- Audio levels in Camtasia 2020 can seem a tad
mystifying.
Let's look at simplifying that.
Now what we do have to work with is the audio wave form.
The wave form gives me a visual representation
of how loud my audio is.
Now, simplifying loudness starts
by setting your input levels correctly.
And just in case, this is a new concept to you,
you do that here in the recorder
with this slider right here,
I shoot for the meter to be peaking in the yellow to
orange range when I'm using my normal speaking voice.
And that gives me a wave form like this first one here.
Now, if my wave form looks like the second one here,
I could benefit by just boosting my levels a bit
when I record.
And if it looks like this third one
what it means is I'm just recording too loud.
The audio is clipping.
It's going to be distorted and terrible.
So I need to bring my levels down, just a tad.
So start there, adjust your input levels
so your unprocessed wave form is peaking
in the half to three-quarters zone.
Now that we've established that I'm going to
show you the super simple way to normalize your audio.
Normalize just means even out the audio levels
for an overall louder and more consistent sound.
I'm going to right click here
in my canvas and choose project settings.
Move that out of the way.
Now I'm going to check auto normalize loudness
and watch what happens to the wave forms when I do that.
Camtasia will normalize the audio throughout my project.
Go ahead and click apply.
This first clip here looks great.
The second clip Camtasia has raised the level to
match the first clip,
and unfortunately it was not able to save this third clip.
It was just ruined to start with.
Normalizing isn't going to fix clipped audio.
And of course, if I need to, I could always
do some fine tuning here with individual levels.
So my takeaway for simplifying loudness is this,
start with good input levels,
then enable the auto normalized feature before exporting
for consistent levels throughout the project.