Metering and Loudness in Cubase

today we talk about

Metering and Loudness in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today let's talkabout metering and loudness in Cubasebut before we start I want to remind youthat there's a link below to the freecontent navigation guide which is aneasy to navigate webpage with links toall the content on this channel andbesides that in the near future I'mgoing to begin adding tips and otherbits of information that will only beavailable there you know things likesimple steps that will get you startedand up and running quick things that arein the videos but are written down insimple steps that serve as quickreminders when you need information downthe road if you're working with programslike wavelab or Cubase plugins or thecable guys shaper box and many manyother projects that are in the worksthen I know you're going to find justlike I have that this is an invaluablestudy Aid and the other thing I want tomake sure you understand is that this isnot a simple PDF this is a constantlyupdated page that has any informationthat is new or anytime videos arechanged really anything update it andonce you have it you will always havethe latest information constantlyupdated so if you haven't gotten italready go to the link below click on itand save it to your favorites it's mygift to you and it's absolutely freeOkay so let's get started if you have aproject open and you go over and youopen up the right Zone you have thesefew tabs over here and one of them saysmeter and that's what we're going tokind of focus on because Cubase has thisMaster Meter and when you're playingthis meter you can switch it to themaster or you can switch it over to theloudness meter so let's talk about thatwhen you're looking at this peak meterone of the first settings you can changeis the meter scale standards that's thefirst button down it kind of just lookslike a display and when you click onthat you get all these various kinds ofmeters with digital scale at the top youcan click on these and select it fromthe scale but if you have a mouse wheelyou can actually just spin through themif you want to audition them quickly andsee what they look like to the right ofyour choices of scales you have anoffset option some of these are grayedout like the digital scale but as you gothrough these some of these will alsogive you this off set you can change itas well below that you have a configuresettings in case you want to changewhere the different levels are next tothat you have a reset in case you wantto get everything cleared out of thereyou have the actual meter display andthen at the bottom you actually have adigital readout that shows the RMS valueor the peak Max clicking on any of theseresets them as well at the bottom tabyou can click over to the loudness meterand your three main measurements on yourloudness meter are your momentary yourshort term and your integrated theintegrator takes readings over the wholelength of whatever your audio sample isthe short term looks at blocks of threeseconds and your momentary takesreadings every 100 milliseconds theloudness range gives you a readingbetween the loudest and the quietestparts of the song you have a reading forthe true Peak values and then you have atimer at the bottom that just shows howlong of a sample you're taking back upon the top you have a button thatswitches between the control room Viewand all the meter statistics you have abutton that turns the meter on or off abutton to change it between the loudnessunits and the loudness units full scaleanother kind of settings button tochange the different levels and then thereset button without going into a deepdiscussion of the definition of loudnessunits versus loudness units full scale Iwill just show you from thisdemonstration that when things are onloudness units you're getting a readinghere that shows plus five plus six witha sample that I have normalized negative18 loudness so when I switch this toloudness units full scale I am nowseeing an accurate reading of theloudness keep in mind when you're usingthis loudness meter in the control roomand you want to actually see what theloudness measurements are going to be onthe ashram that says loudness units fullscale that changes the readings thatyou'll see on the momentary the shortterm and the integrated the true Peakreadings will continue to read the sameregardless you'll observe those twotriangles on the meter on the left sidethis settles into the integratedloudness over time the movement on thiswill slow down and almost becomestationary whereas on the right you'llget a constant reading of a short-termloudness which will change quicker asthe song progresses you can see how theyread against their numbers then it's alot easier to come down and see theactual digital readout for theintegrated and the short term I'vechanged my sample to be at negative 14and if we look at the loudness meter itkind of Peaks at the top at negative 14and this meter is now filled all the wayso if I'm dealing with anything that'sat a louder value than negative 14 I'mgoing to have a hard time reading it onthis meter if I go to this little gearand I look over on the right there's abutton that says plus 18 scaleif this isn't turned on or it's notpressed this is an Ebu plus 9 