Update* Attempting to get perfect levels is not always a good idea. So I do suggest for you to try to keep the target range -14.3 to -14.5. Even if you seemingly get it "Perfect" RU-vid may have DRC(Dynamic range Compression) so it is better to be almost perfect and it will be within the perfect range.
I am very happy to hear that! I tried to be as direct to the point about this as possible. If you have any questions or are confused about anything I didnt cover, feel free to ask.
Thanks! Yes sir, once i understood the stats for nerds, it was very easy to figure out how things worked on youtubes end. Happy you had mentioned about that!
@@chadmullins7553 Im from Germany and I don't understand every single word, but the way you explain and visualize it makes it really simple to understand and helps me a lot ! Keep going man
I also recommend playing your final mix to make sure it sounds ok. Sometimes the mix isn’t quite right after processing. I generally aim for -15 or -16 LUFS to allow some wriggle room when YT does its processing.
I just took a quick glance at your channel. Not in-depth, just a Quick Look. I see the audio levels are all over the place, which is what I hoped to solve for many people with this tutorial. If you are still having issues even when doing this, feel free to come back and leave more comments with questions, I will be happy to help you figure out the issue and get it corrected.
Happy to help! Audio is the least viewed stuff here, but it is the most important. Take good care of your audio and people will be far more comfortable watching your videos.
@@chadmullins7553 I just checked the stats for my last 2 vids. -2.81 and -1.8 for doing it blindly I think it was not that bad. But now I'm aiming at that 0.0dB. 😎
Always leave the ceiling to -1.0 for RU-vid, not -0.1, not -0.2 or others. -15 lufs is not bad if you don't hit -14 lufs perfectly. And Stealth Limiter from IK T-RackS 5 (or 6) is the perfect transparent maximizer/ limiter
Thanks for the feedback. yes, I always leave the sealing at -1 for RU-vid. And I have recently been bringing my videos down to around -14.2 to -14.4 as there has been some Dynamic Range Compression, even if it was nearly perfect. I have eliminated any DRC by lowering it slightly.
@@chadmullins7553 -1.0 db should be a very generous margin for people that (watch and) listen to your videos on their crappy phones or very bad smart tvs or other youtube connected devices with very bad DACs.
I am a noob when it comes audio in DR. Does this process normalize the audio volume levels? - for example, sometimes my wife says her opening greeting louder than her regular speaking volume throughout her video. To fix this-I isolate the audio by cutting around it and manually drag her level bar down. Is your process taking care of this, too ? Thanks, Chad. Jerry
Yes and no... I will do my best to explain as simply as I can. Hopefully you can understand as it's difficult to figure some things out which are written. It may help normalize that, however it could still leave a loud portion, like where she first talks. What I suggest you do is not cut around it. Rather you can make adjustments on the timeline without doing that. Zoom in as far as you can to see the audio you would like to adjust well. You should see a gray or white line the cuts through the audio wave. If you do see that, you can simply place your mouse cursor over that white line before the audio waveform, hold option and click on it. A little dot will appear on that which is like a keyframe. You can make another one right next to that dot, then go to the other side of the wave form and do the same thing putting 2 dots on the other side. Once you have those two dots, you can click on one of the middle dots and it will lower the waveform between those two dots. Another thing you could do would depend on if you are doing a jump cut. If you are doing a jump cut and the audio is high were she starts speaking, just hover the mouse over the audio at the beginning and the top left should have a little fader thing. that you can click and drag over. Just grab that and drag it in a few frames and see how that does. If none of this works, than you should find a tutorial of some sort, however I do plan to create another audio video as this information is important to cover. I have had quite a few questions that some people would like cleared up. So feel free to drop more questions and I will try to include the visuals in the next audio video.
I actually shoot my video directly on camera. So both my intro, call outs and circle mask are all done on Canon R6 in 4k. The screen recordings I record with OBS with a 4k resolution. At some point, I will be making a video about how I make videos for RU-vid. Might be a while for that though, but definitely going to be doing it.
Another helpful video. However, I didn't normalize the audio before getting the right levels using the limiter. I like to make a lot of cuts to just drop the audio if there is background noise or some other unwanted sounds. When I normalized it, it returned the dropped levels back to normal. For a long video with a lot of cuts, it's just too much of a pain to go through and fix them again. So, I did everything else and got the levels correct using the limiter. Thanks.
