Problem leveling audio.

I have a question about STP that I can't figure out. I did a shoot with two different kinds of cameras, a Sony HDV-FX1 and a Cannon XL1, I used the on camera mics for my dialogue, now I find that the two cameras gave me way different audio, and after cutting the project I have some dialogue that is very low and some that is very loud and hollow. Unfortunately, since the footage was taken from different takes I can't just use one camera dialogue for the whole thing. Now I have taken the whole project into STP and tried my hardest to figure out how to balance the wave file, but have had no luck.

My question is, does anyone know if their is a way to select the whole project and use a certain filter or effect that will correct the audio difference and make everything even, or do I have to go into every cut and change them individually?

Your help would be greatly appreciated!



Andrei Mignea
Dre5 Productions LLC
Las Vegas, NV

Just loading the audio into Soundtrack you can lower the audio but raising it is next to impossible.

If one camera's audio was WAY too LOUD and the other was acceptable, you could lower the LOUD camera down to the level of the normalized camera audio but if one is way to LOW and the other is normalized then you are at a real disadvantage.

Even if you could bring it up some, it would accentuate the background noise and such until it becomes completely unusable.

Soundtrack has some amazing capabilities for removing background noise and moderate level changes could be possible. Filters and effects won't help with level problems.

Thanks for you help John, I figured it would'nt be simple.



Andrei Mignea
Dre5 Productions LLC
Las Vegas, NV

Hi Andrei,

There are ways that can get you closer but there's "cost" involved in each and you have to weigh the aesthetics to each.

If the loud camera has distortion, that's difficult to fix. You'd have to hand draw to "round" the peaks and that's time consuming and the results may not be worth the effort. Would be neat if there were a "round peaks" filter if one could live with the results.

For the quieter camera there's normalize or increase the amplitude. That doesn't give you great results if there's a few high peaks on the audio. One could compress and/or use a limiter which would give you room to bring up the overall level on that track.

You'd be boosting the noise floor using many of the above methods so you'd then have to contend with getting rid of the noise with the threshold settings and using noise reduction.

There's a "Match EQ" filter which might also help a bit.

The right formula and level of "improvement" in matching depends on so many factors it's hard to have a formula answer.

If you find a good setting that works for a few minutes you can apply those filters to the entire length of your source audio.



Craig Seeman
[thirdplanetvideo.com]

I had a clip that I could not fix with software
( last shot of night air conditioner came on )

I had to have this dialoge -

So I pasted room tone (AC noise) on both sides of clip
and ramped it up slowly--

It added tension to the shot and
that is what I was going for so it worked--Jay--