normalize audio : max peak vs all peaks

[pierret18811376]

Hello,

For a video source, I would like to normalize audio, but I am wondering what to choose between :

- normalize max peak to

- normalize all peaks to

My goal is to keep the naturalness of the source, and if I choose "normalize all peaks", I am wondering if I could lose naturalness.

[Richard M Knight]

As I understand it with one clip it does not matter which you use. With two or more clips Normalize max peak will look at the highest peak of all the clips and add gain to make that highest peak to the value you select. It will add the same gain to all the other clips.With Normalize all peaks it will add gain to each clip so that the peaks of each clip hit the value you selected.

For example if the first clip has a peak of -12 and the second clip has a peak of -18, using Normalize max peak to -2 will add 10db to the first clip making the peak -2 and will also add 10 db to the second clip making its peak -8. 

With Normalize all peaks to -2, once again the first clip will have 10db added but the second clip will have 16db added bringing its peak also to -2. 

One of the troubles with the 'all peaks option is that if one of your clips is just room noise it will bring that up to -2 as well, not what you want.

I hope this makes sense.

[camille5EA5]

Thank you for explaining that!

[pierret18811376]

Actually I click on the video source panel and set the audio gain of my video source, in order to have all clips created from this video source with the same audio settings. In that case, if by example I want to have a normalization to -2db, if I understand well you advise me to use "normalize max peak" to -2 db (instead of normalize all peaks to -2db) ?

So all clips created from this video source in the timeline will be all at -2db in the audio bar graph?