What is Normalization For Voice-Over? When Should I Use it?

what is normalization and should I be using it for my voiceover recordings we're going to find out all about normalization in this video we'll talk about what it is exactly what it does to your audio we'll talk about when you might use it for your voiceovers and we'll talk about when you shouldn't use it and when it could actually cause problems I'm Lenny be voiceover audio engineer let's make your voice sound [Music] better so as an audio engineer my job is to really help you make a better emotional connection with your audience I want whatever you say uh on with your voice on the microphone whatever you record I want that message to really hit somebody in the heart and and one of the ways to make a better emotional connection when you're telling a story no matter what it is it could be for animation it could be for an Audi book it could be for a YouTube video if your audio has a particular impact and it sounds good you can hear the emotion you can hear the change somebody's feeling you can hear what a smile sounds like right through the microphone if you've got Crystal Clear um Quality really good voice quality and that's one of the things I like to do my goal is to help you make a better connection um so one of the things that uh comes up and this is how we're connecting this to normalization is that's one of the questions I get a lot it's like should I be normalizing when should I normalize how much do I normalize is it the best thing to do for my audio um and normaliz normalization really is is very much connected to setting an optimal recording level and so this is really connected to a new course that I have one of the new courses I have um it's called optimal recording levels for voiceover I'm going to put the link to that course uh in the description of this video and you know I help um all different types of VoiceOver talent and I work with them and I get questions and I've I've had questions for just the last several years that are that keep coming and there's themes and you know what I do is I try to say wow this is a big topic that needs to be resolved this is really good going to help people and that's what I write the courses on so um it's really helping me come up with the right type of content to offer you so one of the new courses is optimal recording levels I think it's a huge it's really kind of fundamental it's the foundation of getting a really good um voiceover recording so um it's very affordable course and I think you're going to find a lot of value in it again the link in the description okay let me show you everything that you need to know about normalizing well the first thing I want to talk about is signal flow and that is the flow of signal that starts from your voice and it goes to your microphone through your equipment all the way to your recording and eventually to your listener's ears right or the people that are consuming your content at the very end of this process it reaches them so starting with your microphone when you speak on your microphone the sound pressure waves are captured by your mic and it translates um the microphone translates your voice into a very lowlevel electrical signal now this signal needs to be Amplified and that's what our preamps do and we have preamps um most of the time when you're working in voiceover you've got a preamp in your audio interface and an audio interface um has two parts to it really it's a a preamp or several preamps and it also has an analog to digital and then digital to analog converter we'll talk about that in a second but that preapp is going to amplify that low-level microphone signal that signal strength how much gain we amplify that level microphone signal by is how we measure our recording level and we use a decibel scale and we use what's called a peak meter to measure that we increase the gain in our preamp and that signal strength is really how much signal we're sending through the pipeline and when I say through the pipeline we're talking about that analog to digital converter uh in our interface and you will see this as maybe a USB cable or maybe a thunderbolt cable depends on what kind of audio interface you're using but that preamp and how much gain we give that low-level microphone signal is how much signal strength we're sending through that pipeline if you use a little bit of gain then we're only sending a little bit of signal through that pipeline if we increase the gain we're sending a little more signal and if we increase the gain to a proper recording level we are as loud as we can get without ever peaking over -6 and that is in my opinion one of the best recording levels you get for several reasons for voiceover recordings now I dive deeper into that subject in my Optimum recording levels for voiceover course which I mentioned before I'm going to have the uh link to that course in the description of this video but let's continue so we use the gain on our preamp to push that signal strength at the right level through that Pipeline and that eventually gets to our digital audio workstation through the USB or Thunderbolt cable from our audio interface but that gets to our dah our recording software and then we see that as the strength of the level that gets captured by our software I want to just take a second here to kind of highlight this uh this section of your signal flow this is the input gain section of the entire signal flow there's more to the signal flow but I want to draw your attention to this section because when