Deliver broadcast quality audio
Learn why broadcast loudness standards matter, how to analyze loudness, and how Audition and Premiere Pro help your audio levels meet broadcast quality standards around the world.
Published
Introduction
Over the last several years, broadcast loudness standards have been implemented across many countries and regions around the world.
And what this essentially means is that broadcasters must now conform to strict regulations surrounding the loudness and the average loudness of the audio content they transmit.
Well, with these new loudness standards, you can now monitor your actual program loudness and even the way that we monitor this.
And the scale that we use, we're no longer working in DBFS.
[LKFS] Now we're focusing on LKFS.
That's loudness units K-weighted relative to full scale, [LUFS] or LUFS, loudness units relative to full scale.
And we've got lots of tools and lots of different ways that you can look at your loudness, analyze your loudness, and more importantly deliver a video with audio content that will meet the loudness standards for that particular region or country that you're delivering the content to.
Understanding broadcast loudness standards and meters
So here we are inside of Adobe Audition, and one of the tools that we have is something called the TC Electronic Loudness Radar Meter.
Now this is a real-time panel that will actually allow you to see in real time what your program loudness is so that you can make subsequent adjustments to know that your content falls within the legal limits based on the preset that you choose.
[ATSC] Currently we're working in ATSC.
ATSC stands for the Advanced Television Systems Committee, and this applies to US broadcast digital television.
[ITU] Also in the US we deal with the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, [EBU] and throughout Europe you've got the EBU, the European Broadcast Union.
Now if I go ahead and play a little bit of this back, you're going to see how this works and how again in real time it just gives you an overall view of the average loudness of the program material contained herein.
Take a listen. [♪ music ♪] Now all the parameters here are fully editable, of course, and you can see that our target loudness for the ATSC is -24 LKFS.
So just by looking here, we are totally out of range, which again, as we're editing this audio to picture here in Audition, we can now make those adjustments to ensure that this will be broadcast safe.
Now they're similar to the things that you can do
Matching audio loudness in Adobe Audition
to either work in progress audio or finished audio in Audition.
First of all, if you're trying to conform audio inside of an active session to a particular loudness standard, nondestructively you can right click on a clip and choose Match Clip Loudness and then choose the appropriate standard that you need to conform to, set your Target, your Tolerance, click Okay.
And it will make those adjustments nondestructively to the audio file right inside the multi-track.
Now if you have a series of audio files that you're wanting to conform to a particular loudness standard, you also have batch processing capabilities to perform this operation.
I can take a whole series of audio files from the Files panel and drag them into this Match Loudness panel, which will then analyze the Loudness, the Total RMS, the Peak, the True Peak, and all of the elements—all of the attributes—of this audio file.
And then from within the Match Loudness panel, I can then say to match all of the audio to follow one of the standards that I mentioned earlier—ITU, ATSC, or EBU.
Again, right here inside the panel in Audition, I can run this very, very quickly.
It happens that fast.
And now all of my audio files conform to the ITU standard.
Now similarly in Premiere Pro, we also have the same TC Electronic Loudness Radar Meter
Monitoring and normalizing loudness in Premiere Pro
which again runs in real time, so I can go ahead and play this back again. [♪ music ♪] Here you can see I've done some remixing here, so we're getting a little bit closer to that -24 LKFS range, but we're still not quite in range.
So again, here's where we make those tweaks.
But as I'm doing this, I just want to finish my mix and have Premiere handle the loudness normalization at the end.
Well from within Premiere, I can go to File, Export, Media.
And inside the Export settings dialogue, if I go to the Effects tab and scroll all the way down, you will see at the bottom we now have settings to implement Loudness Normalization on Export.
Choose the standard that you want to conform to.
It's going to use all of the standard settings here automatically by default, but of course you can even configure things like our True Peak Limiter.
You can also have it generate a Loudness Report and specify where that's going.
And this is something essential, again, for all of our broadcast partners.
You can also use Loudness Normalization
Automating loudness compliance with Adobe Media Encoder
directly inside of Adobe Media Encoder.
And here what you can see down below is that I've actually set up a Watch Folder with PCM Wave Audio where I've customized anything I drop into this Watch Folder will automatically conform to the ATSC A/85 standard with a target loudness of -24 LUFS.
It'll output all of that content to this Watch Folder automatically in one step, and you can even see down below you can choose the Channel Configuration and which Source Channels it's going to process with this Loudness Normalization.
With Adobe Audition, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Encoder CC you now have multiple ways to automatically achieve loudness compliance whether using the simple Loudness Normalization capabilities on Export through Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder or the native Match Volume panel in Audition, even the nondestructive Match Volume capabilities in Audition's multi-track.
This is truly the best way to deliver broadcast-safe, compliant audio with confidence.
