Loudness Metering in DaVinci Resolve 16 | YouTube Loudness Levels

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the channel it's great to see here again and today we're gonna be talking about loudness here in DaVinci Resolve I'm gonna talk about what it is how to use those loudness meters because if you're like me I didn't know what they were for how to use them but I'm gonna tell you what they are how they work and why they're important so let's jump into the video [Music] the loudness what is it why is it important why do I even care so for me a long time that was kind of a mystery and I just didn't have the time to do the research and check out what loudness was and why I should care about it but one of our subscribers here Pedro Diaz from Norway had reached out to me in an email asking some questions about it and he had done a lot of research to figure out what it is how it works and why it's important so I kind of piggybacked on some of his research did some more research on my own and now I understand what it is and I'm gonna share it with you guys cuz I've gotten questions from you guys and it's just something that until recently I hadn't looked into before so what is loudness so loudness is measured in Bluffs what's a luff I'm gonna throw it on the bottom of the screen here but it is loudness units relative to full scale so that sounds kind of confusing but I'm gonna show you what it is here and why it's important to take a look at it with your videos especially when you're uploading to YouTube so YouTube has certain levels of loudness that they want your video to be at and in YouTube's case -14 lufs is where they want your loudness to be at its maximum otherwise what happens is YouTube will compress or squash down your audio and I'm gonna show you some examples here of how we can see where our audio is falling in YouTube and if YouTube is squishing our audio down and then I'm gonna show you how in DaVinci Resolve here we can check that and see where we fall on that loudness scale because keep in mind that your faders and the way you set you are volume in your editing program whether it's DaVinci Resolve or anything else it's not the same as loudness for example if you boosted your fader all the way up to minus 3 because I heard Oh YouTube should be at minus 3 to minus 5 well it's not minus 3 to minus 5 total decibels here on your meters it's the loudness level that you're looking for so it does sound a little confusing but we're gonna jump over to the computer I'm gonna show you how you can see whether your YouTube videos are getting their audio squashed down or whether you're getting the same mix that you mix when you're editing the video if you get the same thing on YouTube or not so let's jump over the computer and we're gonna walk through some examples here I'm going to show you some more about how loudness works and then I'm gonna show you in DaVinci Resolve how you can change a couple settings and see where your loudness actually fall okay so the first thing that I want to take a look at here is a video sample that I uploaded where I purposely went above that negative 14 left level so that YouTube would have to squash down my audio so here's a little clip film with my iPhone and I'm gonna play through it you can see how it sounds then I'm gonna show you how you can check the loudness and whether YouTube's squashed down your audio or not going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up on YouTube I'm gonna boost up the loudness and make it too much so that we can see how YouTube squashes down the audio a little bit so here's our sample clip check it out check out the stats for nerds and see what we got going on guys alright so in order to check it if you come to any video on YouTube and you just right-click on top of the video come down to stats for nerds and it brings up a bunch of different information here and here you can see volume / normalized so the volume is what you had your video set at when you uploaded it so that's always going to be 100% normalized is telling you did YouTube and normalize your audio because it was over their threshold of minus 14 laughs and in this case you can see out of the hundred percent of my audio that I uploaded and you can see that YouTube's normalized my audio on this video 65 percent of the original volume that I had uploaded at because it was overtop of that - 14 loves threshold so now if I come to another video here and I want to check where is my audio on this video come down to stats for nerds and hear volumes / normalized you can see 100% of my volume and I'm at a hundred percent for the normalization and you can see the content loudness is minus four DB so I believe this means I'm four DB below that threshold of minus fourteen lufs so how can we check this in DaVinci Resolve to make sure that what we're adding in DaVinci Resolve is exactly what's gonna come up on YouTube so we're gonna jump back here in DaVinci Resolve and right up here we have our loudness meters and if I just play through a little bit of the clip here from the camera it sounds like junk we can see that the meters are moving but I don't actually know what they're referring to or how they're working so the first thing we want