sorry, didn't quite catch that......

Marconi, an inventor of radio and audio devices? This was my attempt at "imagining" Marconi's response to our friend here turning down volumes to -31db and wondering why the audio was so low, and why he had done so.

Grazie

I use those settings when rendering from Vegas*, not in DVDA, and they produce the correct level every time.
(Grazie, it's Dialogue normalization under the Audio Service tab that is set to -31db, not the volume.)

At what stage in the Vegas/DVDA workflow did you apply Noise Reduction?

Just to set the record straight, Marconi did not invent radio, it was my personal hero, Nikola Tesla. The fact that Tesla invented radio was backed up by a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943. Marconi was using a number of Tesla's patents.

By the way, a lot of people credit Thomas Edison with inventing the electrical power system, it was actually Nikola Tesla (again.) Tesla's alternating current system powers the entire world. Edison was pushing a direct current sytem that would have required a power generating station on every city block since DC can't be transmitted very far at all.

. . I just KNEW I should've stayed in bed today.

Thanks Guys - My apologies . . .

Grazie . . . ..

Wow, Peter! I've used AC-3 for all my DVDA setups and never ever looked at the Default Normalization setting. Here it is -27dB, but I COULD also have picked off -31dB. Now, in hindsight, why would I go even lower?

So this is about Normalization. How come our chum here is very quiet stuff then? Normalization wouldn't do that - eh, right?

Well, I have learnt at least 4 things in just this ONE thread.

What value!

Grazie

There is something that people fail to understand about Dolby digtal (AC3) and that is that it was never really built to belt out things at a single, constant and loud volume. AC3 was built to playout over a very wide range of softness and loudness varying its levels from one extreme to the other. Of course you don't HAVE to run it this way if you don't want to... you can normalize everything to 0db if you wish or even use a compressor, boost the input and then level all the peaks out at 0db. You'll get a loud and constant volume this way.... but you'll also lose all your dynamic range.

So yes... if you're looking for loudness then continue to use the settings that you are and just simply normalize everything to 0db.... won't sound exactly like AC3 though.... just a constant volume coming out of 6 speakers.

I can't offer you any tech response, Grazie, but the settings were, I think, discovered by Ed Troxel, years ago, and have been discussed here many times. I've never known why "default" didn't keep volume the same, but Ed's settings, under the "Maintain Level" template I've saved, keep levels where they already were!

Blink and Pete - thank you. I'll go and re-read the "Edward" threads on it. Maybe NOW it will stick to my brain cell.

However, our poor OP doesn't have a solution - yet?

Grazie

"Now, in hindsight, why would I go even lower?"

http://etvcookbook.org/audio/dialnorm.html

There's also a technical paper from Dolby that's around 150 pages on this topic. I will not pretend that I understand it fully however in general the dialog normal value should reflect how loud speech is in your program. The one time I've been somewhere that had the metering system to show the setting used for content being broadcast -27dB was the value it was displaying. The intent is that all program content will be subjectively the same loudness to the listener depending on the environment they are listening in.
For example you generally have a much larger dynamic range in a cinema than in a lounge room.

I'd tended to leave it at -27dB however setting it to -31dB seems to cause the decoder to make no adjustment to what comes out of it which seems to be what most people desire even though this is not how the system is meant to be used.

Bob.

Going along with Peter's suggestion, would it be possible, Al, that you have rendered using the NR with the Keep Noise check box - checked? This would have the effect of a rendered out lowered signal.

Grazie

however setting it to -31dB seems to cause the decoder to make no adjustment to what comes out of it which seems to be what most people desire even though this is not how the system is meant to be used. - Thanks bob, I think (?).

Okey dokey, just brought VP9 to its knobbly-knees by testing out NR on a piece. Had to close VP9 down.

Grazie

FWIW, I have always left dialogue normalization alone (at it's default.... -27) merely for the fact that it really doesn't do much (at the settings I use anyway (dynamic range compression:none, Complete mains):


Here's my original track set


Here's a render at dialogue norm of -1 (opened in Audition)


And here we are at -31

"Dialogue normal" has nothing to do with normalization.

It is (or should be set to) the average (RMS) values of the normal dialogue in the program.

Bob.

Blink,

I am well versed in various audio encoding schemes, WMA, MP3, AC3, etc. Your last post on the subject makes no technical sense whatsoever. There is no such thing as a "single, constant and loud volume" unless you have generated a tone or a set of tones at a fixed amplitude. Any normal audio will have some dynamic range, pretty much regardless of how much it's compressed.