you use normalization it's actually affecting this section of the signal flow so after our voice is captured by our digital audio workstation at whatever level we set there is an output now you've seen uh an output before like on analog boards right these slider pots or these volume pots is what they're called but uh most dos have um a graphic representation of this output but I want to point your attention to this because this is an output level this is the level of signal after it's recorded that gets sent out from your do okay um there's something called Unity gain which means we're not increasing or we're not decreasing the output at all um and unity gain is there's usually a line on these output meters that represents Unity gain but if you're mixing a bunch of tracks together this is where you actually do it in that output gain stage but I just want to uh uh make sure you understand that there's a difference between the input gain from your preamp and this is an output gain level now wherever that output level is set is how much signal strength we're sending back through that pipeline um this is the digital to analog converter but it's in that same USB cable goes through the same cable or the Thunderbolt cable that's how much signal strength we're pushing through the pipeline again ultimately back to our headphones or our speakers where we can monitor what's going on when we play back our audio from the DAW and I want to draw your attention again because there's three different level controls here we've got the preamp input gain on our audio interface we've got the output signal strength that we can control with that volume pot slider and then now we've got the headphones or speakers um those controls and that's a different control or an output volume that'll add level to our headphones or our speakers so we have to be concerned with the ratio between those three controls to make sure that we get an optimized recording quality at the end and I'll give you just a quick example if you feel like you need more volume in your earphones you need to turn up the headphones volume on your monitor not the gain in the preamp because you could mess up your recording level I just want to give you an example of what I mean the the ratio between those three controls they have to be set at the right place and that's another place where my Optimum recording levels for voice over course uh could come in handy so what is normalization well normalizing is a process that you can do on your dah your digital audio workstation the software on your computer to capture audio where you can increase or decrease the input gain level of an audio file or a selected range of an audio file and uh you can see it's just it looks really kind of like a very simple plug-in and what you're doing is you're just telling it to go to a certain level I'll illustrate that in a second but again we're talking about that one particular section of the signal flow normalization modifies the input gain level of an audio file after you record so how does normalization work normalization increases or decreases the input gain level any of the audio that you select is affected the entire selection is affected by the normalization process normalization identifies the highest peak of the selected region and sets that Peak to the desired level or Target and it's also important to note here that normalization does not modify the tone or the sound of your audio file in any way it's only modifying the input gain level so in this particular illustration I'm using Adobe Audition and I want to show you um how normalization Works how it could be used in Adobe Audition I will say though um that it's probably going to be the same at least the concept is the same and the procedure is the same in most Daws so yes this is Adobe Audition and if you don't use Adobe Audition um the normalization procedure is probably going to be very similar so um there's a couple different ways we can use normalization to modify this recording this is my voice uh that I just recorded a little piece doesn't matter what it sounds like because um we're just going to be dealing with the input gain level if you look and scan across this entire recording you can see this highest peak is the one here and it registers above -6 the -6 line is here if we were to look at the uh the peak meter which is the same as the numbers here on the right side so -6 would be that line so we've peaked over -6 and if my goal was to get a proper or Optimum recording level for this voiceover recording I would want to Peak no higher than -6 so we can do a couple things and use the normal normalization procedure or we could use the clip gain and I'll show you uh to begin with if you modify the clip gain which is this knob right here we are going to change you can see how it changes the input gain of this file and I can use this control to get that Peak just about or just under or just at around -6 so there we have modified the clip G and you can see now it's under -6 so that would be for this particular recording that would be an Optimum recording level so I'm going to undo that and let's now undo amplify and now let's instead of using the manual clip gain adjustment let's use the normalization um uh processor so if I go to amplitude and compression I know some of this may be off the screen but we go to normalize process you'll see this little window pop up and you can see this looks like a plugin and it is a very simple plug-in so we could normalize to a particular number and we want to do --6 