Good levels for spoken word?

Is there a general guideline for where levels should be for spoken word?

Jim Simon wrote:
The short answer is no, there is no one "general" guideline on this one.
Good answer...
To shooternz.... You can make a whisper as loud as a scream LEVEL WISE.... So they might both PEAK at -3db but the scream will still sound (RMS) MUCH louder than the whisper.
To OP... The most importing thing is to get the relationships between the audio events to blend in with each other. What I mean by that is, if you have a car dialog and are working with Foley talent
you might want to make sure that the spoken word mixes (blends) in with the environment they are supposed to be in... CLose your eyes and listen to background noise of the engine and the tooting car horns outside,
then up the gain on the spoken words until you find that they blend in nicely witht the whole atmosphere. After you have blended the various levels of one scene you can create a nested clips and make sure that is normalized.
Basically what that means is that you find the loudest passage of the clip and up the gain until that part hits the roof (I set mine to negative 0.5 dB) you can do -3db too, to be real safe.

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