down so it meets the YouTube loudness standards which could make your video sound pretty terrible in this video I'm going to show you a few different ways to measure your loudness levels and set your loudness targets and we'll also look at a few quick ways we can actually increase the overall loudness to get closer to whatever standard your targeting let's head into Da Vinci resolve and we've got this edit open here I'm just going to switch over to the fair Light page if I just start playing this back the first volume you can see is down here in the tracks volume meter this track volume meter is showing you the variations in the audio for that specific track and you can think of this volume level or loudness level as a very shortterm loudness level or the loudness level for a given track at any given time this is not the value however that some publishing platforms like YouTube will use to determine whether or not your video is too loud let's come back and start playing this again and we're just going to click this start button here and now we're measuring this value here this is an integrated loudness level you can think of this integrated loudness level as the loudness level of the video over a specific longer period of time for example if you played the video from the start to the end you'd get the overall loudness level in that integrated value loudness is measured in lfs and it takes into account the perception of human hearing when it comes to perceiving the loudness of your video there's one more important value that you need to know about once again if I start playing this back you can see up here this TP value is currently at - 9.5 this TP value represents the true Peak or the loudest point that you've had during playback true Peak is a little bit more accurate than the value that you're going to see in the track meter going up and down it's more accurate because it takes into account some other technical factors which we don't need to go into in this video which I cover in more detail in my fair like course so what integrated loudness level should you aim for well that depends on what you're delivering for for example the YouTube standards indicate that we should aim for a maximum loudness of no more than -14 lfs if it's louder than that YouTube's going to turn the video down and compress that audio also in terms of true Peak YouTube specify a maximum true peak of -1 there's three main ways to check your overall loudness level of your video so let's go and have a look at these the first is to Simply go to the start of your video and then start playing it back once it's played back all the way to the end you can check what this integrated value is of course that means you're going to have to play back the entire video in real time which takes a bit of of time I'll show you a quicker method in just a second and the minute this loudness meter is showing a relative scale relative to the Target loudness that set I'll show you how to set that in a second what I suggest you do is click on these three dots and then enable this absolute scale so you can see this is ticked now notice that this meter has changed and our Target is now showing near the top here currently this project is targeting an lufs integrated loudness level of -14 another thing you can do is click on these three dots and enable this lock metering to transport what that will do is it will reset any values that you may have already encountered here so if I click without stopping on another area watch the integrated value resets and then starts to be recalculated from that point onwards it just saves you from having to reset and start and pause and resume using all of those buttons the second way you can check your loudness levels is coming over to your main Master bus here we'll just expand this down so we can see it a bit more and enabling this loudness history toggle currently we've just got the integrated loudness checkbox ticked we'll go back to the start and just start playing back after a few seconds you should start to see a loudness curve or loudness graph being displayed just zoom in a little bit you can see this blue line here is telling us our integrated loudness over time once again you could just let this play back for the entire length of the video and check out the loudness level graph but that's going to take some time that method however can give you a nice overview of if you feel like part of your video is too quiet just let it play with that graph tracking and you'll get an idea in a visual line if it actually is too quiet or too loud just going to expand that up to make a bit more space the third method to check loudness doesn't rely on Real Time playback so it can be a bit quicker what you want to do is come up to the timeline menu here and choose bounce mix to track I suggest in this drop- down box here you always choose new track rather than choosing an existing track just so you don't accidentally overwrite any audio then just click okay and what do resolve is going to do now it's going to render the audio in the background but if we have a look here it's given us this new audio 2 track this is essentially a rendered audio version of everything that was coming out of bus one so all of the other tracks we had in the mix in this mix we've only got one audio track but if you had music it would also include music what you can do now is simply rightclick this new audio file come up to analyze audio levels click that and then choose uh loudness standard in this case we're going with 1774 and then click analyze you can see now that we've got this integrated loudness for the entire video of - 26.5 lfs with a true peak of -9 so in this case we're quite far away from those loudness standards for YouTube you can also choose a loudness standard by choosing these three dots here and setting a loudness standard for example 1774 and now when you play back in real time it's going to show you those loudness standards if you're going to use this timeline bounce mix to track method just make sure you click on the bounced audio and remember to delete it otherwise you're going to get duplicate audio and it's going to be even louder so how do