Audio levels for DVD output

B

bigmouthmedia

Active member
I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I'll give it a try :)

I've got a corporate that I'm ready to output for a DVD master to duplicate so I want to get it right.
I'm trying to find a sweet spot for audio levels for it - at the moment I have a Waves limiter that pushes it to -6db.

I've also applied voice levellers to the interview tracks as they vary widely in parts. So it has mild compression across the board.
When playing it on my DVD player it seems better than leaving it with no limiting at all, almost distorted sounding even if not peaking on the VU's.

Any suggestions ?
 
Audio levels are always tough to hit right in some cases. I dont use Logic, however when you play it back in your DVD editing software this should give you the best reproduction, especially if you have it connected to a Production monitor and your sound is pushed into it. This way it should give you the closest reproduction. I do this for my events and many times what I did in post audio is not what sounds good and I have to redo it till it sounds good coming out of a monitor ion different TV's. I push mine to -3 with talking heads and everything else much lower. make 2 copies and have someone else watch and see which one they like better, often helps me as sometimes I get way to involved and lose sight of what it really sounds like. Hope this helps.
 
The real question here is what's going to happen in your next steps. If you're going to leave it as uncompressed .aif/.wav 48khz then what you hear is what you'll get. The thing is though, that hardly anyone uses that codec for DVD as it takes up too much bandwidth. Dolby .ac3 is way more common, but now you might run into some issues with the compression settings. If you just drag and drop into any old Dolby encoder then it will probably apply some kind of filter to it and that often lowers the perceived volume, especially on vocals. Some people compensate by letting their master audio go near clipping, but now you'll be triggering another issue down the road with DVD players that have AGC (Automatic Gain Control) enabled by default. Apple is notorious for this. Any loud sound like a clap or gunshot will trigger the next couple seconds of audio to drop about 6db. You'll really notice this if you have a music bed under your main audio track. BTW, to disable this you have to go to Preferences>Disc Setup>Audio and check the "Disable Dolby dynamic range compression" option. Who do you know that's ever done that on their player?
So what to do? Best practice I guess in your situation would be to master like you have to -6db and then encode your .ac3 with no filter. Then test the crap out of it. Play it in a bunch of players and laptops, desktops, PC and Mac and see how you like it.
 
Thanks so far guys...I ended up mastering with a Waves L1 Maximiser to -10db, with an Apple plugin for levelling the interviews on two tracks, did a nice mix in Audition from Premiere (love the ease of the round trip) - it's off to the mastering :)
 
I use the Loudness Radar to set my levels, keeping voices at the border between the dark and light green. Going into yellow is fine for music and effects, but too loud for dialog. Dipping into the blue is too quiet.
 
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