Understanding How to Loudness Normalize Your Audio for Video

in this episode we're going to take a look at the concept of how to loudness normalize the audio for your video [Music] very quickly a few things we need to cover if you're not sure the difference between loudness and volume go back and check this previous video where we cover that secondly if you're looking for what settings should i use in this app to get the perfect loudness every time you were dismissed i don't cover that here we really need to cover the concept first you understand how to do this and then you can figure out how to do it in the app that you use let's run you through the steps and i'll show you how i would go about this so first of all i'm going to do this edit in davinci resolve i just have a few clips that i've dropped in here some additional intro music a little talking head part and then we have some outro music along with the kind of a closer here so nothing terribly complicated just to give us an illustration here so first you finish your edit do your edit first and then it's time from there to do a little bit of audio work so first of all what i would do is any sort of cleanup that i find on any of the individual clips and you can do that a variety of ways there are a bunch of plugins here most non-linear editor video editing apps have plugins that you can use on audio or you can round trip to your favorite digital audio workstation app whatever works for you that's fine in davinci resolve there is a digital audio workstation built in called fairlight so that i could do that work right here then what we're going to do here is a super super basic mix is i'm going to fade this music down behind emma when she starts talking and then we're going to fade it back up at the end once she stops talking and we go into the outro so super simple there obviously mixing is far more involved than that if you're working on a short film for example there's a ton of other stuff you could do to really sweeten your sound this is not about that so what do we do next once we've finished our mix the next thing we need to do is export our mix or bounce it to a stereo mix so here for example i'm going to come up to timeline bounce mix to track we're going to put it on a new track go ahead and click ok now it takes all those audio clips that you have in your edit and mixes them together and puts them on a new track that's what we have down here so i'm going to go ahead and mute these two here we don't need those anymore now we're just going to work with this now this is where we can start the loudness normalization process again once you finish your mix don't worry about loudness normalizing individual clips within your edit that's not really necessary what you're doing in the mix before you get to this loudness normalization phase is you're really just using your ears to judge how loud does the music need to be relative to the dialogue so it's not a jarring experience for your audience that's all you're really focused on during the mix then once we bounce the mix out and we're ready to loudness normalizes the last step that's when we work on the overall loudness target now we could do that here in davinci resolve they do have some tools here there's a loudness meter and you can also come up into your project settings here and on the fairlight tab you can set your target loudness level here we set it to -16 so we could do that in here the problem with doing it in here for me is that it doesn't do it offline you actually have to play through the entire piece to get what is called your integrated loudness reading that is how loud is the overall video and that's when you're looking at lufs or lkfs which we talked about in our previous video that's what this measures but you do have to play through the whole thing that's kind of a pain if you're trying to do this in a hurry so i'm actually going to move this bounced file this bounced mix over into izotope rx now in izotope rx we can actually get a reading on the overall loudness very quickly you see we have this loudness control panel here and it's already measured the integrated loudness of the entire mix at minus 19.9 okay now as we mentioned in the previous video because this is mostly spoken word content with a little bit of music at the intro and outro we're really kind of going to aim for about minus 16 to minus 17. so somewhere in that range there will give us a consistent result and if we upload all of our videos at that level that loudness then we'll have really great consistent results the reason we talked about targeting -16-17 we talked about in our previous videos so if you're confused by that go back and watch that and then come back here okay so what do we do here well there are a few things first of all we need to measure our overall loudness and that's what we've done already here so we're at minus 19.9 effectively minus 20 l ufs and we want to get our audio loudness to minus 16 or minus 17 between there so we've also measured the db true peak that's how much headroom we have now the reason this is important let me just show you here if we need to make our audio louder and i'll just show you this here i'm going to add 3db to our overall audio okay looking good still if i do another 3db oh we've got a problem have you noticed that these peaks now these transients have hit zero db that means if i play this back they'll sound distorted and i don't want distortion obviously so that's what we need to take care of next and we're going to do that by doing a little bit of leveling or compression in this case we don't need a whole lot more space so you can see here on the loudness control if i want to get up to minus let's say 16 and a half or so i need essentially three and a half db of additional headroom and it turns out that we're really pretty close to that we've already got four and a half db of headroom so that's good but we also have this true peak ceiling that we want to keep when you export your