audio volume settings

[Kelly Coote]

Just wondering if anyone has some suggestions or guidelines they use to effectively manage the audio levels of the audio tracks in their videos, specifically the music soundtracks and natural dialogue picked up from the external mics, wireless mics etc.

For example, when I import a wav song file to be used as the music soundtrack, the strong portions of the song often register a 0db volume level and thus are getting clipped. Although I decrease the volume settings for the song to about -10db I'm not sure really what level I should be setting it at or whether I should be making the adjustment for the entire song or just the strong portions of the strong.

For my natural dialogue audio the volume often ranges from almost imperceptible to redlining at 0db depending on the situation, what mic was used etc. Should I be managing the levels of this audio also? (I typically don't touch it.)

The thought of having to go through all the audio tracks and 'level' the volumes manually makes me wonder whether it would be worth the effort.

On the other hand if I'm trying to add in dialogue sound bites to a highlights video with a musical soundtrack in the background then managing the audio levels is very important (I would think).

Any general guidelines out there for handling audio track volumes that you'd care to share?

[kirklandvideo]

I always run my project's final audio through a compressor/limiter plugin to smooth all of that stuff out as best I can. I compress lightly to smooth out volume differences and add a limiter to stop the audio peaking above 0db.

I think there's also a bit more normalisation and level adjustment happening when I encode to Dolby Digital.

[Maureen]

You guys are using a different NLE to me, but I convert my files to aiff before I import them. Then I want them between -18 and -12 db unless they are background music in which case they need to be about 9db lower than that (or more). Digital audio is significantly different than analog audio vu meters where 0db was where you wanted to be.

[kirklandvideo]

Now I'm curious - aren't the VU meters in all NLEs representing digital zero? I would have assumed that hitting 0db on any NLE's VU meters would be the equivalent of Analogue -12db (or whatever its supposed to be - I get confused about that).

Why would you need to import audio at a reduced level?