Question / Help Audio Meters

[jswguitar]

I am trying to record video and audio is from a mixer that has a guitar plugged in. When I follow the tutorials that I have found it show where I should keep the audio in so it doesn't clip which is the same as any audio recording. But just today I noticed that if you look at the audio meter even though it is staying in the yellow and not hitting the red, if you look at the very left of the meter it shows a little first section of different colors (green, yellow, red ) what is that telling me? Thanks,

 

[R1CH]

That shows the level of the signals coming into the mixer. If it's red for example, then the audio is coming in clipped, so reducing the volume in the mixer will only result in lowering the volume of audio that's already clipped - you'd need to lower the gain earlier in the pipeline.

 

[jswguitar]

Thanks for the reply. I did find something else about it. I had a compressor turned on in the audio filter section. When I turned it off the colors there at the left didn't change they just stayed yellow so maybe the filter had something to do with it. But thanks I will make sure that the signal is not clipping any where in the system.