Tuesday 13th December
RX Insight Research – Benchmarking for Broadcast Standards
As well as having the RX Advanced Audio Editor, the university also have the Post Production Suite bundle. This includes Insight, Loudness Control and Final mix. Grant Bridgeman has attended the university several times, and on one of these occasions he critiqued our work. He suggested using the Insight plug-in to help improve our sound. To refresh my memory with this plug-in, as we used it for our final year project, I watched a couple of iZotope guides.
The first, Insight Overview, illustrated the basic features of Insight, the five customizable partitions including: Levels, Loudness History Graph, Sound Field, Spectogram and Spectrum Anayser.
The second was more detailed and explained broadcast standards further. The Loudness History Graph appeared most important when adhering to Broadcast Standards. The graph illustrated Momentary Loudness (loudness over last 400 milliseconds), Short Term Loudness (loudness over the last 3 seconds) and the Integrated Loudness (loudness over the complete duration of the program). As well as this there are numerical indications of the Integrated Loudness (displayed as Loudness Unit referenced to Full Scale-LUFS), Short Term, Maximum Momentary Loudness, and Loudness Range. The larger the number in the range, the greater dynamic range. There is also a true peak meter situated within Insight.
To refresh my memory with Broadcast Standards, I headed to R128Audio.com, which had a neat guide explaining the standards. European broadcast standards must adhere to EBU R128 (the European Broadcasting Union Recommendation of August 2011). EBU R128 “is a set of rules regarding loudness normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals during broadcast”. To find out what these rules were, I found TCElectronic’s page detailing the standards. The most important for our film to meet is the Target Loudness of -23 LUFS. This is the standard chosen after conducting the EBU experiments to best suit the needs of broadcast. Therefore, when we are in the Final Mix stage for Cognition, we will make sure we adhere to this broadcast standard, and not exceed -23 LUFS, this is the benchmark we will work too.
I believe this additional practical research throughout the semester is greatly helping towards meeting my learning outcome of working with and gaining experience editing dialogue with RX. From being not very confident before this semester, I now feel competent with the Advanced Audio Editor, and plug in Insight, which has improved my cleaning and editing skills, as well as final mix levels – meeting the broadcast standards.
References List
iZotope (2012) Insight Overview. [online] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCSjR9XVC8M. [Accessed 13 Dec 2016].
iZotope (2014) Loudness Compliant Metering. [online] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HDjsLR6YhY&t=99s. [Accessed 13 Dec 2016].
Unknown (2012) Video and Audio Solutions for Broadcast: What is R128? [online] Available from http://www.r128audio.com. [Accessed 13 Dec 2016].
Unknown (2015) Broadcast Standards. [online] Available from http://www.tcelectronic.com/loudness/broadcast-standards/. [Accessed 13 Dec 2016].
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