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- Audio levels in Camtasia 2020 can seem a tad

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mystifying.

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Let's look at simplifying that.

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Now what we do have to work with is the audio wave form.

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The wave form gives me a visual representation

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of how loud my audio is.

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Now, simplifying loudness starts

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by setting your input levels correctly.

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And just in case, this is a new concept to you,

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you do that here in the recorder

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with this slider right here,

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I shoot for the meter to be peaking in the yellow to

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orange range when I'm using my normal speaking voice.

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And that gives me a wave form like this first one here.

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Now, if my wave form looks like the second one here,

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I could benefit by just boosting my levels a bit

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when I record.

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And if it looks like this third one

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what it means is I'm just recording too loud.

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The audio is clipping.

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It's going to be distorted and terrible.

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So I need to bring my levels down, just a tad.

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So start there, adjust your input levels

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so your unprocessed wave form is peaking

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in the half to three-quarters zone.

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Now that we've established that I'm going to

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show you the super simple way to normalize your audio.

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Normalize just means even out the audio levels

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for an overall louder and more consistent sound.

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I'm going to right click here

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in my canvas and choose project settings.

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Move that out of the way.

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Now I'm going to check auto normalize loudness

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and watch what happens to the wave forms when I do that.

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Camtasia will normalize the audio throughout my project.

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Go ahead and click apply.

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This first clip here looks great.

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The second clip Camtasia has raised the level to

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match the first clip,

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and unfortunately it was not able to save this third clip.

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It was just ruined to start with.

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Normalizing isn't going to fix clipped audio.

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And of course, if I need to, I could always

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do some fine tuning here with individual levels.

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So my takeaway for simplifying loudness is this,

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start with good input levels,

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then enable the auto normalized feature before exporting

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for consistent levels throughout the project.