Using L2 and ac3 encoding

[drenched]

I have the Waves L2 on my master bus set to -8 threshold and -8 Out ceiling. Then on my dialog bus I watch to see the levels push right up to the L2 out ceiling. On the music buses, I watch to see that they peak just below the L2 out ceiling so the music doent get as squahed.

This seems to be working inside PT but I have no ac3 experience so I have no way of knowing if this will render well or if the encoder will further manipulate my levels. I have a choice of using Sonys Vegas Video (Main Concept encoder) of Apples A pac/Compressor to encode.





This DVD has ALOT of music; and narration. But it is music driven.

[drenched]

I guess what Im wondering is..

apparently the ac3 encoding process "normalizes' the audio- where there are settings that can be applied which will do this to greater or lesser extent.

So am I making a mistake by using close to brick wall L2 on my master bus if the ac3 encoding process does that sort of thing again.

[Richard Fairbanks]

You are confusing Dolby's dialog normalization with compression/limiting. The dialnorm parameter tells a Dolby decoder how much overall volume to play back with. It is not any form of compression. I suggest you scour this forum and the Dolby site for information on metadata with the Dolby Digital stream. There have been a number of threads on dialnorm here this past year. There are a lot of metadata parameters that can be messed with and it is confusing at first.

"Better to woodshed now and understand forever, than to muck up and suffer forever."