Thanks for sharing! Quick question : how do you use LUFS metering when making sound effects ? What should we aim for in terms of loudness ? Or do you use this just as a reference to make sure you're just not too low ?
(Edit: not sure why RU-vid struck a line through some of my text below, but please disregard that!) Hey there, thanks for watching :) This is a great question. LUFS metering can be especially useful when we want to keep our assets at a uniform level, usually as a premixing step. That is, if you owned all of the ambience audio design for a video game, it would be beneficial to mandate several LUFS values that you would export your assets at to make mixing in middleware or in-engine easier (eg: - 18 LUFS for close-medium proximity sounds, -23 LUFS for distant sounds, etc.) In my opinion, mandating this is essential when working on large-scale projects that could easily have hundreds of thousands of audio assets. This sort of uniformity allows you to confidently lower or boost a whole subgroup of assets in one broad stroke, rather than level matching them all and THEN performing a boost or attenuation. Getting this right at the source level will make your life way easier down the road :) As far as what LUFS value we should aim for: with video games, it's sort of the Wild West. Most projects I've been on adhere to an average of -23 LUFS Integrated over an hour of gameplay, +/- a few LUFS values to account for big moments or more subdued, quiet slices of gameplay. As it pertains to this video, I didn't approach designing the assets with any values in mind, I was just jamming. I find that most sounds I work on in my free time tend to end up in the -18 LUFS-I to -23 LUFS-I range, as I try to avoid overcompressing them. I'm mainly using the metering as a tool to check the phase coherence while avoiding being tooooo loud. However, when I'm mixing music, those loudness standards tend to be much different haha
