Logic Pro X (10.2.3) - Loudness Meter, Understanding LUFS

hey guys this is music tech help guy and today we're going to take a look at the new loudness meter plugin that comes with the 10-point 2.3 update and Logic Pro 10 we'll also take a look at the difference between metering rms levels vs l ufs levels as well as the history of l ufs metering I apologize in advance for the lengthy introduction for this video but the truth is that the loudest meter is very simple to use and it doesn't really require a full tutorial to use at all however understanding why it's being used and what reference values to follow is really what's most important here so I've a bit of background information to give you before we get started using it up until the 10-point 2.3 update logic has lacked a dedicated loudness meter which is helpful for setting reference levels for mastering music as well as used to normalize audio levels for TV broadcasting this helps so that levels overall are at or near an industry standard not too quiet not too loud the units used in the loudest meter are L u FS units L UF F stands for loudness units reference to full scale sort of like digital metering is in DB f s FS stands for full scale meaning that 0 DB is the peak value you can have in the digital recording before clipping L u FS is based on the DB FF system as well so 1 L U is equal to 1 DB l u FS is also known as L k FS for its K weighting scale and was introduced in 2010 by the EBU that's the European broadcasting Union this was first introduced in the ebu r128 standard also in 2011-2012 the ITU the International Telecommunication Union introduced two revisions for lk FS and there's been several other revisions as well but what I want you to understand is that for all intents and purposes l UF s and L K FS are identical the main reason for the EBU and ITU standards for loudness or because these sound levels of TV commercials were way too loud compared to the shows that are being broadcast with the standard as of today is negative 23 DB for TV and broadcasting with a loose standard of negative 16 DB for music in previous videos I've shown examples using the level meter or the multimeter monitoring rms levels mastering to around negative 10 or negative 12 DB rms rms metering is a good way to approximate loudness but the loudest meter shows us Lu FS units which is weighted different and is a better judge of loudness than using RMS so getting back to why I often use negative 10 we can still use negative 10 as a reference with the loudest meter as I have in past videos but keep in mind that the negative 16 reference I mentioned earlier is really just a suggestion for music and is quite quiet compared to most popular recordings in the market so part of its just personal taste the artists taste and clarity which i think is the most important detail if you can master a really loud recording but still maintain clarity and dynamics great go for it once clarity starts to be lost I typically fall back to a more conservative mastering level the main thing to remember from all this is that yes rms levels are a good judge of loudness there's nothing wrong with using rms metering for mastering music l ufs levels are weighted differently and are just a better judge of overall loudness so now we have all the background information out of the way let's use the plug-in alright so let's get into using the loudness meter what I'm going to do with the loudness meter is I'm going to use it to match the loudness levels of two different tracks by the same band that are going on the same album and I want to match their loudness level so that when one song plays right next to another that they all have the approximately the same amount of loudness or perceived loudness so I'm going to load my loudness meter on the master fader the magico stereo output I'll just unload it here just go to your inserts and it's under metering loudness meter I pull that up and there's actually three different meters in the loudness meter let me just hit start here to start metering and i'ma hit play just to get a little snippet of the song so you can see there's well you can't could see there that there was a three or four meters you have one that's labeled M s and I M is momentary loudness s is short-term loudness and I is integrated loudness level most of the time overall we're going to be looking at the integrated level that's sort of like our long-term loudness level typically what you do is either listen to the entire track and get the entire integrated loudness level or you listen to like at least like a 60 second clip and get an integrated loudness level sometimes you can do even less than that just for quick metering you can you can you know play like 20 or 30 seconds of the track and get an approximated integrated loudness level momentary is like your instantaneous loudness level at that point in time short term is is still sort of almost instantaneous but a little wider a little wider window for metering also there is this little little yellow slider here this is your target loudness level so this is just just basically a reference for you as to where your metering for so for mastering music I'd probably set this number between negative 10 and negative 16 if I was doing like dialogue for TV I'd probably do something like negative 23 or negative 24 so I'm going to set this at negative 10 and any values that go above negative 10 are going to show up in yellow which right now nothing is showing up in yellow because our track is very quiet it's been fully mixed but it has not been mastered rather than adding a bunch of mastering effects here just for demonstration I'm just going to use a mastering limiter you could use logics stock limiter but I'm going to use my my fabfilter pro-mb and you'll see as I add gain in the limiter I'm going to put this in the transparent mode as I get ad gain in the limiter you'll see the the Lu FS