but it may it may start out at negative 1 it may start out lower whatever but for this particular use of normalization we want to try to get -6 and I'm going to put that exact number in there and then if we push apply so as you can see we undid um the manual normalization we undid that on the file so you could see this file here is still peaking over -6 this is the original recording and now we're going to apply this normalization procedure feature and there you go it's adjusted and now we're picking exactly it's precisely at -6 again bringing us to an Optimum recording level for this clip now I want to point one thing out we've been talking about how normalization relates to setting a proper or Optimum recording level there are other uses for normalization and um so I want to make that clear it's not just a good or bad thing or can only be used for setting uh an Optimum recording level you know it could be used for different parts of the mastering process it could be used for just leveling a bunch of different clips I think it's more important to know what normalization does and what it doesn't do so you could use it as just one of the tools that you have this time we're looking at Apple's logic pro and we're going to be coming at this from a different angle I've got a a voiceover recording here that's actually um a little bit lower than the optimum recording level peaking at -6 this peak here I believe is NE 7.5 on the scale and uh let's see but higher maybe 7.6 okay so what we can do then is manually raise the gain here and in logic pro this is how you do it let's see a little bit higher maybe there we go so we've raised the gain uh 1.6 DB and now when we play that Peak and we play um this peak here it actually shows 6.0 which is the the optimum recording level for this clip so I can manually adjust it here and then if we go uh under the function section here normalize region gain and it's very very similar to the uh display that we had in an Adobe Audition we're going to affect uh this just this individual track we'll use the peak algorithm and we're looking for a peak Target level of -6 and if we apply you'll see this jumped up and it should be exactly at -6 when we play it here so when should I normalize when should I use normalization so here's how I use it I believe it can be helpful to find tune your recording level for a few decibel increase or decrease if necessary it's important though you need to use caution when you're using normalization on the certain Dynamic content and I'll give you some examples let's look at a particular situation where um using normalizing or adjusting the clip gain to a particular Target might not be a good idea so in this particular situation we've got uh a pretty steady recording level and a pretty steady level here except for this one transient this one part in this recording is much higher than the rest this is an ultra dnamic situation right this is a lot higher than the rest of the entire recording so and what happens if you know if you use the normalization function um or we just use the manual clip gain change if we're to bring this to wherever -6 is so the peak is happening -6 the rest of the clip is still low and if uh we do the opposite if we bring the rest of the clip to where -6 kind of should be peaking on one of these other transients so the rest of the uh file is at a good level this peak is way too high so because of the nature of normalization because it affects the entire clip this might not be the best case uh scenario where you'd want to use normalization to get yourself an Optimum recording level okay let's look at another scenario here where I have three segments okay these these three different phrases of my voice were recorded at One recording level but uh this first segment here was at a proper recording level it came out to be a good level for my voice this one uh the second one is more of a whisper so the result was a lot lower than an Optimum recording level and then this last segment here was a very loud portion of my speech where I'm projecting or kind of yelling okay uh let's say this a good examp example here would be like maybe an animation type of a read okay so what do you do in a situation like this again if we're to modify the clip gain if I were to get you know keeping the level um where it's supposed to be here peing at about -6 for this first section makes the second section too low and the third section too high um and if we do let's say if we want to raise the input gain for this middle section to get that where it needs to be our first and third sections are too high and if we were to lower uh the clip gain to get this third section where it's supposed to be uh approximately peaking at -6 I I'd have to put a meter on here and check but if these Peaks were at -6 or where it's supposed to be for an Optimum recording level then the first and second sections are too uh low but here's what you can do and you're probably um telling me through YouTube right now hey Lenny why don't you cut the clips so there's a cut there and then what you can do is use your clip gain to adjust each of these uh independently so let's put that one where it originally was we'll use this and increase that so it's peing at -6 and then we uh if this was where it originally was it's supposed to be there uh and then we lower that one down to um about peing at6 where the Peaks we'd have to use a meter to make sure we get them exactly at-6 but you could see so we've adjusted independently these three sections by cutting it so you still