to do is set our loudness meters to that minus fourteen lufs that YouTube requires in order to do that you want to come down to your project settings and you want to come down to fair light under audio metering you'll see target loudness level and the default here in DaVinci Resolve is -23 lufs we want to change that to minus fourteen lufs which is what YouTube allows so once you change that come down and click Save so one thing that you want to keep in mind when you're looking at these meters here is that zero is that - fourteen zero doesn't equal zero zero equals that - fourteen that we just said it's a little confusing but that's the way they do it so now just looking at these meters isn't enough for us to determine where our Luft level is at so we need to bring up a graph that'll give us a better idea of where all of our audio is falling here in our video so in order to do that the first thing you want to do is come down to this little icon here you want to go ahead and click on that next come over to your index open up your index and down here you're gonna see main one and that's our main output from DaVinci Resolve so you want to go ahead and turn that on then you can go ahead and close your index and if you scroll down on your tracks here you're gonna see now we have main one which is our main output so it doesn't look any different than the rest of the tracks but if you grab the very bottom of that track and you pull it down you open it up and you'll see a few more bits of information here you have loudness history and we want to go ahead and turn that on because this is going to give us a graph that shows us the loudness of our video and below that you have three more items and the integrated one here is the important one that you want to have checked on momentary and short-term you can look at those if you want but they're not as important as this integrated one right here so make sure that's checked on so now when we come over and look at this graph we see a zero here so this zero represents that - fourteen lufs that we set in the project settings so we want our audio to be as close to that as we can get it without going over it if we go over this threshold that's when YouTube comes along and they normalize it down to that - fourteen lufs level so I'm gonna go ahead and play through the video here and you're gonna see where our lufs are falling on this graph I'll just show you real quick is recorded from the camera it sounds like junk and I don't want to use it and want to use the audio from the blue Yeti but here's what that sounds like here's the video between your camera all right so I'm gonna okay so that's enough to get us an idea of where we're at so if this is the -14 lufs we are about 6 below that minus 14 so what this graph tells us is that we can actually boost the volume of our audio up a little bit to get closer to this line up here so when you're first editing together your video I would recommend that you set your audio levels similar to the way that I show in this video that I'm gonna link at the top of the screen here setting your audio levels so you may have heard out there that YouTube says set your audio from minus 3 to minus 5 and somewhere in that range well they're not referring to minus 3 to minus 5 if we look back here in DaVinci Resolve not minus 3 to minus 5 on your fader here what they're actually referring to is minus 3 to minus 5 below that negative 14 loves level at least that's my understanding of it so when you initially edit your audio check out this video above I'll link to here of how to set your audio levels you want to make sure you set all your levels at a reasonable spot and make sure nothing's peeking you don't want to boost all these way up so that you get closer to this 14 lufs that's not the right way to do it in my opinion so edit your video get a good mix set your levels right and then once you check your loudness here I notice it's low so I want to boost it up so what I've been doing is I'll just come in boost up the master a little bit let's say if I boosted it up to 5 here and will start playing the video again and see where our loudness goes to delete that so it's super easy to sync up my audio with my video select both clips I'm gonna right click come down to auto sync audio and I want to come down I have two options that I always use here it's called based on waveform and based on waveform and append tracks so the first option if you select that it so you can see it's slowly climbing up and this is a delayed response to the audio that's being played in the video so the longer you play it the more accurate it's going to be but you can see it's getting up closer to that -14 lufs but typically where i've been set in mine is somewhere between that minus 3 and minus 6 range and i find that that works out pretty good and YouTube does not normalize and my videos they all seem to be at 100% where it should be so in this case I might just lower it back down a little bit but then I think this video should be good to go so let's jump back to that example we saw on YouTube and I'm going to show you how we can make an adjustment to that clip so that it falls at our negative 14 lufs okay so here's that clip that I exported