Audio Drama Production Podcast

One of the toughest challenges when you begin producing Audio Drama is looking at ways to bring in multiple pieces of dialogue, recorded by different actors, on different mics, in different conditions, and set them to play at a consistent volume level. Dialogue tracks recorded on the quiet side will often need to be amplified considerably, and this can bring up a lot of background noise that makes these segments blocks of hiss. Dialogue_LevelsIn this episode we talk about the sound levels of your dialogue, touching on the decibel scale, which you and your DAW will use to measure the volume of your audio. We find that looking to peak at around -6db during recording offers us decent headroom in post-production, where we’ll usually then look to bring the peaks up to -2db or -3db. It isn’t always as simple as that though, you could have an actor whispering and shouting in the same scene, so use tools like your Hard Limiter to snip the peaks off these loud parts and bring the quieter audio closer to them.Noise red