Normalising levels in an audio soundtrack.

Question

Normalising levels in an audio soundtrack.

Hi People,

I've started doing wedding videos to pay the pills inbetween my personal creative projects.

At the minute (until I make some money) I'm not using radio mics, just the mic on my camera. The last wedding I did the Father of the Bride/Best Man/Groom speeches went on for about 30 minutes and there is alot of shouting and clapping from the guests that is peaking regularly on my audio meters.

Now as i'm still quite new to FCE, my plan was to go into the audio track and manually make nodes and pull the level down each time the audio is peaking, but this will be very very time consuming.

I was talking to my friend who is a music producer about it and he said there might be an "audio compressor or gate" that could do this for me. To be honnest I don't really understand what that means or if there is such a thing in FCE?

Any help would be much appreciated,

Scott

Message was edited by: Scottofshields

iMac 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, iOmega UltraMax 1TB Hard drive., Mac OS X (10.0.x)

Posted on May 5, 2009 4:18 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

May 5, 2009 5:34 AM in response to Scottofshields

A compressor filter can do this kind of thing, but this doesn't sound like appropriate material. It's really used to level out speech or music to keep the level constant, but you need the level to go up and down to give you highs and lows. You don't want to flatten out the applause too much. Of course if it's distorted there isn't much you can do, even reducing the level won't really fix it.

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Answer 2

MartinR

Level 7

24,354 points

May 5, 2009 6:37 AM in response to Scottofshields

Scott,
In order to normalize your audio, you'll have to go outside FCE. Export your audio track to AIFF, stereo, 16-bit; then import it into almost any audio editing app. From there, experiment with the Normalize filter and possibly also the Compressor. When you're done, save the file; and re-import the audio back into FCE.

Normalizing and Compression are not the same effects, but depending on your material (and how pleasing the results sound to you) one or the other may help with your sound track. I would try Compression first (and that filter is built into FCE, so you do not have to export your audio tracks just to apply Compression). Read up on it first at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiolevelcompression - audio compression is an art.

I'm sure you appreciate that in the future you should mic your subjects and use a mixer for that extra degree of control during the event.

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Answer 3

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

May 5, 2009 6:45 AM in response to MartinR

There is a normalize function in FCE4, but this is definitely not what you want.

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Answer 4

MartinR

Level 7

24,354 points

May 5, 2009 12:14 PM in response to Tom Wolsky

You know, I thought there was a normalize audio capability in FCE4 but when I looked for it I couldn't find it under audio filters (where I expected it to be). Then I discovered it's a command (Modify > Audio > Apply Normalization Gain). Duh ... RTFM ...

Although, imho, that's an obscure place to put the function; I would certainly rather see it under the audio filters. Obviously I haven't used it in FCE ...

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Answer 5

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

May 5, 2009 12:39 PM in response to MartinR

It actually does apply a filter, the Gain filter. I think it's in there, because, unlike other filters, it calls up a dialog box when it's activated to allow you to enter a specific target decibel level.

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