video some of this headroom is eaten up the lossy formats will actually eat up some of your headroom so if when you go to export your video before you've exported it if you have minus 4.5 db of headroom once you've exported it and you play back that file say you brought it back into here it wouldn't have 4.5 db of headroom anymore it would have less than that probably closer to 3db of headroom so what you need to do is that you need to take into account the fact that once you add some loudness to your audio you need to still leave minus 1.5 db true peak headroom so we need to take that into account as well so here if i wanted to get to minus 16 for example that's 4 db higher or 4 l ufs higher and so i would also need on top of that for lufs in terms of headroom i need another 1.5 db true peak headroom so i need effectively five and a half db of headroom before i start pushing this audio up and i only have four and a half right now so how do i get that additional db of headroom well i could use a compressor so let's go ahead and pull that out and this is not a tutorial on compression but just to kind of quickly go through it here i might say let's see maybe if i set my threshold around minus seven here uh i could even go minus eight maybe we're going to do some pretty mild compression we can set the threshold somewhat aggressively let's maybe go split the difference let's go seven and a half on our threshold got our ratio set to three very fast attack slow release to kind of keep it from having that super compressed sound to it let's go ahead and run that and see what we end up with in terms of headroom we're now at minus 5.8 so we're good that's all the compression we needed we just pulled those peaks down just a tiny bit now one of the things that's important to do let me undo that and come back into the compressor again it's super important to listen to this before you actually commit to it so let me just play a little bit of the audio really quickly so you can hear what the compression is doing to it okay so today in the mail i got a surprise package i i knew what it was but nobody else did um and i actually got a pair of roller skates this is something i've been thinking about for probably two months now um i can't explain where the urge to skate came from i'm sorry okay so when you see this line go down that's when it's actually compressing it sounds pretty transparent we're not doing any sort of hardcore compressions so i think that's going to be good we'll go ahead and render that go ahead and apply that there we go that gives us our 5.8 db of headroom so we're good to go ahead and loudness normalize now here in izotope all i have to do is let's say i can just say let's go to -16 lufs or lkfs and let's keep 1.5 db of true peak headroom this will do some limiting if i didn't have that go ahead and render that it's doing a lot of calculations there there's a lot of math involved but the computer has taken care of that for you and it's going to move pretty quickly here for us and then once it's done that we'll get a new measurement here just to make sure we're in a good spot okay we still have at least 1.5 db true peak headroom and we are now at an integrated loudness of -16 lkfs or lufs and uh this is what it sounds like okay so today in the mail i got a surprise package i i knew what it was but nobody else did um and i actually okay now what i sometimes do is that if some problems seem to rear their heads namely things like breaths because you did some compression and we pushed that audio up the breasts now are a little bit more prominent more so than i'd like and we also had some mouth noise so here for example here's a little mouth click we could take care of that right here we have a mouth de-click plug-in just run that through that's taking care of that mouth click now that's gone that's cool and then we also have this breath control plug-in and i'm gonna go ahead and just run through that really quickly and here's a breath you can see it definitely knock that breath down let's listen to it again it was but nobody else did um and i actually got a pair good so we'd run through just make sure everything's sounding good double check our overall loudness again once you make some changes you can affect that loudness now the reason i do that at the very end is that sometimes things start to kind of pop their heads out once you've loudness normalized that you didn't necessarily notice before but you just need to make sure and do a final loudness check before you commit you know and say okay i'm done i'm ready to go and get this back into my video editing app so we're still at minus 16.1 we still have a db true peak of at least one 1.5 so we're good to go so all i have to do here is save this when i pop back over here it's loaded the new mix in i've muted these other two the original audio so now i'm good to export i can go over here into the deliver tab and i can deliver the output with my final loudness normalized audio and we're good to upload from there so hopefully that was helpful in understanding the concept of the kind of the practical steps you have to take to loudness normalize your audio we may come back and cover how to do this in other apps as well here was an example in davinci resolve and izotope rx typically falling into my workflow adobe audition and premiere also have a number of great tools that allow you to do that i was and generally still am a final cut pro 10 editor but i don't really find the tools there in that app very good for loudness normalization sadly so i typically have to come out to another app to take care of the loudness normalization so there's a look at the pragmatics and the concepts of loudness normalizing the audio for your video if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 24,834

Keywords: Audio, sound, video, loudness, normalize, normalization, how to, tutorial, loud, consistent, consistency, boost

Id: lHNhxGojFRU

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021