Determining the sound track peak level

Before transferring the soundtrack of your show for a different medium, e.g. audio CD, CF card or video, you should check and correct the audio level of the complete soundtrack. This is how it is done:

Open your show and, in the main menu, click Output – Audio Peak Search.
Select the required timeline under Timeline and Portion. The preset Timeline1 may only need to be changed when there are several timelines.
Select Complete timeline. If you want to search in a particular portion only, select From current locator position or Only selected portion of timeline. The latter is only available when a portion is marked. ...Marking a portion.
Now click on Start. Following this, the volume of the complete soundtrack incl. all editing steps is determined. The highest values for every channel are displayed as Peak level or RMS level. The Peak Level is the decisive factor for a correct audio level. The RMS Level, on the other hand, measures the power and can be easily be used for judging the loudness. Under L Stereo R the stereo sum peak level is displayed, i.e. it includes all active channels. For multi-channel soundtracks you can select the corresponding peak level displays in groups of four under Show outputs. This works even during the peak search. Click Cancel to stop peak level search at any time.
Once the search is completed, you can normalize the peak level to zero dB. There are two buttons available:
Normalize (Master) ... normalizes the highest level of all channels to zero dB via master control. The volume balance of all sound objects and channels remains unchanged.
Normalize (Individual) ...normalizes the highest level of every individual channel to zero via the output channel sum level control. This means that the volume balance of the output channels changes relative to each other. That's why this variant can only be used in special cases.

Note: When the K-system is enabled the buttons for Normalizing are not available as volume and level control require a different approach than loudness. You only need to make sure that zero dB FS (peak value) are not exceeded. See The K-System - Checking volume and dynamic range.

Click Cancel to close the dialog.

There are two cases where you should not use the Normalize function:

...if there is a message saying that the audio level is too low and that normalize via this function is not possible. Click here to find a solution.
...if you are using several timelines in your project. The sum level controls refer to all timelines. Therefore, you need to highlight all objects in one timeline and use Special functions - Change volume... from the sound object context menu. See also Adjusting the volume.