| Sorry, to clarify: I work for a Dallas ad agency that has an in house audio and video production suite. We produce on Pro Tools HD and Avid.
I am the executive producer here and in charge of all audio for radio, tv, web, etc. We use as little Limiting and Compressing (L/C) as possible in the first stage of production where we are building the audio tracks with VO, Music, SFX. TV audio mixes go to Avid at full mix level, but are then limited to -10 in Avid to meet Fast Channel requirements. If we don't send them out at -10, Fast Channel will tweak them down on their end. We'd rather maintain the level control from our end. For radio spot mixes I, again, use as little L/C as needed to iron out detailed nuances of the tracks, and almost always, that will be applied to the VO track. Once the mix is ready to bounce I run it thru a maximizer to crank up the volume of the spot without increasing the gain. We did not use to use the maximizer but after many airchecks of our spots revealed that the other spots in the stopsets were louder than ours I began using the maximizer ( on the suggestion of a fellow producer who had been maximizing his radio mixes for some time ). The result is that our spots air with a consistent volume to other spots in the stopsets at the radio stations. Prior to this position (7 yrs here) I spent 30 years in radio, 27 of that in major market radio. I started out as an engineer for a couple of years, then spent 10 yrs on the air, and the rest as a production manager producing imaging and commercials. That's where the info on the multiple squeezing thru the Optimod at the radio station comes from. I used to drive the freeways with the Program Director, listening to our station, comparing to our competition, with our chief engineer on the cell phone, directing his tweaks to the Optimod, so we could dial in the sound of the station, overcome road noise and gain up the signal. |