Are you a video editor and cannot or will not round-trip your audio over to an audio editing app to compress and even out your sound? If so, here’s a quick and dirty way to use a compressor and adjust two quick settings to get your audio sounding consistent and loud enough. Not my first recommendation, but works in a pinch for videos that aren’t that precious or important.
If you’d like to learn how to make great dialogue audio for your film and video projects, please have a look at my courses at https://school.learnlightandsound.com including processing dialogue audio in Adobe Audition and DaVinci Resolve/Fairlight, recording sound, how to use the Zoom F4, F6, F8, and F8n, and how to get the most from the Sound Devices MixPre series of recorders. Our latest course is Sound for Live Streaming with the ATEM Mini.
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Index: 00:00 Start 00:07 Summary 00:17 Introduction 00:37 Presets 00:52 Problems with Presets 01:22 What went wrong? 01:40 Default settings 02:09 How to adjust threshold 02:45 How to adjust make-up gain 03:12 Premiere Pro Loudness Normaliztion 03:35 WARNING 03:57 Please buy my courses
This video is for people who are not audio engineers or sound enthusiasts and just want
a quick and easy way to get the spoken word audio to a decent loudness level without leaving
their video editing app or NLE. Audio engineers and soundies, you should probably instead watch
this video linked up here in the upper right hand corner on loudness normalization. You are
dismissed. Presets make life easier. When working with spoken word audio it takes time to make the
audio consistently loud and pleasant, so we usually apply a compressor which evens out the levels so
that we can then raise the level without clipping or distorting. I've seen lots of people use presets
and that saves time, but it can also cause problems and makes audio that doesn't sound so great
if they don't adjust some of the settings for each video. Here's one example where a compression
preset wreaked havoc on an audio clip. So we can save our work and refresh to load up all the
updated styles, elements, everything in the project. But as someone who's editing, I can click in and
change this text. I'm just changing the text on the canvas. And when I'm done with that edit, Meg?
What happened? The settings were originally set for a particular voice recorded in a specific space
with a particular microphone at an exact distance with a particular audio recorder
with a gain set to an exact setting. You cannot just apply a compression preset to all of your
audio. It will make some or most of your audio sound bad. However, you can still use compression
presets if you adjust a couple of the settings for each situation. If you need the benefit of
a compressor preset for spoken word audio, set the attack to the fastest possible setting,
around one millisecond. Set the release to 500 milliseconds. Set the ratio to three to one. The
two settings you definitely need to adjust for every single video are threshold and makeup gain
or output, depending on the terms your compressor uses. You already have ratio attack and release
set. Next, start with the threshold at zero dB and slowly move it down while you listen to the audio
playback through the compressor. All you're aiming to do here is pull down some of the peaks, what we
call transients, to give us room to boost the overall levels. So listen to make sure you're
not making the audio sound crushed like this. Elements, everything in the project. But as someone
who's editing. But pull back up so that the audio still sounds fairly natural, but the peaks are not
sticking out so much. But as someone who's editing, I can click in and change this text. I'm just
changing the text on the canvas. And when I'm done with that edit, Meg? You'll notice that the levels
seem to have dropped a bit. That's where we adjust the makeup gain or output level. Increase this
slowly and watch the meters to make sure you keep the meter below about minus two or minus three dB.
Listen to make sure the audio doesn't sound distorted. To load up all the updated styles,
elements, everything in the project. But as someone who's editing, I can click in and change this text.
I'm just changing the text on the canvas. And when I'm done with that edit, Meg? If you're editing
in Premiere, you can also use this export feature under effects called loudness normalization.
If you're exporting your video so you can publish it to the web or online, use these settings. Minus
minus one dB TP. Yes, you still need to do the compression we did earlier first,
but this will make the loudness consistent from video to video. That's where we'll stop for today.
Warning, this is a quick and dirty way to handle your audio. I don't usually approach it this way.
But if you absolutely cannot or will not round trip your audio to a proper audio editing app,
a digital audio workstation, then this will probably get you better, more consistent results
than just dropping a compressor preset on your timeline and not adjusting any of its settings.
If you'd like to learn more about audio for video and podcasting,
please be sure to check out some of my courses over at school.learnlightandsound.com.
If you have any questions, go ahead and leave those down below. And if you've not already
subscribed, make sure you do that. And I'll be sure to get you more great videos on how
to improve your lighting and sound for video. Talk to you soon.
