Normalize or Compress?

As in any video, audio is at least half of what makes a good wedding video. So why is it that wedding videographers are notorious for overlooking this crucial part of their videos?

Assuming you miked your wedding well, you now have various audio tracks to edit into your video. Chances are that your minister spoke quite a bit louder than your bride. But even as he spoke, his volume probably varied quite a bit.

This is not a problem for the human ear, but it represents a big problem for your video, when your audio goes from -30db to, say -3. Is "normalization" the proper fix for this?

From wikipedia -

"..normalization applies a constant amount of gain to an entire recording to bring the highest peak to a target level, usually 98% (-0.3 dB) or 100% (0 dB)."

In the above case, (depending upon whether the app used actual levels or percentages), this would raise our -3db level to -0.3 and our -30 to -27.3, leaving us still with a big old gap!

There are some audio editing applications out there that are confusing the terms normalization and compression, by doing both in a single process, but these are not the norm.

In Adobe's Audition program, the Dynamic Processing and Amplitude effects include "hard limiting" parameters that allow an increase in volume while limiting the maximum loudness, thus compressing the range of volume and increasing the perceived volume.

Like most good editing programs, Premiere Pro also allows compression effects within its Dynamics and MultibandCompressor audio effects folders.

By compressing your audio, your wedding video will sound more professional and will be more enjoyable to watch and listen to. Ever notice that TV stations seem to turn up the volume during commercials? Actually, they don't. They just compress the audio volume so that it seems louder.

You can edit your wedding audio to increase dynamic range or eliminate signals below or above a particular frequency and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to it, which I'll leave for later articles.

- Rich Fogle

As in any video, audio is at least half of what makes a good wedding video. So why is it that wedding videographers are notorious for overlooking this crucial part of their videos?

Assuming you miked your wedding well, you now have various audio tracks to edit into your video. Chances are that your minister spoke quite a bit louder than your bride. But even as he spoke, his volume probably varied quite a bit.

This is not a problem for the human ear, but it represents a big problem for your video, when your audio goes from -30db to, say -3. Is "normalization" the proper fix for this?

From wikipedia -

"..normalization applies a constant amount of gain to an entire recording to bring the highest peak to a target level, usually 98% (-0.3 dB) or 100% (0 dB)."

In the above case, (depending upon whether the app used actual levels or percentages), this would raise our -3db level to -0.3 and our -30 to -27.3, leaving us still with a big old gap!

There are some audio editing applications out there that are confusing the terms normalization and compression, by doing both in a single process, but these are not the norm.

In Adobe's Audition program, the Dynamic Processing and Amplitude effects include "hard limiting" parameters that allow an increase in volume while limiting the maximum loudness, thus compressing the range of volume and increasing the perceived volume.

Like most good editing programs, Premiere Pro also allows compression effects within its Dynamics and MultibandCompressor audio effects folders.

By compressing your audio, your wedding video will sound more professional and will be more enjoyable to watch and listen to. Ever notice that TV stations seem to turn up the volume during commercials? Actually, they don't. They just compress the audio volume so that it seems louder.

You can edit your wedding audio to increase dynamic range or eliminate signals below or above a particular frequency and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to it, which I'll leave for later articles.

- Rich Fogle

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.