I am trying to (easily) post-process my audio for a vlog which I've recorded. I used the DJI Mic for recording, and have two speakers. As it is an amateur vlog, the recording environment is not really perfect – which is fine for me, I just want to get the best out of it which I can. My main challenges are currently the high dynamic range, e.g. one speaker changed the volume in the middle of one clip, cars driving by or something hitting the lavalier mic. As said, I don't really care so much about the quality – mostly what I would like to achieve is to have a consistent loudness. So if it sometimes clips or there is some background noise – that's okay, I'll approach that in the future :D
I'm editing in DaVinci Resolve, but I guess I could do the same thing in Audacity or some other audio editing software. I've already watched quite some YouTube tutorials about it, but somehow they don't tackle this specific scenario (they talk more about short videos recorded in a studio). My video is about 20 minutes long.
What would be a good workflow for the audio in the screenshot? For example, the speaker in track 2 speaks relatively quiet at the beginning, then gets a bit more excited at 02:07:00 and speaks much louder afterwards. Additionally there are also some peaks.
- I know about compression to reduce the overall dynamic range, but for me it seems that I first have to set the individual clips to the same loudness more or less, so that they afterwards end up the same. Otherwise I don't really understand how I should work with the makeup gain.
- I tried to normalize loudness to e.g. -23 LKFS with -1 dBTP, to run the compressor afterwards. Unfortunately, that didn't work at all because of the loud peaks in the clip. Other clips without any peak get much louder in general.
- Just normalizing to true peak also does not work.
- I tried to manually decrease the volume of the peaks with keyframes; which worked relatively nice (although quite some manual work). Unfortunately, then the problem was that the later part of the clip in track 2 was normalized to -23 LKFS and the first part was much quieter (even though the first part should basically be the “normal” loudness and not the later part).
- On the other hand, I somehow also get the impression that it might be just a manual process, and I have to play the clip, observe the mixer and then see whether the “normal” part of the clip is more or less hitting the target loudness which I want; with the other parts of the clip just being louder (which I don't really mind, I don't want to compress everything extremely much) and getting rid of the large peaks with a limiter?
Any good “real life” workflow help would be appreciated :)