I wanted to touch base on a few issues I’ve heard in the
past few months.. I hope you’ll be open to reading and viewing.
1. If you whisper you must up your gain, if you yell, you must turn down your gain. I know the direction for jobs is all over the place, but in the end your audio must be consistently between -6 and -4 for the whole mp3 file. Even if said client says not to process the audio, you still should amplify/deamplify, normalize or do whatever you need to do to make it so the client isn’t turning their volume up and down to hear you.
2. IGNORE those video game instructions stating to have audio at -18. I can verify that none of our talent who have booked video games have had their audio come in at -18, it’s been the regular -6 to -4. See the images below.
As you can see below, an actual booking audio is clearly strong and firm. The good audio is indeed good and the bad audio shows huge sound fluctuations.
No matter what you submit audio for, it needs to have the volume at a consistent level.
This is Bad audio:
This is Good audio:
I expect you to view your data for every submission to make sure it’s level across the whole audio file.
I hope this is just a refresher email.. your first impressions are lasting ones when people are listening to you.