Logic Pro X (10.2.3) - Loudness Meter; Understanding LUFS Video Lecture | Logic Pro X: A Practical Hands-on Course - Music

hey guys this is music tech help guy and
today we're going to take a look at the
new loudness meter plugin that comes
with the 10-point 2.3 update and Logic
Pro 10 we'll also take a look at the
difference between metering rms levels
vs l ufs levels as well as the history
of l ufs metering I apologize in advance
for the lengthy introduction for this
video but the truth is that the loudest
meter is very simple to use and it
doesn't really require a full tutorial
to use at all however understanding why
it's being used and what reference
values to follow is really what's most
important here so I've a bit of
background information to give you
before we get started using it up until
the 10-point 2.3 update logic has lacked
a dedicated loudness meter which is
helpful for setting reference levels for
mastering music as well as used to
normalize audio levels for TV
broadcasting this helps so that levels
overall are at or near an industry
standard not too quiet not too loud the
units used in the loudest meter are L u
FS units L UF F stands for loudness
units reference to full scale sort of
like digital metering is in DB f s FS
stands for full scale meaning that 0 DB
is the peak value you can have in the
digital recording before clipping L u FS
is based on the DB FF system as well so
1 L U is equal to 1 DB l u FS is also
known as L k FS for its K weighting
scale and was introduced in 2010 by the
EBU that's the European broadcasting
Union this was first introduced in the
ebu r128 standard also in 2011-2012 the
ITU the International Telecommunication
Union introduced two revisions for lk FS
and there's been several other revisions
as well but what I want you to
understand is that for all intents and
purposes l UF s and L K FS are identical
the main reason for the EBU and ITU
standards for loudness or because these
sound levels of TV commercials were way
too loud compared to the shows that are
being broadcast with the standard as of
today is negative 23 DB for TV and
broadcasting with a loose standard of
negative 16 DB for music in previous
videos I've shown examples using the
level meter
or the multimeter monitoring rms levels
mastering to around negative 10 or
negative 12 DB rms rms metering is a
good way to approximate loudness but the
loudest meter shows us Lu FS units which
is weighted different and is a better
judge of loudness than using RMS so
getting back to why I often use negative
10
we can still use negative 10 as a
reference with the loudest meter as I
have in past videos but keep in mind
that the negative 16 reference I
mentioned earlier is really just a
suggestion for music and is quite quiet
compared to most popular recordings in
the market so part of its just personal
taste the artists taste and clarity
which i think is the most important
detail if you can master a really loud
recording but still maintain clarity and
dynamics great go for it once clarity
starts to be lost
I typically fall back to a more
conservative mastering level the main
thing to remember from all this is that
yes rms levels are a good judge of
loudness there's nothing wrong with
using rms metering for mastering music l
ufs levels are weighted differently and
are just a better judge of overall
loudness so now we have all the
background information out of the way
let's use the plug-in alright so let's
get into using the loudness meter what
I'm going to do with the loudness meter
is I'm going to use it to match the
loudness levels of two different tracks
by the same band that are going on the
same album and I want to match their
loudness level so that when one song
plays right next to another that they
all have the approximately the same
amount of loudness or perceived loudness
so I'm going to load my loudness meter
on the master fader the magico stereo
output I'll just unload it here just go
to your inserts and it's under metering
loudness meter I pull that up and
there's actually three different meters
in the loudness meter let me just hit
start here to start metering and i'ma
hit play just to get a little snippet of
the song
so you can see there's well you can't
could see there that there was a three
or four meters you have one that's
labeled M s and I M is momentary
loudness s is short-term loudness and I
is integrated loudness level most of the
time overall we're going to be looking
at the integrated level that's sort of
like our long-term loudness level
typically what you do is either listen
to the entire track and get the entire
integrated loudness level or you listen
to like at least like a 60 second clip
and get an integrated loudness level
sometimes you can do even less than that
just for quick metering you can you can
you know play like 20 or 30 seconds of
the track and get an approximated
integrated loudness level momentary is
like your instantaneous loudness level
at that point in time short term is is
still sort of almost instantaneous but a
little wider a little wider window for
metering also there is this little
little yellow slider here this is your
target loudness level so this is just
just basically a reference for you as to
where your metering for so for mastering
music I'd probably set this number
between negative 10 and negative 16 if I
was doing like dialogue for TV I'd
probably do something like negative 23
or negative 24 so I'm going to set this
at negative 10 and any values that go
above negative 10 are going to show up
in yellow
