Basic audio levels

Question

At which db does the audio clip? Is the goal to make sure the audio meters stay out of the yellow/orange/red?
Is there a way to raise the volume of only 1 track of audio in the timeline? There is only 1 rubber band to drag on for both tracks.

Answer 1

To prove to yourself where clipping does occur, place a bars and tone clip on a sequence. (Get the bars and tone from File > New > ). It should replay at -12 dB. Apply a +12dB audio gain increase to the clip. Use the rubber band on the audio part of the clip, drop the audio level at the start of the clip to a low level, and after several seconds place a second node at maximum gain. You will than have a slowly increasing in level audio tone. Listen to it and when clipping occurs you should hear the tone turn from a pure tone to one including harmonics, making it sound "hard". The further the audio is driven past clipping, the greater the harmonics.
It should clip at 0dB. On a new system that I was using recently, I thought that the audio did not sound quite right. Its a BM Intensity card, HDMI output to a TV monitor, audio out of the TV to speakers. Indeed upon using the above procedure, audio was clipping at -12dB! It turns out the TV wont give clean analogue audio out. It also has an optical audio out which is clean right up to 0dB. So that's the fix in my case.
bye Andrew