Have you ever watched a youtube video with your speakers dialed into that
perfect loudness and then the following video plays and you find yourself reaching
to turn up the volume maybe it's your video that's too quiet i've done that anyways that's
why today i'm going to show you how and why you can master your mixes the right way for youtube
not too loud and distorted or too quiet so you don't lose your audience with bad audio
we're going to do it all in davinci resolve 17 with free loudness normalization tools
so make sure to stick around to the end because i promise you're going to learn something new today
youtube automatically turns your audio down if it's too loud but it's not going to turn
it back up for you if it's too quiet you can see how youtube processed the sound in any video just
by right-clicking and choosing stats for nerds i don't know if they're trying to tell me something
here but take a look at the fourth stat down for normalized if it says content loudness
is a negative number then this video could have been mixed louder making it better for the viewer
the goal is to get that negative number as close to zero as possible without going over it's kind
of like bidding on that tv show the price is right now if the content loudness is a positive number
that means it's too loud and youtube has turned the mix down for you and who wants youtube turning
down and messing with your finished masterpiece not me all of this is measured and based on a
standard of negative 14 integrated l-u-f-s also known as average LUFs but what the heck are LUFs?
lufs LUFs that stands for loudness units relative to full scale
one decibel equals one LUF and that's the slightest change that your ears can hear
the lower the LUF number the quieter it is and the higher the number the louder it is side note
the term decibel it comes from measuring how much signal was lost over a long telephone line
more specifically a bell telephone line as in from alexander graham bell that's the dude that
invented the phone see i told you you're going to learn something new anyways that's decibels lufs
they're used to measure average volume over the entire length of a video
based on how your ears actually hear the sound up in your head here in davinci resolve let's take a
listen to what negative 20 decibel test tone sounds like over time okay you can see we're
at negative 20 db over here on the mixer in the meter now let's change that up and listen to what
it would sound like as beeps so it's going to be the same test tone just with air in between
if you can probably tell right now it doesn't sound quite as loud right but
we are still hitting negative 20 db on the meters it's all about
average over time now the process of mastering the mix up to a specification like minus 14 lufs
that's called loudness normalization not to be easily confused with peak
normalization which if you've edited for very long you've probably already used or heard of this
loudness normalization brings up your average volume to a specific level over time so we need
to be using this for mastering our youtube mixes peak normalization on the other hand that brings
up everything to a specific peak in dbfs decibels full scale where zero is the maximum over zero is
red and wrong and that's when distortion starts to happen now don't do this because this is old
school but if you wanted to peak normalizing the edit page you could have right clicked said
normalize audio levels and chosen a normalization mode like sample peak program with it set to
negative 9 hit normalize and it brings the highest peak down to negative nine but it brings it all
down to that it's not a loudness control it's just basically a volume up and down we don't want that
for what we're doing today for mixing for youtube so we'll hit undo and to loudness normalize our
video we go to the fairlight page fairlight page is this a little uh music note that's over here
and now that we're in here i'm going to show you two meters that make all this work so if they're
not open already open up your mixer in the upper right and your meters as well and if i play back
you'll see down here is the meter that you probably know and love from the edit page
it's an rms meter which means it's an average but it's an average or a short period of time
versus the meter up here this is our compound meter our loudness meter which gives us an
integrated reading and a true peak which are very important we're going to talk about a lot today
but the main thing to note is that both of these are useful meters the rms one the
the loudness meter because they give us an objective look at how our sound actually is
not just basically how we're hearing it but how it actually is how the power is coming out just like
the vectorscope or waveform monitor would over on the color page when we're doing color hey quick
timeout if you're new here welcome i'm chadwick this is creative video tips it's all about helping
you craft stories to make a difference and stand out so if you're into that please subscribe right
now so you don't miss out on next week's tip maybe even hit the bell doesn't cost you a thing and you
can unsubscribe at any time i'm an editor that's super into davinci resolve so let's jump back into
the computer right now so i can show you how this all works one quick optional setup thing would
be to go to your project settings little cog down here in the lower right then go down to fairlight
and your target loudest level let's change this here to negative 14
okay because we're doing youtube we're not doing broadcast tv that's what negative 23 is for
we're going to hit save and what this is going to do is it's going to give us a color code of
blue yellow and red that we're going to get to next when we go to analyze their levels
before we can figure out where we're going to go with our levels we need to see we're actually
at and resolve 17 has a great feature to bounce your entire mix to new track and then analyze it
so that way you don't have to watch and listen to the whole thing to get an accurate reading
a loudness reading of what it is so to bounce a new track we go up to timeline bounce mix to new
track and then we're going to say the destination track is going to be a new track new stereo track
we'll sit say okay and real quickly it's basically it's rendering out a new piece of audio which is
all of that mixed down for us so you could solo it and preview it and listen to it if you wanted to
but what we're going to do is use the analyze tool which is done by right clicking and say
analyze audio levels it's right above normalized audio levels which we don't want to use
and then we're going to use the loudness standard and we're going to use the same loudness standard
for all the parts of this video because this is the latest and greatest it's the 1770-4 of the itu
i think the default is dash 1 when you open it up so make sure you change that to 4.
