Basic Compression question

Tom Greenlee · Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007, 22:49 (GMT) Post subject: Basic Compression question

When setting your parameters for compression.....What is the determining factor on what you should set your threshold level at? In other words, What determines what level I enter in that parameter. What should I be looking at when I look at the waveform to decide what db level the threshold should be?

J.S. Gilbert · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007, 01:57 (GMT) Post subject: a little or a lot

First off, I recommend that everybody wherever possible have three listening streams. A good set of earphones, a cheap set of computer speakers and a reasonably good quality pair of nearfield monitors.

In general, most of the finished v.o. work I know, usually has the voice compressed somewhere between 1.5:1 and 3:1, with thresholds set at -23 to -18 db. This has a lot to do with your overall loudness and assumes a recording with -6db average.

Some people suggest setting the threshold slightly above your noise floor after cutting out all breaths and clicks. Then doing critical listening and raising the threshold up to see the differing effect one gets. Stop after it sounds really good and doesn't improve from moving it up.

I am certain that the parameters are radically different for imaging. They vary wildly dependant upon the genre of the material and the nature of the read.

The idea behind compression is to give, nice strong presence to the voice, but not to blow the listener out of the water, nor to creat sybilance or tonal mush. Compression essentialy limits the dynamic range of the recording. Most people will agreee that it should be perfromed after eq'ing.

My personal feeling as a producer and director is that it's not always nice to fool mother nature.

Compression adn eqing (as well as any plugins) will react differently to 16 bit recordings than they will to 24 bit. Depending upon what you use to downsample and/or if you leave it to V123 to handle final conversion to 64kbps audio, you can get some really, really bad mojo from over processing.

But hey, I guess a couple of tutorials and pgs 186 - 221 of the Protools manual will make up for actual audio engineer training and years of experience.

All the COMPRESSION and EQing in the world won't make a bad actor sound good. Spending less time playing with the knobs and more tim studying the craft is a better way to go.

I checked in with some top bookers and oddly enough they get hired because they can freakin act.

Nikki Saco · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007, 04:29 (GMT) Post subject:

You're so intense, J.S. But you're right: garbage in, garbage out.

Tom Greenlee · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007, 07:12 (GMT) Post subject:

Hey! I hope your not refering to me as being garbage, since it was my question! hahahaha

Nikki Saco · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007, 14:30 (GMT) Post subject:

Far from it! Wink

Tom Greenlee · Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007, 15:42 (GMT) Post subject:

Awwwww....thanks Nik. Wink