Dialogue levels and clip gain advice.

[alidav]

I am new at protools, and this new feature in pt 10, clip gain change, is a bit confusing, I am working on a low budget independent movie, and audio has recorded directly down on canon 5d with many problems, my questions is, I want to put my dialogue all at -10 dbfs, if the movie will have a sort of budget it will go in hand of a mix studio otherwise I have to deliver the final product, so I am looking for an advice to a basic approach to it. first dialogue has been recorded very badly with many levels variations along the time line, and it is noisy also, an annoyng hiss is present long the whole work. I set up my PT10 project bussing the dialogue channel to an aux channel with inserts in to it for the WNS denoiser waves plug in, and an waves l3 LL multi maximizer also. Thanks for our answers

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by alidav

I want to put my dialogue all at -10 dbfs

Why?

Clip gain will not be an effective way to achieve that end.

[alidav]

[QUOTE=Chief Technician;2016140]Why?

isn't that the general task about dialogue level? - 12 dfs or -10 dbfs and having some headroom for scream etc?
http://socialsounddesign.com/questio...stering-levels

what is the use of clip gain line why should I go to manage the original dynamic and not the volume that is the output post fader post eq and post inserts.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by alidav

isn't that the general task about dialogue level? - 12 dfs or -10 dbfs and having some headroom for scream etc?
http://socialsounddesign.com/questio...stering-levels

To quote some bits from that URL:

• "…you want to calibrate your playback environment first…with dialogue you want to be hitting equal to about -27 DB LEQ(a) up the center channel, usually measured on a stage with a Dolby LM100. That usually results in your dialogue average meter sitting around -16 dB to -12dB with peaks hitting around -6dB, maybe as hot a -3dB on a huge scream.
• TV works a little different, where I've seen it that dialogue is hard brickwalled at -10dB and the overall summed mix levels were hard brickwalled at -6dB and the LEQ(a) target can be somewhere arouound -24 or even a little hotter.

I read in your original post that this is an independent movie. If that is true, then the text at the URL you linked to does not suggest normalizing to -12dBFS to -10dBFS. The article suggests the value of your dialog sit between -16dBFS Leq(A) and -12dBFS (LeqA).

Normalizing, which you mentioned in your original post, is not the same as achieving consistent loudness. Normalizing will ensure that all of your peaks do not exceed the specified dBFS value if your source material is already over that dBFS value. Normalizing will ensure that any source material whose maximum dBFS peak is below your specified dBFS value will be brought up to your target dBFS value.

Originally Posted by alidav

what is the use of clip gain line

The use of the clip gain line is to make a pre-fader adjustment to the level of the clip that you want applied at all times. The level that you set with the clip gain line follows the clip anywhere in the session.

Originally Posted by alidav

why should I go to manage the original dynamic and not the volume that is the output post fader post eq and post inserts.

If you want to make a non-destructive adjustment to the volume of a clip pre-fader, you would use the clip gain line. However, you will have to manually normalize if you use this method. By manual, I mean play the clip through a metering plug-in, get the maximum dBFS value of the clip from the metering plug-in, then adjust the clip gain line accordingly so that when you play the clip again, the maximum dBFS value in the metering plug-in matches your normalization target.

If you really want to normalize, you should use the AudioSuite plug-in and have it create a duplicate file. This way you have the original file as provided and the normalized file whose maximum peaks match your specified dBFS value.