you actually set the loudness standard that you want to aim for there's a couple of different ways to do that the first way is to come up to the far menu come down to project settings come over to the fair light section on the left here and then choose your target loudness level here currently this is set to4 but for example if I change this to let's say -8 notice on the lb scale here we've got this absolute scale with -14 in white here watch what happens when I click save that now changes to-8 the second way is to use one of the presets built into Da Vinci resolve here for example Netflix in this case we'll choose YouTube notice now that the loudness Target of -14 has been set in this absolute scale because the YouTube preset that we just select it also sets the maximum true Peak to -1 let's see what happens if we play back and exceed that you can see that the Tre Peak is about1 now just going to max out these sliders and you see once we got over negative one this value has gone red telling us that we've exceeded the true Peak for that YouTube preset we'll just reset these faders if you find that the mix of audio tracks in your video is exceeding either the true Peak or that loudness standard level then you're going to have to actually change the values of individual Clips reduce the value of individual tracks or use some Advanced Techniques such as compression or limiting being able to elevate the audio in your videos is going to set you apart from other editors and it's really going to allow your video to shine if you want to learn to give your videos the professional audio polish they deserve check out my da Vinci resolve Fair light course using the first link in the description or scan this QR code to learn more if we play back this video and I've just muted the audio so you can hear me talking we can see that we're getting this integrated value of about -24 so that's quite a long way away from the target value of -14 and the true Peak is 10 which is a long way away from that maximum -1 so while this is playing back what I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the fader down here for this track and if I Max it out we reduce the maximum true Peak to almost negative 1 we've gone a bit over there we'll fix that in a minute we've also increased the maximum integrated loudness here to -19 what we can do is we can add a limiter on the main bus output here I'm going to click the plus button next to effects going to come down to Dynamics and I'm going to choose limiter as its name suggests this limiter will limit the maximum volume level that can be allowed to pass through it if I just start playing back this track the Blue Line represents at what limit the limiter will kick in or what loudness the limiter will kick in and this gray line is the voice talking or the audio that it's going to be limited so what we're going to do is we're going to change this ceiling here to -1 because that's the absolute maximum we want to use for this video because we're delivering it for YouTube and we'll just click here and and check out what these integrated and true Peak levels are now notice now even at this louder point the true peak level is no longer going over -1 it's being limited to -1 using the limiter here we can also see that the integrated loudness is -16 so we're getting very close to the Target of -14 if your loudness levels are way too low for your Target loudness then you're going to have to increase the volume of individual Clips overall track faders or a combination of both when you're doing this so just keep an eye on the true Peak and the overall loudness levels to make sure you're not exceeding anything assuming that you've done all of that and you're still not quite at the Target loudness level I'll just show you another really quick tip using the limiter what we'll going and do is we'll just go and bounce this to ATT trct so we can quickly check the current audio levels use analyze you can see here that we're not exceeding the negative one true Peak which is good but our integrated loudness is 16.5 so we've got about 1.5 lufs that we could possibly increase the loudness by to get up to -14 make sure you delete that bounce track and we'll just start playing this back going to open up the limiter by clicking the little middle button here and the trick is to use this input level to increase the level before it hits the limiter so let's try increasing this by one and the higher you make this the more input will be given before it hits the limiter and you can see all of these blue Peaks are exceeding the ceiling now and you can see we've completely exceeded the loudness Target of4 that's why this value is turned red so we'll just bring this down just restart this and we'll try value of about 1.5 for the input you can see now we're kind of getting closer but maybe a bit too close we'll just do the bounce trick again and we'll analyze this now we're at -5 overall loudness so that means we can try and increase things a bit more we'll open up the limiter again and let's go to about two close that delete this bounced track Bounce It Again analyze it again and now we've got the integrated loudness of -4.6 which might be loud enough to publish this video to YouTube but you could continue to tweak things to try and get it as close to that -14 loudness level I'd probably feel fairly comfortable with publishing this video to YouTube with these two values don't forget to check out my fair light course the Link's in the description I think you'll really get a lot out of it I'm Jason Roberts and hopefully I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jason Roberts Video

Views: 17,050

Keywords: How to Set Audio Levels for YouTube Using DaVinci Resolve, What should the audio level be on DaVinci Resolve for YouTube?, What is the correct audio level for a youtube video?, DaVinci Resolve loudness meter, davinci resolve 18 loudness history, Loudness Metering in DaVinci Resolve, The Secret to YouTube Loudness in DaVinci Resolve, How to get maximum loudness for Youtube, Optimize Your Audio loudness for YouTube, davinci resolve 18 fairlight

Id: 2pg8Q9FulSY

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023