which right now nothing is showing up in
yellow because our track is very quiet
it's been fully mixed but it has not
been mastered rather than adding a bunch
of mastering effects here just for
demonstration I'm just going to use a
mastering limiter you could use logics
stock limiter but I'm going to use my my
fabfilter pro-mb
and you'll see as I add gain in the
limiter I'm going to put this in the
transparent mode as I get ad gain in the
limiter you'll see the the Lu FS
integrated level go up or yeah it goes
up closer to zero dB
it's never going to get there we really
want it to be more like negative 10 DB
so we don't want you know that loud when
I make it too loud so this is similar to
what I've talked about in previous
videos using an RMS level to 2 meter
it's essentially the same thing as using
RMS levels to meter it's just the
weighting of Lu FS is better for
approximating loudness than RMS actually
is so I'm just going to play the track
I'm going to reset play the track and I
was going to pull the gain up and we'll
see where the integrated level gets to
about negative 10
so are coming in a little loud actually
so we'll pull the game down a bit reset
it hit play again
if we leave this
so they job
here we go
so you'll notice what I'm doing is I'm
making an adjustment over here that I'm
just hitting a reset because if I don't
hit reset it's still taking into account
the previous settings so if I was too
loud it's still going to be the meter
still going up shows too loud so I just
keep hitting reset now the the last
meter that's shown here is the Lu range
the loudness range this value is
basically useless and let unless you
play the track for a longer period of
time like usually at least 40 or 50 or
60 seconds the r128 documentation even
specifies that that this value is not
really you can't really take it you
can't really take it seriously unless
you let it play for 60 seconds with that
what the loudness range is is it
quantifies a variation in time varying
loudness so basically it's the variation
in loudness that we have so a smaller
number means that we have less loudness
variation and a larger number means we
have more loudest variation so a softer
song that maybe an acoustic song is
going to have a little bit more more ups
and more downs more dynamics a rock song
like this is going to have quite a bit
less dynamics pop music and electronic
music sometimes even less dynamics there
as well at least when it comes to volume
dynamics so really to get a good lü
range approximation we have to let the
track play for at least four year 50
seconds the they are the are 128
specification recommends 60 seconds so
I'm going to play this whole little clip
here with our new gain setting in the
Pro L and we'll see what our le range
ends up being it's going to be something
drastically different than 8
if we leave me
so me jumps out
it's so many ways
what do
yes we've got a loudness range of about
1 Lu which is what I expected it's
heavily compressed loud rock music so I
wasn't expecting a lot of dynamic range
so let's um let's check out our other
track now I'm going to put a different
limiter on my other track and we'll
match the loudness of the first track or
the second track to the first one so let
me just throw the pro L back on here I'm
going to select a range 2 meter as well
I'm sort of skipping the intro of the
song because there's a lot of like
little dips and things like that I just
want to get to like the loud part of the
song really to reset the meter let's
meet the first track unmeet the second
track and I'll hit play and I'll keep
resetting and keep bumping up the game
we put myself in transparent mode here
and we'll give this a listen
there we go we got our integrated
loudness around negative ten they just
pump this up one more tenth of a DB
there and then let's get a full Lu range
measurement as well
and you
don't you understand walking
I'm running over me
so yeah this ins got a little bit higher
Lu range just a slightly higher because
there's like those little breaks I think
in between the guitar riff I think it's
causing like a dynamic shift I'm going
to pull the gain up like one more tenth
of it a DB here and then of course the
last thing here is just to trust your
ears you know listen to one track and
then listen to the other track and see
if they sound good back-to-back so it's
just a B then real quick
you
yeah so the only thing that's really
different now of the volume levels the
same loudness is the same but the maybe
there's some tonal differences so that
would be another another issue outside
of loudness that we may have to tackle
in mastering maybe shifting some of the
frequencies a bit with a sonic enhancer
like vitamin or just an EQ just to sort
of like shape the tone a little bit
different from one track the next to
match their tones a little bit
differently but that's that's a whole
other that's a whole other process a
whole other topic so one last thing you
can do with the the loudest meter is you
can click up here by default it's in
vertical mode and you can click up here
and put it in horizontal mode so if you
want to view it horizontally you can do
that as well so I hope you guys enjoyed
this tutorial on the new loudness meter
in Logic 10.2.32 on Lu FS metering again
it's a more accurate better weighted way
to approximate loudness overusing rms
levels and I'm happy that logic finally
added a dedicated loudness meter so I
hope you guys enjoyed the video and
thanks for watching
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you