I can't find it. I looked back a few weeks too. Is it a thread, or a tutorial? Your link just takes me to the forum page.

Thanks

Neil

There's no direct link for it; you have to go to >Tutorials>Vegas Video>Mastering Audio for Video.

It's a nice article but is slanted towards long time musicians rather than video hacks. Often more important to us to simply get the voices the loudest and reduce the other stuff - not enhance it.

I've heard in digital video forums that -12db is what you're aiming for. It sounds awfully quiet on my computer, but after a few complaints of my audio being too loud I noticed our DSR-2000 very plainly shows raw footage as peaking at -12db. Our DSR-40 also has meters and shows this too. So until convinced otherwise that's what I'm doing.

MiniDV masters are excellent for VHS reproduction - VHS doesn't begin to compare with MiniDV in resolution, so you will be fine (although your VHS will never look as good as your DV.

-12db is the accepted standard for 0 based analog tones. In the "old days" of analog, if you happened to peak your audio levels, they might (or might not) sound a little nasty. If you happen to peak your digital levels they will be static filled and unusable. But the dynamic range of digital is so far superior that you can record and playback a "less hot" levels, then on audio.
The very last step that I do, before laying my stuff off to tape, is to render a new track with all the opticals and mixed audio, as a separate element. (Tools>Render to new track - settings at NTSC DV. This gives you a final mixdown of all of your audio.

Once you have recorded, cut and mixed your tracks, you can "normalize" them in VV3. This will assure you the maximum playback levels, with the minimum buildup of noise.

If, after you've done your first mix, you find that some tracks are just too soft, go back into your edit, slice the soft audio on either side of the soft part, and raise the levels as needed. Then remix.

Once you've learned what you are doing, you will want to normalize every one of your tracks before you mix them, but for a newbie, I suggest after - it's way easier and faster.

Cool! Thanks for the info.

Neil

Peak levels are essentially meaningless when it comes to determining how "loud" your final product is. The human ear doesn't determine loudness by the peak level, it determines it by the average (or RMS) level. The "normalize" function in Vegas is pretty much useless because it only makes adjustments based on peak levels and that's not they way we hear things.

If you're watching a movie on TV and it has some relatively quiet dialog and then a commercial comes on, the commercial sounds louder because it has been heavily compressed in order to raise its average level (and get your attention.) The fact of the matter is that the movie and the commercial probably had the same peak level, it just that the commercial has a much higher average level.

Audio compression and limiting is an art form and it takes a lot of experience to do it "correctly." There are no hard and fast rules to determine the appropriate average level, you'll just have to play it by ear. But like I said, peak levels are virtually meaningless (well, as long as they don't exceed 0db.)

John

This is a very confusing subject to me since digital audio was introduced. In the "old days" of analog the goal was for audio to average 0db with occasional peaks to +3 being acceptable, until metal or chromium oxide tapes came around and a lot of folks liked to "saturate" the signal and would peak as high as +6 without problems.

But on the DVCpro tape I'm shooting these days, instructions are to use -20db as average and I try to keep peaks around -12db. I got burned on my first digital shoot because I'd heard that you ran digital audio lower than analog but didn't know by how much, and ended up averaging about -10 with peaks below zero and the audio was dreadful. I've tended to stay on the conservative side since then. You can raise low audio, but if you overmodulate in the field, it's crap forever.

The issue gets more confusing because not all meters read the same. On DVCpro decks -20db is dead center in the meter and 0db, which used to be average, is now the uppermost limit--there are no plus numbers on the meter. But the Discreet Logic edit* system I use at work has meters within the program that are, believe it or not, the equivalent of analog and go to +10. And the mixer between the DVCPro deck and the computer has unity at zero and goes to +28. So it's like I'm switching from digital to analog as I edit and it's confusing enough to make my hair hurt. The tech evaluation I got back from PBS on the last project I did said that the audio level was consistently 6db low, so obviously I haven't got it fiqured out yet!

Regarding Vegas, which I've been using at home for a freelance project for the past month or so, the meter tops out at +0.2. I read somwhere you're supposed to keep the peaks below zero and and above -6, which is yet another standard for me to remember.

It just seems like when digital audio came in, standardization went out. Anyway, that's my rant and I'm sticking to it.

Try this link:

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/spottedeagle_douglas/audio_mastering/index.html