and put on YouTube and you can see here I purposely boost it up the main a lot i boost it up this individual track and let's look at our meter here it's already set up this is minus 14 left set this zero line so let's play this and you can see where it'll fall on the graph it's going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up on YouTube I'm gonna boost up the loudness and make it too much so that we can see how YouTube squashes down the audio a little bit so here's our sample clip check it out check out the stats for nerds and see what we got so you can see I'm over that threshold by about 3.7 which is what it said in that stats for nerds back on this YouTube video so how do we fix this so that this video will not be normalized and have the audio compressed and reduced so I'm just gonna come over and start by double clicking on my faders here to reset that I'm gonna come back to the beginning of the clip and let's play through and see where it falls before I make any adjustments going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up on YouTube I'm gonna boost up the loudness and make it too much so that we can see how YouTube squashes down the audio a little bit so here's our sample clip check it out check out the stats for nerds and see what we got going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up on YouTube I'm gonna boost up the lack of so real quick just to stop the reason why it keeps coming down well as I keep playing it over and over again is because the loudness history is based on the past 30 seconds so because it's a short clip I keep playing it again and again and you can see the graph coming down and we should hopefully drop below this minus 14 so let me continue playing it and see where it falls get out check out the stats for nerds and see what we got going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up and you see we just entered into the blue area here and blue is where it's acceptable it's below your threshold that you set in your project settings there so blue is getting better and like I said the loudness history is the past 30 seconds which is why we see it continuing to go down so I'm gonna give it another playthrough once or twice here and see where we end up how YouTube squashes down the audio a little okay so I played through a few more times and now you can see I've got a consistent blue line here at about minus 3 decibels so I'm gonna go ahead and export this throw it back on YouTube and then we're gonna check and see what the volume / normalization is for this video and see how it compares now that we adjusted our loudness here in DaVinci Resolve so that way our clip should be below the threshold that YouTube requires so here we go we're on youtube I'm gonna play through the video this is the new one I just uploaded let's play through you can hear how that sounds and then we're gonna check those stats for nerds going on guys here is a clip I'm gonna throw up on YouTube I'm gonna boost up the loudness and make it too much so that we can see how YouTube squashes down the audio a little bit so here's our sample clip check it out check out the stats for nerds and see what we got okay so this is the new video let's right-click come down to stats for nerds if we look at the volume / normalized we've got 100% and 100% so my content loudness is minus 9.1 so I couldn't even boost this up a little bit higher if I wanted to and get closer to that - 14 lufs when I was back in DaVinci Resolve but you can see here that YouTube did not compress or squash down my audio at all because I was well below that threshold alright guys so there you go loudness here in DaVinci Resolve again why is it important it's important because you don't want YouTube to just come along and normalize your audio and squash it down you want it to sound the way that you edited your video you had a certain sound in mind you want to make sure that YouTube doesn't mess that up or make it sound bad on you so make sure you check out the normalization of your audio here in DaVinci Resolve before you go ahead and upload it to youtube so hope this video was helpful I hope I helped shed a little light on the subject I know for me it was a great learning experience to kind of understand what it does and why it's important so if you have any questions leave a comment down below I'll do my best to help you out get out there check out some of your videos see how they're falling on the scale of a Lux which is such a weird name what are they so thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next video peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 40,367

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 16, Davinci Resolve 16 tutorial, Davinci Resolve 15, Davinci Resolve 17, Davinci Resolve, Resolve, DaVinci Resolve Tips, YouTube Loudness Standard, YouTube Loudness Normalization, YouTube Loudness Level, Loudness, Loudness Meter, Loudness in DaVinci Resolve, LUFS, Levels, Mixing, Metering, DaVinci Resolve Audio, Loud, Loudness Normalization, Fairlight, Professional Audio, Loudness Youtube, Content Loudness Youtube, Loudness Meter in DaVinci Resolve, Normalize, Editing

Id: SyWFLS4VWvA

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020