I see... If you have an editing technique that is already working, it is a good idea to stick with it. Maybe in the future videos, you can do the normalization before making the cuts, then you will be able to edit them independently after you make the cuts. Something else you can do is make an adjustment on the audio itself without making a cut. You can simple hold the alt or option key then click on the line that cuts through the waveform. when doing that, it adds a keyframe to the line. Do that two times before the section you want to bring up or down and 2 times after it, then you can raise and lower the sounds. Doing it that way will avoid the crackling sound that happens on some exports from the cuts in the audio.
@@laservius Hope it works! A couple of people have mentioned something similar, so maybe I will do a video with this specific type of thing in an upcoming video. I only have 2 videos for audio in a playlist, so need to make some more.
@@chadmullins7553 I think that would be a good idea. Another reason that I like cutting the video/audio is that I am able to fade in and out of clips. Sometimes I breath hard, or say a final consonant (ex. s or f) too hard or too long. By cutting it and putting a nice fade out on the clip, it softens those sounds.
@@laservius totally understand! The microphone can pick up some weird sounds haha… I try to cut out my breathing and other things that get picked up too.
Learned a lot from your video. Was able to adjust a video to perfect levels. But have a question. The bounce track shows the changes but when I check the original track it still shows the old value after normalization. What am I missing?
This is a great question. If you have the studio version, you can utilize the dialogue leveler (pretty sure it's studio only). From there you will be able to do a more accurate optimization on the timeline. Currently, DaVinci Resolve has launched 19 and a lot of things have changed since then, so I am going to be doing another video which is going to cover a whole lot more of things to get the perfect audio levels. The tutorial is still good, however I can optimize it with some updates in the coming future.
so, I have a few question: - if I normalize the bounced track, does it affect the original tracks as well? Or should I even tried to normalize the Bounced track at all? - when I export, D.R will export the Bus 1 audio track right? - Can I wait until the very end of video editing, to Normlize the tracks? I used to bounce them all into one track THEN normalize the bounced track. Is it the correct way to do it?
@@Truck_Kun_Driver thanks for asking! Doing it that way will definitely affect the audio negatively. Wait until the end of the video for audio normalization. Always do this part last, before the export. Normalize the audio on the timeline, then bounce the mix to the track and analyze the audio. Do not normalize the bounce track at all. The bounce track is only for analyzing the audio so you can see what the levels are. Once you have it all normalized properly, then you delete the bounced track. The bounced audio is a dirty audio and not quality, so you must delete it
@@Truck_Kun_Driver I did just make an updated version of this video. You might want to watch this one as it will have more clear instructions and workflow ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H22V1-quGYU.html
So the bust one is all the audio in one? So when deleting the bounce, the limter settings are still saved onto the whole audio track? Is that what is it?
These are all great questions and I will do my best to answer them all fully. Starting with the Bus 1. All of your audio tracks will merge into Bus 1 and that is what you will output for your video. You will set your limiter on the Bus 1, so all tracks that you have on the timeline will flow through that limiter. The bounce track... When you bounce your audio, all as it does is puts all of the audio directly down onto 1 track. It's kind of a like a dirty mix. Which is why it's very important to delete. When you analyze it after setting your limiter, you are only analyzing what the bounce track is going out of the bus1, if you are analyzing that track. So that way you are getting a pretty accurate readout. If you do not trust it fully, you can do everything manually, but it takes a lot longer as you would have to play the entire video through in order to measure the LUFFS. However, I have had great success doing it the way I have shown in the tutorial. I hope I made sense of things for you. If not and you have more questions, feel free to ask! I am always happy to help!
The first thing I do is make sure the audio is balanced from both speakers, next step is to normalize audio levels for RU-vid. From that point, I would cut the entire timeline, then add in sound effects, then finally the music and be sure to normalize it all for RU-vid. The last thing I do before exporting is bounce the mix to analyze it and get it set as it should be. So it is a process throughout the entire thing.
For some reason every time I delete my bounce track it also deletes an audio and video clip from the ones I want to keep... and they are not selected...
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I am sorry you are having an issue. This sounds very strange and I have never seen it happen, nor heard of it... It sound like some kind of a glitch. It may be a good idea to shut down and restart DVR and try again. That may fix the problem if it is a simple bug.
Sorry to hear it is filling up your disk. Your issue with hard drive space would be because of the cache files. If you want to learn how to clear them check this tutorial ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5JicuLqRqLw.html Beyond that, you should learn what settings to use to keep the cache files small than you should learn how to use the project settings, if you haven't figured that already. You can see that with this tutorial here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ve6lDMTJ2BQ.html But please let me know what type of computer you are using? Windows? Mac? and I can give some suggestions then.