all the others are derived from it so why not just use the latest and greatest we're going to choose
that we'll say analyze and then real quickly without having to go through the whole one
minute promo video here we have reading so this is negative 1.7 dbfs and negative 19.5 lufs which
as you know we want to hit negative 14 so we have quite a ways to go
this is way quiet for youtube and we're going to fix that in the next section
okay well that analyze feature is great obviously we're not going to have time to bounce the track
every single time so we're going to delete that right now and i'm going to show you how the
compound meters the loudness meters work up here and there's a couple things i want to change off
the bat that's going to make your life a lot easier choose this little 3 dot menu and turn
on lock metering to transport what this is going to do is every time you move the playhead around
it's going to reset for you so you don't have to use the reset button that's super helpful the
other one i want to change under here is absolute scale so instead of having 0 right here which is a
relative scale based off your project settings it's going to be telling us what it is i just
want to see what it is so it's going to change so minus 14 is at the top and our integrated reading
is going to tell us what our actual integrated reading is i can do the math i think and the
other one is let's change this to the standard of 1770-4 which is the latest and greatest
okay now that we've done that all you need to do is go to the beginning your video and play through
the entire thing okay there's no cheating it you can't fast forward it although i'm going to cheat
it and fast forward that for the tutorial's sake but in reality you just have to wait and let the
thing play back and that'll give you an integrated reading and a true peak a true peak reading say
that two times fast three times fast and uh i'll tell you what those are in a second but let's hit
start on this loudness meter and we'll hit play and i will see you once this fast forwards
okay video is over we have an integrated loudness reading of negative 19.8 lufs which is pretty
close to what we got when we had bounced it and then we also have a true peak up here of negative
1.7 now if you don't know what true peak is true peak is basically what's the loudest point in the
video after it's been converted to analog so if something gonna distort is it gonna go over
zero once it's converted to analog this is what's gonna tell us that so what our goal
is now is we're gonna try to keep our true peak to negative 1.5 that's like a youtube thing it
gives us a little bit of headroom when we compress it so negative 1.5 is the max there and then our
integrated reading we want that closer to negative 14 maybe negative 15. so but here's the thing
obviously if you do a little math at negative 14 and we're at negative 19.8 we need to go 5 5.8 up
in decibels but we only have 1.7 of headroom here before we would clip so in the next section i'm
going to show you the strategies that i would use to mix it and the other thing i was going
to point out here is these colors so we talked about in the project settings when we had set up
our target loudness level to negative 14 that actually affects the colors of what these numbers
are here so blue means it's below our target yellow means we're good and we're pretty close
and red obviously that's bad so let's avoid red at all costs just like if you're using an rms
meter down there so while this isn't a mixing tutorial i do want to give you a couple tricks
to use to pull your overall level up to get closer to the negative 14 LUFs that you need for youtube
and the first of those is compression compression reduces the dynamic range of your track or your
clip and the way you use it here in fairlight over in the mixer go to dynamics and double click
and right in here you've got it right in the middle so i already have this set up
for this vocal track on this lav it was very dynamic so i needed to bring my threshold down
quite a bit that's when it starts to kick in so at negative 25.4 decibels is when it kicks in
and then the ratio this ratio is actually pretty high i generally wouldn't recommend you go over
3 but because there was so much variance in the dynamic range i needed to go up to 5 on this and
then the makeup gain is basically because we've squashed and lowered those peaks the makeup gain
is basically lifting back up to compensate for how much we've decreased the volume so if we take