can use normalization or adjusting the clip gain to reach or fine-tune your recording level but we had to split these clips up and it's just a factor of how normalization works when you do normalization it affects the entire clip so you have to do some cutting if you're going to work with ultra dnamic content normalization can be used to get your recording level in the right place and where I say it's the right place is as loud as possible without peing at -6 that's the optimum recording level however you using your preamps input gain to reach a peak of -6 and no higher than that is going to yield a better overall quality especially for more significant changes so for example if you use normalization to fine-tune your gain a few DB up or down that's fine but if it's a significant change like if you're using normalization oh I have to boost it uh after I recorded it my recording level was too low I got to boost it six or 10 DB that's a significant change you're better off re-recording and adjusting it properly with your input gain cuz that's going to give you a better quality uh normalization does not increase or decrease the signal to noise ratio of a file that you've already recorded but getting the proper recording level will help you get the best signal to noise ratio for your production if you properly adjust it with your gain um you could lower the noise floor that way it's just the best way to do it and again in the course um optimal recording levels for voice over I go through all the details on why you should do it and how to do it as well most of the digital audio workstations are going to have this normalization feature if you don't know where it is if you've never used it before in your Daw you just may have to dig a little bit maybe um uh look at the manual to find out exactly how to do it normalization can increase the loudness of your audio however there's a better way to do it you could actually achieve more loudness with a limiter and a meter which is what we call mastering and that's a totally different process I'm going to put a link to the uh in the description of this video to more um course that I have that can teach you all about mastering and getting a really loud level without distorting yes you can do it with normalization but there's a better way um why do people suggest that uh you normalize well I believe it's because it's a it's a simple and easy way to increase the level of your audio um and and set a Target safely without getting into too much trouble it's just kind of a a crude way of doing it and and that's why I think um you know it's a it's simplified process at least to get you to a certain level but there are better ways to do it and that's what I'm here for um to kind of teach you and show you some of the Alternatives and some of the the professional ways um that I think you can optimize your audio so normalization really is one of the tools that can help us get a great recording level and a great recording level does a lot of things it can give you the least amount of noise in your system it optimizes the interaction with the processing effects like uh EQ and compression and other processors you know when you hit those plugins at the right level providing you've set the right recording level it's kind of The Sweet Spot you can get the best sound out of them that way and if you're not hitting them at the proper level some of them don't even work uh unless you're you're going into the plugins at the right recording level um getting a proper recording level gives you massive leeway during the mixing process so this is if you are adding music or two different voices and sound effects or something and you're mixing all those things together you know the right recording level really can help that process sound the best and also um just one of the things I think that's important that we Overlook is you know if you have the proper recording level every time you record your voice over this standardizes your product right your voiceover recordings are your products that you deliver to your clients and standardizing those products means that if I uh have a great quality um uh product that I offer my client now it's also going to be very similar it's going to be the same it's going to be standardized if I do something for them next week next year so it gives you that consistent uh the consistency and quality uh that we're all really looking for I think that's a sign of a good quality uh product if you need uh Clarity on normalizing or any of the stuff that we touched on today feel free to ask your question in the comments section of this video I I love the questions because not only do they help me learn myself if I don't know the answer uh it helps me really come up with new courses and new material and new videos um to help the community so um by all means leave a question I'll never criticize um I'm always going to do my best to teach you and don't ever uh be shy or feel like your question is too simple because it's not because if you have that question I'm sure other people have it too Lenny be.com is the place to get more information about my training courses I've got free courses available I have paid courses that are available and then you can also get information on my custom processing preset service I'm Lenny B voiceover audio engineer thanks so much for [Applause] watching

Channel: Lenny B

Views: 3,446

Keywords: Voice Over, Voiceover, What is normalization, Normalize

Id: QBMCvPWxQv4

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023