This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] A Normalize Question for Anyone Out There

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Re: [Avid-L2] A Normalize Question for Anyone Out There

Hi Mark, and a special Happy New Year. You may be right that I'm not understanding the normalize process. I'm not really a technician. I marked the tracks for the entire program and normalized in and out. Overall, that lifted the audio levels to max, which is fine. Since many were recorded too low, just raising the gain didn't get me much compared to what normalize does. Are you saying I need to treat "unnormalized" clip separately? In most cases the non-normalized clips are too low compared to the rest of the segment, even from the same interview. A few are noticeably higher, again from the same interview, excerpted from only a few seconds apart. Is there a way to adjust the normalization clip by clip, rather than reverting to gain, which doesn't produce a high enough audio level?
Again, I appreciate your prompt and helpful response.
Jon

On 1/1/2015 3:09 PM, Mark Spano cutandcover@gmail.com [Avid-L2] wrote:

Are you sure you're using the tools correctly? Normalilze is a gain change to set the highest peak in a clip to a set level. That means that if your clip has a single sample at -0.1 dBFs, and you want to normalize the clip to 0 dBFs, you will effectively be changing the gain by +0.1 dBFs. It's worth analyzing your clip to see if there is any point where there's a peak that is significantly higher than the majority of the rest of the clip. Then you can see why normalizing isn't going to do anything.

It seems you may really just be in the market for a gain change. The gain change will increase the level of the clip by the amount you set. If there is a portion where audio clips at 0 dBFs, well, that portion is toast anyway, so adding more gain to it isn't likely to hurt since you probably aren't using that spot anyway.

On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Jon Wilkman jon@wilkman.com [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I'm finishing a one-hour documentary as a personal favor for a friend.
A major component of the project are interviews, with varying audio
levels. I've normalized all the edited audio clips and that seems to
work, expect for a few exceptions, when the levels are ignored. In some
cases, these are clips from the same interview that was successfully
normalized elsewhere. I've tried re-rendering and even re-normalizing
the segment where the levels change, with no success. Does anyone have
any suggestions of how to correct non-normalized clips in an otherwise
normalized sequence? I'm thinking the problem may come from trying to
do an entire hour at a time. Would splitting it into smaller segments
(e.g. 20 minutes) help. MC 7.03.
Happy New Year!
Jon