Clip Volume

ericlast wrote on 5/30/2005, 7:41 PM

I've started putting together my first project...making a video from DV footage of my daughter's concert. The files already existed on my hard drive (they were captured by Ulead VideoStudio, which I'm happily no longer using).

After gathering the files in the media pool, I found that a few of the individual scenes had volume that was too low. Is there a way to boost the volume for individual clips on a track, without raising the volume of the whole track? As a former user of both Ulead and Pinnacle software, I know that they had a "rubber band" volume control, which allowed you to raise or lower the volume level of an individual section of audio by simply dragging the volume level in the audio graph. Anything similar in Movie Studio?
(I do have access to the Sound Forge software Sony bundled with my PC, and have set it as the default audio editing program for MovieStudio.)

Comments

IanG wrote on 5/31/2005, 12:43 AM

Select the audio track you want to change and type "V" (without the quotes!). This will bring up a volume envelope - a blue line. Double clicking on the line will add anchor points and you can drag the volume up or down between pairs of points.

Ian G.

ericlast wrote on 5/31/2005, 5:20 AM

Ian -

AWESOME!

I assumed there had to be an easy way...just couldn't figure it out.

Thanks!!!

Eric

Lawrence wrote on 5/31/2005, 10:19 AM

You can click on media properties of the audio event and tick the "Normalise".
This will helps to raise the volume of the audio up for the whole track too.

Elmo27376 wrote on 6/2/2005, 1:15 PM

Thanks, IanG, that comment came at just the right time. Eric must have figured it out but I didn't have the commen sense to realize that two anchor points are needed at each end of the portion of audio to be altered, one at each end to anchor the audio that is not to be changed and one at each end inside of these to define the portion to be altered.

I posted this in case someone else didn't figure it out.

ericlast wrote on 6/2/2005, 6:28 PM

Yes, Elmo, I was able to figure it out (but only b'cause I've had the frustrating experience of doing similar stuff in Ulead and Pinnacle for a few years!)

Another question...is it better to use the envelope process with the anchor points, or to use Lawrence's suggestio to use the Normalize function???

Chienworks wrote on 6/2/2005, 7:26 PM

Normalize increases the volume uniformly over the entire event. Any parts that were quieter will still be just as much quieter after normalizing because the louder parts were increased by the same amount too. However, that being the case, i've had good success with splitting the clip into various parts where the volume changes drastically and normalizing each section independantly. This allows quieter sections to be raised more than louder sections. Keep in mind though that the amount of increase is limited by the loudest point in that section. If the clip is mostly at -25db and there is one peak at -2dB, the entire clip can only be raised by 2dB. In a case like that you would want to split it so that the -2dB peak is in it's own small section.

If you have more than a few places in which you need to change the volume by a different amount than other places then a volume envelope is probably easier. Volume envelopes also allow for smooth changes from one level to another. Using split and normalize can cause rather jarring jumps in volume level.