The Secret to YouTube Loudness
Loudness Normalization in DaVinci Resolve 17 isn’t all that difficult and in order to make better and louder YouTube videos you’re going to want to learn these simple tips using the loudness meters with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Fairlight page to bring your levels up to -14 LUFs. This is the secret to mixing louder and more consistent volume videos for YouTube.
YouTube Standard Loudness Spec -14 LUFs
YouTube automatically turns your audio down if it’s too loud, but it won’t turn it up for you. You can see how YouTube processed the sound in any video by right-clicking and choosing “stats for nerds”. I don’t know if they’re trying to tell me something here. But take a look at the 4th stat down for “normalized”.
If it says content loudness is a negative number, then this video could have been mixed louder, making it better for the viewer. The goal is to get that negative number as close to 0 as possible without going over. It’s kind of like bidding on that TV show, The Price is Right.
If the content loudness is a positive number that means it’s too loud, and Youtube has turned the mix down for you, and who wants YouTube turning down and messing with your finished masterpiece? Not me!
All of this is measured based on a standard of -14 integrated LUFs, also known as averaged LUFs, but what the heck are LUFs?
What are LUFs?
LUFs stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale.
1 decibel equals 1 LUF, and that’s the slightest change your ears can hear. The lower the LUF number, the quieter it is, and the higher the number, the louder it is.
Side note, the term decibel comes from measuring how much signal was lost over a long Telephone line, more specifically a “Bell” Telephone line, as in from “Alexander Graham Bell”, the dude that invented the phone. See, I told you that you’re gonna learn something new.
So LUFs are used to measure average volume over the entire length of a video based on how your ears actually hear the sound in your head!
The process of mastering the mix up to a specification, like -14 LUFs, is called Loudness “Normalization”, not to be easily confused with Peak “Normalization” which, if you’ve edited for very long, you’ve probably already used or heard of this.
Loudness Normalization vs Peak Normalization
Loudness normalization brings up your AVERAGE volume to a specific level OVER TIME, so we need to use this for mastering YouTube mixes.
Peak Normalization brings up everything to a specific peak in dBFS, where 0 is the maximum, over 0 is red and wrong, and that’s when distortion starts to happen.
