I need to match the audio levels in my video. Time is very limit!

Kevin M.

Newbie Location: Oceanside, Long Island, NY Joined: Oct 03, 2014 11:06 Messages: 40 Offline

Solved by

Nov 24, 2014 15:17

I am now 99.9% finished with my very first video that I created in PD13. It's taken about 70 hours over the past 4 weeks to create this 14-minute montage. And I have learned SO MUCH. I will be showing this video to 75 people at my wife's birthday party in only 4 more days! Yikes!

Anyway, I am having trouble setting the audio levels properly...and would greatly appreciate any hints or suggestions to get me through this last step before I burn the DVD.

What I have is two songs, followed by 20 short video clips that each guest e-mailed to me in which they wish my wife Happy Birthday. The problem is that the volume or gain of each of the two songs seems very different from that of each of the video clips. (I do not understand the difference or the relationship between these terms, but I would love to know more if you can point me towards a good source for that!)

After spending many hours adjusting the individual volume levels of each of the 22 audio clips (the two songs plus the twenty video clips), members of this forum told me about the Normalize button in the Audi Mixing Room. So...I clicked "Restore original volume level" on each of the audio clips and THEN clicked on Normalize. However, all of the audio levels still seem to be different. Specifically, if I adjust the two songs to sound good, then several of the video clips audios are way too loud and vice versa.

Any help would be appreciated as I have an appointment TOMORROW to test the final DVD on the two 60" monitors on the which it will be displayed to the audience.

THANKS in advance!
Kevin

Attached hereto are two screenshots to let you see what I see.

Filename	Screenshot of Production Area.doc	Download
Description	Screenshot of entire production area
Filesize	25 Kbytes
Downloaded:	283 time(s)

Filename	Screen shot of audio track.doc	Download
Description	Screenshot of audio track
Filesize	25 Kbytes
Downloaded:	291 time(s)

PlaySound

Senior Contributor Joined: Dec 02, 2010 10:26 Messages: 2031 Offline

Nov 24, 2014 15:38

Quote: I am now 99.9% finished with my very first video that I created in PD13. It's taken about 70 hours over the past 4 weeks to create this 14-minute montage. And I have learned SO MUCH. I will be showing this video to 75 people at my wife's birthday party in only 4 more days! Yikes!

If I endendi you have two songs that have good volume.

Add these in another track and do nothing.
Or restore the volume (2 songs) after normalizing all.

The clips that I suppose are all in one track, apply Normalize only for this track.

If the result is not good, act in volume control for the same track.

see that after a certain point appears in the audio wave the yellow color means that level above normal, redusa volume disappear until the yellow is in good volume.

Note: nomalize of PD12 is just equal the volume between various videos and not to adjust the volume "normal.

See video screen capture, http://youtu.be/Q72YD0P1sWI

It seems that tried to post a picture?

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Nov 24. 2014 20:48

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Jirka.Bolech

Senior Member Location: Liberec, Czech Republic Joined: Aug 16, 2014 06:03 Messages: 158 Offline

Nov 24, 2014 16:03

Hi Kevin,

do you have the different parts of your audio that you want to normalize in separate clips? Normalization is not selective within a clip; it only compares the clips with each other and it offests the level of each entire clip relative to the other clips. If, for any reason and in any way, you merged the audio into one continuous clip currently present in your timeline (or storyboard), you need to cut it up using the Split button to have each part you want to adjust relative to the other parts in a separate clip. The Normalize button should work pretty well then.

What format are the files you attached supposed to be in? They appear to be MS Word documents with nothing useful in them…

Kevin M.

Newbie Location: Oceanside, Long Island, NY Joined: Oct 03, 2014 11:06 Messages: 40 Offline

Nov 24, 2014 19:16

Hi Jirka,

Thanks for your reply. I have two songs (each about 4 minutes long), and twenty audio clips (each between 5 and 30 seconds long)...all of which are positioned in Audio Track 1. (Note: All of the corresponding video is positioned on Video Track #1, right above the audio).

For some of the audio clips I used CyberLink's WaveEditor 2 to boost the audio a few db's, and then the new audio file got automatically saved back into PowerDirector. During that process, I "unlinked" a few of those audio files from their video counterparts, but once back in PowerDirector, I clicked on "link audio and video".

I appreciate all the help, but I am actually afraid to mess with it now. As I stated in my original post, I have literally spent 70 hours (till the wee morning hours) creating this 14-minute video montage and I do want to screw it up as I will be showing it to 75 people in only 4 days.

Thanks again. I have learned so much and I love working with PD13.

I had attached (or at least I thought I had) MS Word documents containing screenshots, which were all readable on my end. I will try to attach them again.

Jirka.Bolech

Senior Member Location: Liberec, Czech Republic Joined: Aug 16, 2014 06:03 Messages: 158 Offline

Nov 25, 2014 04:47

Kevin, the way you put it I imagine you do have separate audio clips. Linking with video is not important for audio normalization.

One way you could have joined the audio would have been by producing the entire track to further edit it.

Providing a screenshot of your timetrack would really help see where a problem might be…