scalewhich reads from a negative 41 loves atthe bottom to a negative 14 at the topon the other hand if I hit this now it'san Ebu plus 18 scale which reads from anegative 59 at the bottom all the way toa negative 5 at the top in most casesthat should give you plenty of room toread anything musically because now it'sreading negative 14 and still has quitea ways to go before it Peaks out theother thing to notice is how this isblue and then suddenly turns red you canset your thresholds of what you want tosee here negative 23 is the broadcastrecommendations but maybe I don't wantto see this go red until I hit negative14. if I come down into myconfigurations I have an integratedreference which right now says negative23 and if I change that to negative 14now I get just a little touch of red atthe top where it hits negative 14. andif I'm dealing with anything musicallythat's going up to negative 10 or Beyondthat's I'm going to see the red marksalso the numbers down in the data willturn red on the integrated loudnessright now my short term and my momentaryare set to zero if I go back to thisgear and I change my short termto say negative 16 now when I look atthe meter the short term goes redbecause it has gone over the limit and Icould do the same thing with themomentary if I wanted you can do thesame thing with the true Peak valueright now you can see it's still whiteright now I want to hit the gear it'sset at negative one which is a safevalue so the true Peak would have to getto negative one before this goes redyou have a couple of nice options forthese triangles when I hit the gear Ihave an option that says hold on stopand reset on start if I do the one thatsays hold on stop when I play a soundthe integrated will lock at its valueand then it will stay there and then ifI go to the option that says reset onstart the integrated will wipe out theminute I start and give me a new readingand because I've got the hold on stopit'll continue to give me in Readingafterwards you have an option down herethat says resolution right now it's setat 900 that's basically the default withmy settings if you lower this you'regoing to see more emphasis on your shortterm readings you have a button for theaes17 and that'll cause a 3db offset onyour readings you have the option tocreate presets at the Top If you set updifferent levels that you want you canjust create a preset for those the onlyother thing I want to point out in thisvideo If we go back to the Master Metercan't turn things loud because we'll allblow our ears out but you can see how mymaster meter has different colorsthe meter's over here in my mixer if Iraise the level all the way go up to 6DB that corresponds to this meter thatsays plus 6 DB scale if I'm looking fora meter over here in my master sectionthat mimics what I'm actually seeing inmy project I would switch to thatpersonally I like it on the plus threedigital scale but the point is thatthese colors that I'm seeing you can gowith whatever Cubase gives you bydefault but you may want to change theseto read things that are important to youif you go back over to your edit comedown to your preferences in your list ofoptions you have something that saysmetering and if I go to the option inthe metering that says appearance I nowhave a scale here that I can changewhatever the color scheme I want and beaware if I come down to this drop downlist then I can locate any one of thosemeters that's over there on the right inthat list and change the way thosemeters look including my loudness meterslet's go ahead and change some colorsI'm going to leave Blue at the bottom onmy loudness meter here I can click thisadd button and then just pull them downfrom the top because it keeps addingthem at the Top If You get more than youwant then you can click on them andremove them I'm going to take it down tonegative 23. now I'll make my next oneat negative 18. make my next one atnegative 14. so at the bottom ofnegative 23 I'm going to keep it at theblue colorand you can see your meter change as youmove these colors around I think I'll gofor a kind of a green color here I'mgoing to make that a blue again so I canreally see it so now when I look over atmy loudness meter I have all thesevarious colors be aware that you cancustomize the color of your meters togive you the kind of information thatyou need to know and that's going towrap it up for our discussion ofmetering and loudness in Cubase asalways if you haven't grabbed yournavigation guide be sure to grab thatfrom the link below the video gives youquick easy access to all the content onthe channel ever growing free to usecontent is in order being continuallyupdated do yourself a favor don't workso hard download it use it when you needit so we started out looking at wherethe meters were we saw some of theMaster Meter settings and the loudnessmeter settings took a tour of the windowwe saw the difference between the plusnine and the plus 18 scales we got intothe settings for the integrated theshort term momentary loudness and thenwe finished off talking about how youcan change the colors to give youspecific level information make iteasier to see it as we continue movingthrough all these features and functionsin Cubase as always great to have youguys here and I'll see you on the nextvideo