@@ROBBIEDZthere are a couple of things you can do… First is adjust the individual tracks. If you have your voice in track one and your game play on track 2, then adjust your gameplay track in the mixer. If it is sound effects, a good starting point would be around -22. If there is a music track than around -28 or -30 would be a good starting point. If you have the studio version of DaVinci resolve, you can use the audio sucker feature. It’s hard for me to explain it out right this minute, so I will recommend you check he video I have for my audio workflow. A Simple Audio Workflow For DaVinci Resolve ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-i_sBTYcubIs.html You can learn a lot about this specifically here.
I had uploaded it before with 0.0, but forgot a sound effect and had done a new export and upload of the video, which brought it down to -0.1. Its so close, I didnt want to worry about that. Have you checked any of the videos you have uploaded?
That is a really great questions, but I have not been uploading to instagram, so I am not 100% sure of the correct settings. I will be looking into to it to see if it is similar or the same as RU-vid.
Since I have been asked a couple of times, I did just look into it bit, but keep in mind I haven to uploaded there. Instagram does not state what it actually requires, so it is kind of difficult to get the measurement stats like we do from RU-vid. However, instagram is using mostly cell phones, so they have a preference to slightly quieter content than RU-vid. You can still use the RU-vid settings, but try to go down between -14 and -16 lufs for instagram. Hope that helps
Hey! Not exactly... It's more of a process. You have to make an adjustment, analyze what you have done, then make further adjustments. Everyone's audio and every videos audio is going to be different. So the settings will differ. Just have to figure out what is right for the sound that you have in each of them.
I am sorry to hear that... Which version of DaVinci Resolve are you using? Which location are you attempting to normalize them as well? On the edit page? There should be an option for you, if not I will figure out another solution which can help.
I have found a way we could adjust this manually if necessary. However, I would hope we can figure out what your issue is so you wouldn't have to do it that way. I did take a quick glance at your channel and see you could use some audio improvements and the audio normalization is your main issue. So it would be a good idea for us to figure it out together to get your channel uploads to the right standards.
I genuinely think most people are trying to help, but after manually editing every bit of audio to literally just my ears & what makes sense logically, every single time I have ever tried these tips my audio is indescribably destroyed. I am talking so jokingly bad it is truly pathetic that these options were ever invented. I seriously have not been able to figure out how people have ever come to the conclusion that any of these tips are anything but immeasurably damaging to peoples audio. I did everything step by step by the way at no point did I deviate, even my audio tracks are separated so my talking, effects, & music are all on separate tracks. It is not user error. So far I have not been able to figure out anything even remotely close to helpful dealing with audio other than manually making everything sound normal to my ears. What youtube does later is out of my hands, but Ive looked audio tricks up about yearly trying to find a better method only to be indescribably disappointed at just how jokingly awful the guides are for me. For the people out there that in some magical fantasy land this helps, Im glad ya got something out of it. Im just glad Im wise enough to always test this on a secondary project file lol.
I am sorry that you can not figure this out. This is an incredibly negative viewpoint, which not many people can help you with, if you are not really interested in being helped. However, I do help a lot of people and would like to help you. First thing I suggest you do is ask questions and create a conversation out of it. There is obviously something outside of the settings that could be causing these issues for you. So if you will, let's discuss it further. First, what sound device are you using to monitor your audio when you are editing? A set of headphones? If so, which kind? If not, what are you using to do this? Next, your audio normalization and export settings are causing issues on your channel. I checked your videos stats for nerds and see content normalization over 10 dbfs, which means you aren to doing it correctly. So this would land on user error, not the tutorial. I am very happy to help you fix these issues and guide you to proper audio, if you allow it. But that does all depend on you. Feel free to ask questions and answer them. We will get your stuff going great!
