I have been receiving a lot of strange audio formats recently. A symptom of our ever expanding social delivery requirements I guess.
I was wondering what terms you use for your broadcast or online audio?
@johnt I have completely forgotten all of my UK delivery knowledge and it has probably changed anyways.
In Australia if I get audio marked as OP59 I know that this is TV standard.
New Zealand gets marked as - 24LKFS for television.
germany its R128 for tv and people still do a âweb mixâ thats like -3dBFS peak or something⌠tbf if its too loud youtube etc just turns it down to whatever ( I think its -14 LUFS)
UK TV has to have 6fr silence head and tail these days and called R128.
intereting ive never heard about the 6frm silence, whats the reason for that?
Rumor has it it was one of the main reasons for the Revolutionary War.
Well it used to be 12 frames. The reasoning, as far as I know, was to give a second of silence between adverts. When commercial tv started in uk there was a bit of deference to the audience, not to bombard them with commercial messages unlike in America. There has been a shift to 6 frames in recent years probs my because advertising agencies often complained about not having enough time to squeeze in all the copy they wanted. And on the internet they can do what they like of course. Itâs a conservative country and slow to change in many respects.
Sometimes though, it would be nice to have more bucolic, slower adverts like this:
Instead of this;
very cool!
I wouldnprobably assume I have issues with my eARC watching UK commercials 
This is literally your job. 
And not putting audio on the first or last few frames of an advert is a little likeâŚ
Is it possible to adjust the Loudness standard on Flame?
Nope.
Use premiere, Audition or Media Encoder
Not sure I follow the question.
The âloudness standardâ is for measuring/metering for conformance. If youâre material is above or below target there are multiple ways to adjust it to become compliant - as simple as a volume level adjustment, or more involved as in compression.
You can change the audio level in Flame. You can reveal the audio desk via options in the single player view. You can also see (and add) audio fx in the timeline. The eq, delay, and reverb are exposed via the audio desk, but there are additional ones like compression and gating available in the timeline fx. That gives you some rudimentary tools.
Be mindful that the meters in Flame are dBFS scale, but thatâs not the same as loudness, as loudness has a different temporal component than the ballistics of an audio meter.
There are multiple means of measuring loudness in realtime (external hardware meter, VST plugins), or afterwards via various audio tools (WaveLab, etc.). Flame doesnât support VST plugins, so you have to do this outside of Flame.
If you use an external loudness meter attached to your Flame (e.g. TC Electronic | Product | CLARITY M) you can make reasonable tweaks to your loudness level via gain and or compression and verify via the meter. If youâre off by a lot, youâre better off re-doing the mix, as overall adjustments are probably not the best results in those cases (you likely end up bring up the noise floor or create out of compliance peaks). If you follow this track, be mindful that your audio signal chain has to be calibrated properly, or youâre measurements may be off.
Usually when doing online work for advertising, the client expects that they can walk out of the online suite with their masters fully exported, they have the subconscious idea that because they are paying a premium for flame, all of their work can be done on the online.
Now even premiere and Resolve are able to master everything that you throw at it and resolve itâs free.
No wonder why much of the online work has been replaced with resolve, far cheaper and overall better results for the client
Flame is not a DAW. You canât use it to finish the sound. Do the clients you talk about expect the same session to finesse the mix of their spot, or do they do a separate session with the mix engineer?
I presume the latter. In which case the mix engineer should pop out a render when theyâre done, and you can add that into Flame and once the picture is finalized export a master and send them on their way.
The mix engineer would be responsible for making sure the mix conforms with loudness specs.
Of course all that requires a locked edit. If during the Flame session you change timing, that doesnât compute.
I donât work in that type of setup. So Iâm curious where this falls apart?
Some things have been moving to Resolve. But itâs not a replacement. While you can do most of the things we do in Flame in Resolve, theyâre not always that fast or simple and they wouldnât necessarily want to sit through it.
One thing Resolve is, is an app that is an NLE, DAW, Color, and VFX app all on a single timeline. But except for color itâs not not top of the line, but just a solid middle field at least for now. So if you pay top dollar and want to see that, donât expect happiness from Resolve.
While there are some mixers who use Fairlight for corporate and possibly commercial work, it trails far behind its competition and rarely comes up in audio circles. It has come a lot further on the NLE side compared to Premiere and Avid, but itâs primary tailwind is that this eliminates conforms which are slow and imprecise. So it has a particular advantage for anything that requires edit + color, which is like 99% of the work.
I disagree; you can use it to finish sound. For a commercial product with major distribution, such as a national tv commercial, or a dramatic show, I would recommend an experienced audio engineer in a sound room who is as passionate about the sound as I am about the picture. But for many other things, it works well. I personally have not spent any time mixing sound in many years other than a few little things here and there, but I know others in this forum do.
Yes and no. It has rudimentary controls with eq, reverb, compression, etc. So if youâre starting out with a very clean dialog recording or library sounds, and have a good piece of library music, which you largely just assemble and tweak lightly, then yes, in the realm of Flame. I would call that sound editing though, not sound finishing.
The reality is that so many recording these days need major work and expectations are higher. Noise reduction, ambience match, and many more. I work on both sides of this fence myself.
Weâre basically saying the same thing . . .
Thatâs kind of like asking âCould I preform heart surgery with an axe instead of a scalpel?â
Yes, you could. Flame could lower the gain on a web mix until itâs below a given loudness threshold. But a professional sound mixer will probably do the job better and faster, with a lower mortality rate.
I think itâs also helpful to understand exactly what âLoudnessâ is:
https://www.tcelectronic.com/de/loudness-explained.html
-Ted
We have an average loudness rule in Aus/NZ now. Very difficult to know what I can use to measure this. We, personally, just donât have our Flames setup for audio.
I might be able to mix a VO, music and FX together for you but only as a preview.
I rely on sound houses to meet all of the specifications.