At what level do you peak the audio in your edited video.
The yellow bar starts at -6dB, do you max it at that?
Or set audio gain a little lower and max out at -9dB or something?
I just think -6dB comes out a little loud.

Range should be -12 to -6dB. Normally you want to peak in the yellow, -6db and not cross 0. If it's "sounds" too loud at -6dB, then you might have an overmodulation or distortion issue.

What I mean by "sounds" to loud, I mean harsh. Usually when I get -6dB, and it's harsh on the ears it's due to distortion or clipping in the original recording. If it's just "loud", turn the speakers down : )

Ok, cause the camera audio I get on my HV10 peaks at about -3dB, but I often add music, so I find a nice MP3 file in my collection (for private use only) and add that. Often the MP3 is peaking between 0dB and -3dB so I turn down the gain about -3dB to -6dB. It just sounds loud, it's not distorted or clipping. Then again downloaded CSI shows from bittorrent are often a bit loud here too, so I guess it's just the volume settings.

Thanks for answering and putting my mind at ease. This is a great forum.

Is there a way to lower (or raise) the volume (or gain, I guess) on multiple clips at the same time? I have tried selecting multiple clips, and then dragging the yellow line down, but it only lowers the volume on that one clip.

Thanks,
Ed

You can either raise/lower the clips on an entire layer via the audio mixer panel (universal), or directly on individual clips (rubber bands).

You could place all loud clips on one layer, and quiet ones on another and raise/lower the level for that layer. Otherwise, you should look into rendering out a master audio file to export into audition or sound forge, and learn about applying either a Normalize (mixed media and music) or Hard limiting (suitable for voice) filters to the audio.

In many cases with mixed media it's quite the norm to having to hand tune each clip as needed.

Generally I drag all loud clips to one layer, and put quiet ones on a second, and average ones to a third layer. I then adjust the layer's master volume via the audio mixer panel. Still, there are a few rouge clips that will need further hand tweaking.

Finally, after all said and done, I render a seperate master audio file. I further tweak that file in Audition using normalize or hard limiting filters and save it back. I place that file on it's own audio layer, turn the others off and render the final video.

I just add a submix track or two.