What's up my friends, you're watching our video order stuff, welcome back. Do you ever struggle to get the audio levels in your video absolutely perfect? As someone who makes content for YouTube, I've been wondering for quite a while, what's the correct volume to set my videos at and how much compression should I use and also, how do my volumes compare to other YouTube videos? Well today I'm looking at a plugin called Levelmatic which hopefully will help me deal with all of these things. Roll that intro. As ever, links to this software plus any other relevant videos I've linked in the description box below. And of course this is unsponsored content so if you do enjoy it please let me know by leaving me a like, definitely get subscribed as well. You may not know this but my background is actually in audio. That's what I studied, I used to record bands and write music and all of that kind of stuff before I sidesteped into video. When I was studying audio it was drummed into me that dynamic range was massively important. The theory being that the more variation in volume, the more memorable the music will be and it'll be more likely to invoke an emotional response. Chart music however seems to have taken the opposite stance of let's make our songs as loud as possible all the time and hopefully that'll catch someone's attention. For example here you can see two audio tracks, the top one is Led Zeppelin's Stay Away to Heaven. The bottom one is Raw by Katy Perry. As you can see the Led Zeppelin track is really dynamic it starts off really quiet and ends up quite loud but still with plenty of dynamics. The Katy Perry track you can tell has been absolutely slammed and overall there's a massive difference in dynamic range. So all of my instincts tell me not to push my audio levels too high but I'm aware that on YouTube there's a need for consistency particularly when you're jumping between music and dialogue so it's really hard to judge and that's when I found Levelmatic. So what is it? Levelmatic is in essence an audio compressor for your video editing software but it's been designed specifically for dealing with one of the most dynamic instruments, dialogue. Not only that but it's also optimised for balancing the music and voice in your videos and it works with Final Cut, DaVinci, Premiere Pro and more. So how does it work? Well it works largely in the same way as an audio compressor, it makes the loud sounds quieter and the quiet sounds louder, giving you a more balanced and consistent sound. Jumping into Final Cut now and as you can see we've got two identical clips and I've made them really huge so you can see the sound wave and all you need to do is simply drop the Levelmatic plugin onto the clip and then when we open up the plugin you can see just how simple it is there's not very many controls. I'm going to bring my playhead to the very beginning of the second clip and then turn the plugin on. As you can see the default strength of the plugin is 80% and the target is set way down at minus 12 decibels. Straight away I know that I want my target volume to be more than minus 12 so I'm going to move it out and try it at minus 6. After giving it a listen I decided I actually wanted the target to be even higher at minus 3 but I decided the strength of the compression was way too much so I dialed it all the way back to 30% nice and subtle and you can tell just from looking at the two clips that the one with Levelmatic is so much more even and is going to sit much better for my YouTube videos. Here's the before and after so you can hear what a difference it makes. What's up my friends you're watching hard video order stuff welcome back. Do you ever struggle to get the audio levels in your video absolutely perfect? What's up my friends you're watching hard video order stuff welcome back? Do you ever struggle to get the audio levels in your video absolutely perfect? One of the best things about it is you don't have to know how an audio compressor works to get great results. It's pretty much one of those set and forget plugins that just gets out of your way and let's you get on with your editing. I've been using Levelmatic in a couple of different ways the first of which being to level out particularly dynamic audio tracks like this if I step back and go back here into the outer focus zone. Sure it sounds roomy but at least I don't have to go in and adjust all the different volumes and chop up my clips. The other nice thing is when I come back and sit back down levelmatic will adjust automatically it will ease off and it sounds as it did before. The other way that I've been using Levelmatic is across an entire project and the reason I do that is to balance my music and dialogue. Let's jump into Final Cut now and show you what I mean. So here I have the first minute of this video. As you can see I've got some dialogue followed by my intro music and then some more dialogue. So what I'm going to do is just select the whole lot and then right click and turn it into a compound clip. Once I've done you can see that the volume of my intro music is much louder than the dialogue. This is kind of to be expected because music is a very full frequency thing. To balance it out a bit I'm going to drop on an instance of Levelmatic and as soon as I turn it on you can see with those default settings of 80% strength and minus 12 target it has completely flattened out the whole thing and I suspect this is going to be too aggressive for what I want. So the first thing I want to do is increase the target volume up to zero because the last thing I want to do is reduce the volume that my audio is going to peak at. As you can see this has had quite an extreme effect on my audio and I suspect way way to aggressive and really when you're applying this plug into an entire project subtlety is the key. The end around 30% strength worked for this project but of course there is no hard and fast formula that you just have to try it and see what works best for your project. Let me show you the before and after back to back so you can see the difference. Today I'm looking at a plugin called Levelmatic which hopefully will help me deal with all of these things. Roll that in track. Today I'm looking at a plugin called Levelmatic which hopefully will help me deal with all of these things. Roll that in track. I always like to give you both sides of the coin with these video reviews. As I mentioned this is not sponsored so I'm not going to hold out so let's have some pros and cons and we'll start with the cons. Firstly Levelmatic is a very streamlined and minimalist plugin with not many controls so I can see for some people it might be too simple. I imagine if you're really used to using the kind of advanced really complex compressors it could be a little bit too automatic but it's kind of meant to be part of the name. Secondly I wonder if it doesn't quite have the depth of features that some people require. Things like side chaining, frequency specific compression or like hardware modelling. But the way I see it is this plugin is made for videographers just to help them quickly get good sounding audio so they can get out their way and they can move on and finish their editing so I doubt they're going to miss those kind of features. And that's it for the cons. As for the pros I absolutely love how simple this plugin is and I know that was one of the cons but it's kind of the whole point. Despite coming from an audio background where I understand and own lots of very complex and advanced compressors I massively appreciate the simplicity that this product offers. In Pro and LevelMatic sounds good and I know that's a strange thing to say given that all it's doing is changing the balance of audio in your videos but in the world of recording studios all compressors have a sound. They could be smooth, gritty, aggressive, snappy, punchy. To me levelmatic sounds soft and rich much like it reminds me a bit of a plugin called Vocal Rider by Waves. It just sounds good. Lastly I love how levelmatic saves me time because when I film these videos my audio levels are very massively every single time. It could be that my microphone is slightly further away, it's just here by the way. It could be that I'm talking louder one day. Whatever the reason I massively appreciate the fact that I'm spending less time tweaking a compressor and making it sound good. And finally my opinion and I would say that levelmatic is a very simple but effective plugin. Yes it's not as complex as some of the plugins out there but it's not meant to be. That's not the point. Sonically I find it really pleasing. Like I said it reminds me of a plugin called Waves Vocal Rider and that plugin simulates back in the 60s and 70s when they used to manually ride the faders in recording studios and what it does it just gives you a very gentle and natural sound. So at the end of the day time as money and if levelmatic saves me time and it will and it already has then I'm very happy. Check it out. And that's it for now. I just hope you found this video interesting and helpful. I've enjoyed it as always. I've got a large back catalogue of videos about videography on this channel of which YouTube recommends this top video for you and the one below is my most recent upload. Until next time let's help each other out and shoot better video. See you guys.