In today’s video,
we’ll take a look at how to loudness normalize
your video for uploading to online platforms such as YouTube,
using Final Cut Pro.
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My name is Serge, and welcome back to my channel.
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A little while back, Curtis Judd
released a couple videos that talk about volume vs loudness,
and how to properly loudness normalize your videos
before uploading to YouTube.
I’m neither a sound engineer,
nor do I even come close to having the knowledge
or experience that Curtis does,
so I’m not even going to try to explain the theory behind this.
For that, I strongly recommend you watch Curtis’s videos,
which I’ll link in the video description.
What I’m going to do today,
is expand on what Curtis’s videos demonstrate,
and show you how to apply that to your videos in Final Cut Pro.
Let’s just briefly touch on Loudness vs Volume.
They’re two different things.
The best way I can think of to demonstrate this,
is by referencing music.
If you listen to a soft classical track,
and then listen to a heavy metal track,
even though the volume levels might be the same,
the heavy metal track is going to sound a lot louder.
That’s perceived loudness,
and it’s measured in Loudness Units Full Scale,
or LUFS.
Each Loudness Unit is equal to one decibel.
What we’ll be focusing on in this video
is the Loudness Units - Integrated field,
which indicates the perceived loudness level
for your entire video,
and True Peaks, the maximum level that a signal reaches,
or the loudest parts of your video.
The maximum Loudness Units for uploading to YouTube
is -13 to -15 LUFS.
Thats the maximum loudness allowed,
but to leave ourselves a little headroom,
we’ll aim for -16 LUFS.
As far as True Peaks go,
anything over 0 decibels will be clipped,
so we definitely want to stay away from that.
For this example, we’ll aim for negative 1.5 decibels,
once again, to leave us some headroom.
Let’s jump into Final Cut Pro,
and take a look at how to Loudness Normalize your video.
Normalizing Loudness in your video should be the last step.
Before you do this,
you should go through your project and properly mix the audio.
What I mean by this,
is adjust the volume levels from different audio sources,
so they’re relatively close to the same level.
The way I do this in my videos,
is I start with the voice track.
I usually turn this up until the average levels
are bouncing between -12 to -20 decibels.
This ensures the peaks in my audio
don’t hit that zero decibel level.
After that I adjust my music, sound effects,
and any other audio levels relative to my voice track,
until it sounds right and all my audio levels are fairly consistent.
There’s a lot more to mixing,
but today, we’re focusing on the next step.
Before loudness normalizing your project,
or any other major editing phase,
it’s always a good idea to make a snapshot of your project,
just so you have something to go back to in case you need to.
Select your project in the Media Browser,
and press Shift Command D
to take a snapshot of your project.
Next, since you’re trying to set the overall loudness
for your entire project,
you need to combine everything into one compound clip.
Press Command A to select everything in your timeline,
and Option G to make a compound clip.
First thing you need to do
is measure the overall loudness of your track.
Press Command 5 to open the effects browser,
scroll down to audio effects,
and select the Specialized category.
Grab the Multi Meter effect,
and drag and drop it over your clip.
This is strictly a measuring effect,
and will not affect your audio in any way.
Head up to the inspector window,
select the audio inspector,
and click the icon besides Multi Meter to open up the controls.
There’s a couple things we’ll focus on here,
the Loudness Units integrated, and True Peaks,
which you can display by choosing it from the levels dropdown menu.
To get a proper measurement,
you have to play through your entire track.
My demo track measures an overall loudness level of -23.2 LUFS,
and just under -2 decibels at the loudest part.
To hit our target volume of -16 LUFS,
we need to bring the levels up by just over 7 decibels.
The problem with this, is if we just turn up the gain,
then we’ll be clipping the peaks.
What we need to do is bring up the volume of the softer parts,
while leaving the louder parts pretty much the same.
We have a bit of headroom with our peaks, but not much.
To achieve this, there’s a couple tools you can use,
a compressor or a limiter.
Personally, I find the limiter effect much easier to use,
but both are very good options.
Go back to the effects browser,
select the Levels category,
and add the Limiter effect to your clip.
Whatever adjustment you make with this effect,
in order to measure them with MultiMeter,
it has to come before the meter.
In the audio inspector, select the limiter effect,
and drag it up above the MultiMeter effect.
Click this limiter button to open up the controls.
For this effect, I usually set the release time to about 250 milliseconds,
output level to about negative 1.7 to 1.8 decibels
to keep my true peaks under negative 1.5,
and lookahead to about 5 milliseconds.
I also switch to the Legacy Mode,
and make sure Soft Knee is on.
Now, since we need to bring up our levels by about 7 dB,
let’s start off by bringing our gain by by that amount.
Play through your entire project to measure the loudness levels again.
Since we’re measuring loudness,
and not just the volume levels,
just because we brought the volume levels up by 7 dB,
doesn’t mean our loudness will go up by the same amount.
As you can see, our demo project loudness
only went up by about 5 dB.
Go back to the limiter controls, and adjust the settings again.
The true peaks only got up to -1.6,
so I’ll bump this up by point one,
bring up the gain to around 10, and play the track again.
You might have to go back and fourth a couple times,
to get the levels just right.
Once again, you’re aiming for negative 16 LUFS for your loudness,
with true peaks not going over negative 1.5 dB.
Loudness normalizing your videos before uploading
ensures your upload is loud enough for viewers to hear clearly,
but not too loud.
Also, if you do this to all your uploads,
it brings consistence to your videos,
so if the viewer chooses to watch more of your content,
they don’t have to worry about adjusting the volume levels on their device.
Subtle things like this are the difference between good videos
and great videos.
Also, I strongly recommend you take the time to watch Curtiss Judd’s videos
for a better understanding of this concept.
But, before you go watch them, don’t forget to subscribe to this channel.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.