AC3 isn't specifically designed to provide any more or less dynamic range than WMA, MP3 or any other psychoacoustic encoding scheme.

However, unlike other audio encoding methods, AC3 does provide a mechanism to reduce the dynamic range and control the overall volume, but if the OP set his encode to -31db and set the line mode profile and RF mode profile to none, then the resulting AC3 audio should have the same levels and dynamic range as the original unencoded audio. I have decoded and measured AC3 audio encoded with these setting and can confirm that no level or dynamic range modification takes place.

There is something else causing the apparent loss of audio level. How is the comparison being made? Perhaps the media player used to play the resulting DVD has a volume control which is not set to maximum.

By the way, Adobe Audition doesn't pay any attention to the "Dialog Normalization" setting. It doesn't change the actual encoded data, it is merely a flag which tells the DVD player where to set what is probably best described as the "virtual volume control."

This volume issue is probably every new (!) Vegas user's culprit!!!

I stumbled over this same issue during the first DVD's I burned. The audio level vwas very low and I could not understand why, nor could I find out a reason for it, evein if tearing out some hair. This forum was the place from were I found the solution - NOT the Vegas/DVDA documentation...

One would assume that what you have mixed and adjusted at the track level - should stay as-is - all the way to the final DVD. That is how the DEFAULT should be set, at least for the majority of the Vegas users!!!

Or at least , there should be a WARNING and instructions provided in the documentation, how to burn an 1:1 version of the audio track you have on the timeline, if that is what you (mostly) desire. My guess is that there are lots of DVD's burnt with too low audio, even with folks not ever noticing it. They just increase the volume during playback by some 10..15db on the TV set (together with noise and hum and distortion). Very few of us really make "movies", where the AC3 Pro coding is really useful, for preserving the highest possible dynamics for the audience... That should be the option - not the standard setup. My humble but experienced opinion... So tell me, who else stubled in this hole as a Vegas noob?

Christian

"There is no such thing as a "single, constant and loud volume" unless you have generated a tone or a set of tones at a fixed amplitude."

Of course you're right... the only constant volume is something like a steady tone.... but that's not what I mean... and you SHOULD have figured that out John. I mean a constant, steady, even volume PRESSURE across all speakers. The center speaker is supposed to be softer than the rest for example so that when a bomb blast goes off there is a tremendous increase in volume pressure throughout the room.

Many home theater receivers have what's called "night listening" now and what it does is evens out the volume pressure and gain though all the speakers so that you don't have these huge volume differences from one scene to another.

I trust we're on the same wave length now John?

"By the way, Adobe Audition doesn't pay any attention to the "Dialog Normalization" setting. It doesn't change the actual encoded data, it is merely a flag which tells the DVD player where to set what is probably best described as the "virtual volume control."

Thank you for explaining that.

This is, I believe, what the OP was referring to. I've used it since then and found it to work perfectly--even in v9.

Here's the thread mentioned by Edward on DVi that goes into a little more detail.

I love this forum, learn a ton from it... but sometimes while reading I remember some character named Cliff Clavin

The settings the OP used will give him unity gain. No louder, no softer than by any other means. I ran a ton of tests to verify this, with both stable test tones, and good quality program material. The results were the same every time.

If his audio is too soft in the output using these settings, then it is too soft in the Vegas mix. He needs to adjust his faders and / or boost the volume envelopes equally to compensate. Normalizing all tracks would destroy his mix ratios, so he would have to start over.

If anyone wants to read the Dolby manual you can get it from here. A quick look at Section 4.4 (Page 42) shows that the default values Vegas uses follows Dolby's recommendations.
There's also a section on setting the correct value for the dial normal values along with a recommendation that you obtain Dolby's reference CD. The best (only) advice I've read on how to do this correctly requires Sound Forge as Vegas does not have the metering required to do this. In Sound Forge you can use the Statistics to get the RMS value of your program and use that. It's not 100% correct but should be close enough. I have to say it didn't quite work for me however it's quite likely that my DVD player was also not setup correctly. In the end I gave up on my intention of trying to do it right and just went with the settings that originated in Jet's article.

I really wish there was a simpler to follow concise guide on doing this right. We all seem to be bypassing Dolby's intended use of ac3 but their document is way too long and even as you do attempt to wade through it you're referred to even more documents.
Then again maybe ignorance is bliss.

Bob