a listen over here i grabbed nate and i was like hey i got this idea can you help me flesh it out
so basically we've pulled that level up quite a bit right there
and we can see over here we're at negative 14 integrated lufs on that little bit of playback
of course that's just the little section that we played but you can see we're getting
everything in a much tighter spot so that's compression and that's that's how you could use
that i would use that on most of your tracks um depending how dynamic and run and gun your shoot
was another really simple to use tool to pull your level up is going to be the fader the fader
basically is going to say everything that's on a track like everything that's on this track right
here if i push this up or down that's gonna push that entire tracks volume for each clip that's on
it up or down so in this instance on this one this this guitar track let's push this up to
plus three and you can see that indicated right there so i think i saved the best for
last and that's actually to use the limiter effect which is the plug-in and put that on
the final main output bus and here's how i do that i go over to the mixer hit the plus button
choose dynamics, flairlight effects, limiter and this is the tool it's really really simple to use
i'm going to explain it so limit this section here is your threshold because we want to stay under
the negative 1.5 decibels true peak we're going to change this to negative 2 so that gives us
just a little bit of extra headroom half a decibel and uh the next one to it is gonna be our gain so
if we're not hitting that enough to bring everything up we can increase our gain
on this level right here to get to that negative 14. now if we take a listen to our video
so faith is rising up i grabbed we've got an integrated reading right here and it's it's about
you know one and a half low so we could easily push our level up now a lot of times you would
do this while playing back but i'm just trying to talk and explain it so maybe we push this up to
2.4 or something this is hopefully going to get us closer to the integrated reading that we're
looking for and so faith is rising up i grabbed nate and i was like i'm pulling that down so i can
talk better but basically if you see it crossing this blue it's basically it's getting affected
it's getting limited um but it's protecting those without clipping which is super helpful
and if you check check out up over here we're in that negative 14 ballpark that yellow zone that we
want to be at so we're not in the blue zone we're in the yellow zone which is great for youtube
and we haven't gone over into the red and also our true peak up here is being limited and taken care
of under that negative 1.5 or negative 1.8 which is great so that's the limiter effect
i highly suggest that you use it on pretty much anything you send to youtube um because
it just lets you get that integrated level up so easily there's also another way to look at
loudness here in resolve in the fairlight page and that's what the loudness history graph the
way you get to that is by clicking the automation button that's right here not to be confused with
the transient detection button that's below it so choose automation and that has now just made the
bus track available visible on our main timeline here if you just drag this down a little bit
you'll see there's more to it so just drag that down in the header check the loudness history
button and choose integrated because we're always looking at integrated loudness you can see i had
previous graph here from doing this before but if you go back to the beginning of your timeline it
will begin drawing the loudness history over the course of your playback just like the one up above
where it's giving you yellow if it's in the right ballpark red right there is a little bit hot but
it's pulled back down to yellow of course and it's bumped right up around negative 14.
so we can see this video is pretty much all set and good to go for youtube now i've got
a quick question for you can you please drop a comment with your experience level using resolve
beginner intermediate or jedi that way i can make better future videos for you in the future also if
you're coming from another editing platform put that in the comments that's gonna help me out a
ton hey if you want more videos like this click on the davinci resolve playlist on screen right now
for more tutorials and because there's so much more to learn i'll see you in the next video