Movie Audio Volume normalise

[jagman]

Hi all,
         Hope this helps some people, for a long time now the movies audio is a bit painful as in very loud to very soft, recently i made a change & extracted the audio from a movie  and edited in Audacity

[ill88eagle]

the movies audio is a bit painful as in very loud to very soft

It's called dynamic range

recently i made a change & extracted the audio from a movie (guardians of the galaxy) and edited in Audacity, tried others but none where near as good as this program, i said normalize but in fact you need to use the compressor feature

In effect what a compressor does is lessen the dynamic range by attenuating the louder parts (above threshold) of a signal by a given ratio at a given speed (attack/release).

- after you import the movie audio file - select - effect - compressor, the new window will open, the settings i used are> Threshold = - 60db, noise floor = - 35db, ratio = 10:1, attack time = 0.10secs, release time = 1.0 secs, check the boc> makeup gain 0db after compressing., you can also try check box "compress based on peaks" **Note** the higher the noise floor # is the more distortion you'll get, the setting sample works for the file i was fixing.
          "still some soft spots?" if you're satisfied with the overall edit but still have a couple of soft spots you can select those sections only & redo with the compressor......constructive feed back welcome.

Your settings are a bit absurd. The threshold is below the noise floor -it's below what is even hearable by the human ear. You are supposed to use the noise floor to leave the low noises (below that level) untouched and then set the threshold somewhere above that so you will compress the peaks but leave the rest of the signal undistorted. What you are doing here is churning all sound into a sausage of loudness. But hey if you find that pleasant to listen to, suit yourself.

Also VLC has a realtime compressor plugin for non destructive sound-sausage-packaging

[jagman]

Audacity sound editor is a good prog for sound editing

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[ill88eagle]

For someone who has server tinnitus it worked for me on that audio as i watch the movies on a TV, the next one most likely be different, perhaps i should have mentioned that in the post, i'll take your suggestion on board...thanks

Fair enough, but I would advice you (and anybody else)to play around with VLCs compressor to get a better feeling of how a compressor works before tweaking all settings in audacity to max (like you did).

Here's a screenshot of VLCs inteface with some less intrusive settings which will double the overall volume without making the background noise in the silent parts sound like explosions: