Better Workflow for Normalizing Sequences

[1545media]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if anybody can help us with a way to speed up our workflow process.

We work in an environment with footage primarily from video tapes.

Once ingested, we typically normalize the audio before outputting each tape to it's own individual file.

This typically consists of the following:

- Create a sequence based on the captured video

- Edit the video to remove the unnecessary empty space in front and back

- Normalize max peak to -1

However, normalizing the audio clip is very time consuming as you have to wait for Premiere to finish building peaks before you can move onto the next video clip.

Is there a workflow where we can normalize the sequences instead?

I've been told to normalize the video clips in the project before putting into a sequence, but this takes a sum of all the clips as opposed to each individual clip itself.

I've tested this out and since our audio varies wildly, this does not produce results similar to normalizing one by one.

Would love any suggestions on how to mechanize this process further.

Thanks,

Cristian

[RobShultz]

You don't have to normalize a clip one at a time. If you have several clips in your timeline you can select them all/Right Click/Audio Gain and normalize them all at once.

[1545media]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the response, but each sequence is a clip.

We're not placing all the clips onto one sequence, we have to create a different sequence for every clip.

Otherwise, we would be combining different tapes into one file as opposed to individual files.

[Richard M Knight]

Not quite the same thing but you do have loudness options on the export menu.

[1545media]

Hi Richard,

I think you may be onto something, but it's not quite the same.

Here's a screenshot of a test:

The top track is the original track after I normalized it in Premiere Pro to Max Peak -1

The bottom track is pre-normalization, but I used the Loudness Mix in Media Encoder to output.

It certainly raised the levels, but still not the same as the one in Premiere Pro.

Any thoughts on dialing it in to get it to match?

[Richard M Knight]

As you have found your method takes the maximum peak to -1 regardless of the program material. The export method makes the loudness similar so the results will be different. There are many options for the loudness control it might just be a matter of trying them until you get the results you need. The target loudness might well be the parameter to adjust.