@@chadmullins7553 Thanks for the reply, its not fair I blow it all at you, but I have tried from the start about 4 years ago & what has happened is I invest sometimes half a day like this off day really trying to understand it & it simply doesn't work for me like in the video. In the past I did comment & ask questions, but you are the first person that responded & offered help. Im not gonna name & honestly can't remember, but I just know those comments didn't get answered in the past. I don't use normalize to go over my entire timeline at all because when I do the easiest & fastest way I can explain it is it just sounds like someone maxed the volume on everything even with me doing just talking track, even the background music goes from sounding normal at home to me to also being maxed out. I can't hear my voice very well, cant hear the effects, & for the vids you see that I haven't wiped or made private that is literally me just manually doing everything. At no point do I use the normalize or other detailed features. Maybe there is some standard presetting that is not in the sections that pop up, but as far as following your tutorial to the letter I did. I will admit that even downloading manually new versions of Davinci is a headache to me so I don't actually see a RU-vid option. That or you have the paid option, but you can see I had problems with audio 4 years ago so the latest model of Davinci isnt really the issue. What I did to try & follow your steps was I just chose one, but then changed both the db & the other setting to -.1 & the -14 or whatever. I did make sure to have the correct numbers but I dont have DR open so Im not looking at the file & I also did not save it because like I mentioned it totally makes everything maxed out volume. Honestly all my vids are just based off how loud the typical youtube video sounds to me while I watch youtube through my PC speakers, just some cheap ones but they work fine. So when I play back the video within DR I just make sure it sounds close to what normal volume I listen to videos at. I record my voice on headphones, but once thats doen my editing is mostly just through the speakers I use. But I could play my video exported onto my PC then watch several youtube videos & they sound similar to me in overall volume. I don't like things very loud. I have wanted to learn very much so bro. My first comment was 4 years & probably 6 attempts each time spending at least 3 hours trying to watch & understand it, but then I mirror the steps & seem to always get the same bogus results on my end. I don't honestly know what happens from the time it leaves DR to my PC, then placed onto youtube, but like you said it does get messed up. That frustrates me even more because its not like Im changing my speaker volume so if others have good audio & mine sounds close to that, why is it getting warped & youtube overlords ruining it? If I uploaded the video with the audio under the steps I took you would definitely see what Im talking about everything just seems maxed & 100% youtube would change that cuz my speakers it comes out so so loud. You can see I havent made anything in a while, but I remember a few times after manually changing all audio files which you can understand takes eons in itself, I've exported to my PC I never try to upload right to youtube thing. & I have tweaked the volume down overall by adjusting I think the master volume or whatever, then export again & watch my video over again. Im doing everything the hard way. If I have to Im not complaining, but I have wanted to figure out smoother better methods of editing. If people knew how many hours it takes for me to make a little music video they would laugh at me. At least 5-600 tiny mini cuts, slowed, sped-up, color altered, new effects tested & tried. Im ok for now with editing the hard way. Im so meticulous that I would probably prefer it that way anyway. But the audio I really would love to know the basics & not be so clueless even after pouring in 20-30 hours over the years. I want to start a new series of videos & invest a lot more time with it so if I could figure out how to get normal audio without the "normalize" or other features screeching my audio files into the sky I would be very happy. My speakers are cheapo kind it just says "CREATIVE" on the front, but I think my biggest issue is the volume skyrocketing to super max loud even if the dbs say its -14.
@@chadmullins7553 With how poorly youtube runs you can't tell if someone deletes a comment, if its shadow-banned, entirely erased, or simply malfunctioning where you can see it but I don't, but Im not seeing my very detailed reply which leads back in a loop to the first comment. Almost always ignored completely, given false promises then quickly ignored, or youtube just makes it so difficult because you say some word that is somehow banned or something like 'cheese' or something ridiculous like that.
@@chadmullins7553 AH, yeah Ive been seeing youtubers mention that many times its not them deleting comments they just don't see it. The shortest version is everything just all gets super loud. It like everything just max volumes even when I set the dbs & such where it says & I don't know what setting or feature that could be making that happen.
@@chadmullins7553 My last was a negative 5.5 question though maybe I missed it so you normalize everything to negative 14 even your background music? Usually I set the track levels lower on the music and sound effects, and if you delete the mix dosent the limiter also get deleted. I had really bad audio lol, watched a lot about it never that knew I’ll have to try it. Great video thougj
@@SleevelessMTG Set your audio levels as you normally do. All of your sliders are set however you usually set them. On the timeline, you will normalize the audio to youtube standards, which will change the dynamic range of that track. However, you levels will still be set from your sliders. Everything pipes into the bus track which is what we put the limiter on. That will allow you to optimize the the overall range of the audio. and yes, you will want to delete the bounced track before you export. That is not a quality audio for use. It is only to help speed up the process of analyzing the audio. It gives a very close judgement on what the audio levels are.