Bumping Up the Volume

[solarblast]

I've been looking at a large collection of audio and video events I've produced for a video that make the whole. I've particularly been working over the audio portions with plug-ins, envelopes, normalize,... I decided to Render As an avi with NTSC format to square it all away. The resulting audio track surprised me. The audio volume seems "smaller" visually than before. I can pump it up with the mixer fader, but it doesn't quite seem to be so loud as in the previous unfinished state. What, if any, plug-in can I use to pump it up further without distortion? Another shot with Hammer on the now single audio event? Why does the volume seem to be transformed to something lower than before?

[Soopafresh]

If you transcoded the AVI to Divx or Xvid, you can use this:

http://forum.videohelp.com/topic314909.html