How To Make Your Voice-Overs Louder With Mastering

voiceover production called mastering is the very last stage of voiceover processing and it's all about the loudness of your voiceover recording now depending on the project it's not really always necessary but it is used to meet loudness standards and it could be used as a secret weapon to make superior demos and really outshine your competition during auditions i'm lenny b voice over audio engineer let's make your voice sound better what is mastering well it's the final stage of voice over production before you send out your file the process of mastering allows you to raise the overall volume of your audio recording without peaking or distorting the file it's also how we meet loudness requests from different platforms or different clients so why is it valuable well this is the biggest takeaway i want you to get from this louder is perceived as better when it comes to audio recordings and here i'll show you let's say you've got two identical voice over demos each clip is played on the same playback system at a comfortable volume you play back each clip and they sound exactly the same now if one of those audio files was louder than the other and they're played back at the same volume on the same system the louder clip will always be perceived as better and here's why it's because the human ear is not a linear device at the lowest volumes we're most sensitive to high mid frequencies the hearing curve actually changes with volume the louder the audio becomes our sensitivity difference between frequency becomes less the curve actually flattens out in other words as things get louder we hear different frequencies more evenly this is why music sounds better and more full when it's louder so let's take a closer look at mastering and how it works i'm going to walk you through uh what a limiter does a limiter plug-in so you get what the controls do and you understand what it is there are tons of different limiters most daws actually have them as stock plug-ins this is the l2 ultra maximizer by waves it's also a limiter i'm not going to go too deep on this just going to show you what you need to know to properly master a voiceover let's look at the threshold as you lower the threshold the output level goes up on some limiters this may also be called the gain the threshold here is set to negative 10 db meaning we've pushed up the signal 10 db now here's how this is working the level of the file can be increased but with minimal audible effect the tone and all the work that you've done in the processing is actually retained it doesn't change the sound just the volume the out ceiling here is where you place your limit with this control you're saying i won't have any audio ever go over this setting although you raise the gain the limiter actually caps the level at the ceiling i do want to mention that i suggest you have the out ceiling at a slightly lower setting than what you see here or even around zero and i'll explain why when we get into the example the attenuation meter shows us how much attenuation is happening during playback when you use a limiter on your processed file you lower the threshold which is raising the level the peaks are limited above the out ceiling which gives us the result there is no way we could ever get near the increase in volume of this portion of the audio without a limiter normalizing can't accomplish this now before i run you through a real world example by mastering a voice over i need to get you familiar with a few things let's get to know the meter because we're going to need to measure your loudness you'll find a meter in most of the daws and most of them have the same type of measuring capabilities all right so let's talk about what we need to measure specifically this is the ulean meter and i think it's very user friendly it's free there's a free and paid version for your daw it's compatible with both mac and windows you lean is the name of the company and i believe it's ulean.co i'll have a link in the description i'm using the pro version here and this meter works in most recording packages recording software you may have heard of an rms meter and that's the one here on the left an rms meter reads average levels over a short period of time but the lufs measurement is what we're concerned with and lufs is like an rms meter but the lufs meter measures the average loudness over time and it's adjusted for the human hearing differences which are the differences in how we're sensitive to frequencies at different volumes the short term lufs measures average loudness over a shorter length of time and the you lean short term meter gives you a three second average of the loudness the integrated lufs continues measuring average loudness over time and it updates the average value on an ongoing basis this is the one we're going to be looking at now is probably a really good time to tell you not to freak out if this is all totally foreign to you and you're like lufs and output ceiling threshold gain negative ah what's going on don't freak out because you don't have to really understand all this stuff you could still master your voice over and raise the loudness by just following the directions don't freak out just keep going you may be familiar with the true peak meter this is the one that is probably on your daw a true peak meter measures instantaneous levels then there's the loudness range we have to be concerned with it's the difference between the highest and lowest true peak values i know there's there's a lot there to digest and there's a lot more but for now i just want to get you familiar with the lay of the land here these are the things that take part and are part of the mastering process as you can see here i've listed a few of the standards loudness standards or loudness requirements are specific for different platforms we've got netflix they want you to master your uh maximum integrated dialogue if you've got dialogue in your tv show or you're doing voice over at negative 27 l ufs uh there's the apple podcast is different uh youtube's negative 14. i'm going to walk you through an example of mastering using the youtube loudness standard the blue is the male voice over example on the top and the yellow is a female example we're going to start with a male example first two files here that we're looking at the file on the left is unprocessed and the one on the right is processed with a custom processing chain that i've put together for this voiceover talent let's listen to the two so you can hear the difference and keep your eye on the the level you'll see you'll notice that the volume is about the same between the two in the north sea on the tiny island of fedya norway a german scientist tracks local rumors about a mysterious underwater wreckage in the north sea on the tiny island of