audio balancing (sort of)

[dg_phillips]

I have been trying to "balance" the audio of one of my favorite movies because thus far, the intense, fighting scenes are too loud and less-intense talking scenes are too low. I find I have to adjust the sound on my television all throughout the movie. Is there a way I can decrease the intensity of the sound on the fighting scenes AND increase the sound of the talking scenes so that I can leave the volume level on my television set for the entire movie?

Dan

[SaSi]

The "correct" way to do this is using the DVD player controls. Some players I've seen have a dynamic range control setting, which can be used to control the peaks of loudness. If you set the control to the min. setting, no compression is done in the dynamic range. If you set it to max. it compressed (during playback) the dynamic range so that loud sounds are not that loud compared to whispers.

The "desparate" way is to extract the audio on the PC, use a tool like CoolEdit to perform a hard-limiting filter (which decreases the dynamic range permanently) and then re-author the DVD with the new soundtrack.

My advice is, read the instructions of the DVD player and experiment.