integrated level go up or yeah it goes up closer to zero dB it's never going to get there we really want it to be more like negative 10 DB so we don't want you know that loud when I make it too loud so this is similar to what I've talked about in previous videos using an RMS level to 2 meter it's essentially the same thing as using RMS levels to meter it's just the weighting of Lu FS is better for approximating loudness than RMS actually is so I'm just going to play the track I'm going to reset play the track and I was going to pull the gain up and we'll see where the integrated level gets to about negative 10 so are coming in a little loud actually so we'll pull the game down a bit reset it hit play again if we leave this so they job here we go so you'll notice what I'm doing is I'm making an adjustment over here that I'm just hitting a reset because if I don't hit reset it's still taking into account the previous settings so if I was too loud it's still going to be the meter still going up shows too loud so I just keep hitting reset now the the last meter that's shown here is the Lu range the loudness range this value is basically useless and let unless you play the track for a longer period of time like usually at least 40 or 50 or 60 seconds the r128 documentation even specifies that that this value is not really you can't really take it you can't really take it seriously unless you let it play for 60 seconds with that what the loudness range is is it quantifies a variation in time varying loudness so basically it's the variation in loudness that we have so a smaller number means that we have less loudness variation and a larger number means we have more loudest variation so a softer song that maybe an acoustic song is going to have a little bit more more ups and more downs more dynamics a rock song like this is going to have quite a bit less dynamics pop music and electronic music sometimes even less dynamics there as well at least when it comes to volume dynamics so really to get a good lü range approximation we have to let the track play for at least four year 50 seconds the they are the are 128 specification recommends 60 seconds so I'm going to play this whole little clip here with our new gain setting in the Pro L and we'll see what our le range ends up being it's going to be something drastically different than 8 if we leave me so me jumps out it's so many ways what do yes we've got a loudness range of about 1 Lu which is what I expected it's heavily compressed loud rock music so I wasn't expecting a lot of dynamic range so let's um let's check out our other track now I'm going to put a different limiter on my other track and we'll match the loudness of the first track or the second track to the first one so let me just throw the pro L back on here I'm going to select a range 2 meter as well I'm sort of skipping the intro of the song because there's a lot of like little dips and things like that I just want to get to like the loud part of the song really to reset the meter let's meet the first track unmeet the second track and I'll hit play and I'll keep resetting and keep bumping up the game we put myself in transparent mode here and we'll give this a listen there we go we got our integrated loudness around negative ten they just pump this up one more tenth of a DB there and then let's get a full Lu range measurement as well and you don't you understand walking I'm running over me so yeah this ins got a little bit higher Lu range just a slightly higher because there's like those little breaks I think in between the guitar riff I think it's causing like a dynamic shift I'm going to pull the gain up like one more tenth of it a DB here and then of course the last thing here is just to trust your ears you know listen to one track and then listen to the other track and see if they sound good back-to-back so it's just a B then real quick you yeah so the only thing that's really different now of the volume levels the same loudness is the same but the maybe there's some tonal differences so that would be another another issue outside of loudness that we may have to tackle in mastering maybe shifting some of the frequencies a bit with a sonic enhancer like vitamin or just an EQ just to sort of like shape the tone a little bit different from one track the next to match their tones a little bit differently but that's that's a whole other that's a whole other process a whole other topic so one last thing you can do with the the loudest meter is you can click up here by default it's in vertical mode and you can click up here and put it in horizontal mode so if you want to view it horizontally you can do that as well so I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial on the new loudness meter in Logic 10.2.32 on Lu FS metering again it's a more accurate better weighted way to approximate loudness overusing rms levels and I'm happy that logic finally added a dedicated loudness meter so I hope you guys enjoyed the video and thanks for watching hey guys if you'd like to see more videos like this subscribe to the channel to see multiple new videos at it every week also you can check out carny media group com where you can view all of my video tutorials search for specific topics download the videos add free and in some cases you can purchase session content so you can work along with me in the video also please consider giving a monthly contribution at patreon.com Ford / music tech help guy as always thanks for your support and thanks for watching you

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 96,009

Rating: 4.9647679 out of 5

Keywords: logic, pro, logic x, logic pro x, logic 10, logic studio, loudness, meter, lufs, mastering, mixing, metering, 10.2.3, LPX, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, music production, production, audio, beats

Id: k1rjuden8_k

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 09 2016