fedya norway a german scientist tracks local rumors about a mysterious underwater wreckage if you're a fan of the channel and you've been following some of my videos i spend a lot of time and a lot of energy to make sure that the post-processing level is the same so uh it's called gain staging and what you want to do is make sure if you add an eq or if you add a compressor that the level going in is the same as the level coming out of your processing chain we've done that here and when you add a limiter to do some mastering and raise up that volume which i'm going to show you right now we work on the processed file and the reason why i want to retain that same level is because i need that space to do some eq if i was going to do that in the mastering stage some sometimes it calls for a little light eq'ing you've saved yourself some headroom and that's exactly why we make sure that we get a good level uh in the very beginning of your recording process is so you have room to work when you get to the mastering stage which is what we're doing now so if we switch on the limiter here you'll notice that i have increased the threshold or actually lowered the threshold negative 8.8 decibels which is increasing the loudness 8.8 decibels and that's what i have figured it's going to take to get the integrated lufs level to negative 14 which is the youtube standard that we're searching for or we're aiming for the output ceiling is set to negative 1.5 and the reason why i do that there's two things i want to point out here i use negative 1.5 because even though we've set negative 1.5 as the ceiling there are some instantaneous peaks that may sneak through so the true peak level here on the meter it may go above negative 1.5 and so we've left some headroom there and the other reason is when you take a lossless file like a wav file or an aif file aiff file and you make a like an mp3 you do data compression you make a smaller file what happens is in the process when you go from a wav to an mp3 file you can actually end up having your level higher and so we're going to leave some headroom for that too i believe it's like 0.7 db is the change that can happen when you go from a wave like to an mp3 let's say so i'm building that in as well as a buffer because if i make this an mp3 file i don't want it to go over zero i don't want any distortion i don't want any overs so negative 1.5 as an output ceiling kind of keeps those two things in consideration and should keep us in the the safe zone here also when we play back this clip uh take a look at the attenuation meter and you'll see a drop down three to four maybe five uh db at the peaks when we hit those peaks on the the audio clip and that's when the uh the limiter is really doing its job by attenuating those peaks and making sure that they stay under the output ceiling they don't go over okay we'll play back the file now with the limiter engaged and see if we could hit that negative 14 lufs target in the north sea on the tiny island of fedya norway a german scientist tracks local rumors about a mysterious underwater wreckage wolfgang lowenstein is intrigued by the story of the uh-64 that disappeared in february 1945. so we've hit the negative 14 lufs right on target there you'll see the true peak max has gone to minus 0.7 db which means there are some instantaneous peaks in here that snuck through the out ceiling and uh you know that that does happen from time to time but i still have the necessary 0.7 db of headroom uh so if we were to make an mp3 file from this after we're done mastering it shouldn't go over um so again that's the reason we make sure the out ceiling when it comes to voiceover is a little bit lower than what you'd expect maybe 0 or 0.5 or something okay now let's take a look at the female voice over here we uh i've got the unprocessed file on the left side and the processed file on the right again notice that the levels are very very similar did that on purpose and let's hear the difference between the two calizadas [Music] um the processed file has a better balance between frequencies the boxy sound is removed and we've also tamed some of those dynamic peaks with a little bit of compression but we've still ended up with the very similar volume after the custom processing chain was applied to this female voiceover all right let's do uh the same thing we are looking to hit negative 14 lufs the youtube loudness standard and i have had to lower the threshold negative 11.4 which is raising the gain 11.4 decibels same minus 1.5 output ceiling and you could take a look at the attenuation meter when we play back the processed file and let's see if we can get this uh integrated l-u-f-s to negative 14. [Music] the longer you play the clip you'll see that the integrated lufs numbers they stop changing as much because it's a rolling average so it gets more precise as it goes um and if i was going to make an mp3 i'd probably change and do it one more time but we're pretty pretty close here and as you can see we've hit the youtube loudness target now we're able to get the increased loudness but the tone and the dynamics are retained you'll notice that before the limiter the loudness range is very very similar to the loudness range after the limiter which is exactly what we want it's a little ironic that you can't really hear the exact work i've done here because all of these before and after processing files they had to be mastered to youtube's loudness standards but you can see the result in the meters i've posted the unprocessed processed and mastered files for you to hear and there's a link in the description to check it out lennyb.com is my website there you can find voiceover training courses there's free tips and techniques and you can get all the details on my custom processing service there's a simple form with all the instructions for how i need to receive your voice over file when you send me one visit lennybee.com and look for the red button at the top of the page or you can get there from the link in the description when you know that you have a great voice over sound your performance is better and i i think that confidence is magnetic especially to the potential clients and the ones listening to your voiceover that's what i offer to my voiceover clients it's confidence really i love your comments and questions and i appreciate when you subscribe to the channel so if your voiceover sound doesn't inspire you and you're constantly thinking is my voice good enough do is is it as good as it needs to be then let's make your voice sound better i'm lenny b voice over audio engineer thanks for watching

Channel: Lenny B

Views: 9,202

Keywords: Voice Over, Voiceover, Training, Limiting, Mastering, Loudness, Meter, Youlean, Waves, L2, Ultramaximizer

Id: jABAfRnnoxo

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022