recording playback audio low volume

[neuronetv]

I'm running obs 29.1.2 64 bit on windows 10.
when I make a video recording the audio level in the resulting video is low.
I've gone to a lot of trouble to ensure my mike has a strong signal and I can see this in the audio meter. I've used two different mikes. I've used filters to get the best sound I can. the audio in the rsultant video is clear but its about half the volume it should be according to the input signal in the obs audio meters. If I open the video file in powerdirector or premiere I can visually see the audio track is low level as well. I know I can boost the volume post recording but wondered why the audio output from obs is low. am I missing a setting somewhere?

 

[AaronD]

Congratulations! You've found the difference between "live" level and "mastered" level!

• For live, you don't know what's coming, so you want to leave some headroom for whatever might come.
• For mastered, you (presumably) know what's coming, and so you can use all of your headroom to drown out the deficiencies in the distribution medium. Historically, this was for recordings, like vinyl, cassette tape, CD, etc., but has carried over into live broadcasts as well, like radio, TV, and internet streaming.

Putting everything at full-scale creates a predictable level for your listeners to set their volume to, and makes a song "pop" when you're scanning through the radio dial. But it requires some work from you to pull off, as "just turning it up" will clip before it gets there.

The key is compression:

• Add a Compressor filter, and set it to do a little bit but not too much, with your normal mic level. You want it to tame the peaks, but not be audible itself. Use the Compressor's output or makeup gain to get back to the average level that you had before the Compressor, as the compression function itself only turns things down.
• Follow that with a Limiter, which is like a "safety net". It probably *will* be audible when it does its job, but the Compressor is supposed to keep you from hitting that limit except for something special. Use the Limiter's input gain to put the final output meter all the way up to full-scale, and adjust the details of how both of them work, to put the average (black bar in the middle of the meter) around -10 to -15 or so.

You can be more aggressive with either or both, and put the average higher, but when I do that myself, it sounds too much like a commercial to me. (in fact they do exactly that on purpose, to make the ads stand out even more)

The catch when you do that, is that you're probably adding enough default gain to noticeably amplify noise during the quiet parts. So you might also want a Noise Suppressor filter at the *start* of the chain. If you're just talking, the Noise Suppressor should work well, since that's exactly what it's designed for. But if you try to run music or sound effects through it, it'll probably call that "noise" to be removed. YMMV on that one.

Of course, even with a Noise Suppressor, you'll still want to keep the original/raw background noise as low as you can. It's not magic.