Cable spot delivery help

[Steve Yager]

I'm delivering a cable spot for the first time and I'm looking over the specs. I get everything except this: AC3 dialnorm of -24 or analog at -12 dB. Now, when I dial my mix down to peak at -12, it sounds really quiet. I'm thinking the meters in Logic aren't analog. Is that true? A little help would be much appreciated.

[Jarek Zabczynski]

It will be quieter than what you're probably used to for analog SD. I encode and upload commercials to DGFastchannel for broadcast all the time. The SD MPEG encodes are always much quieter than the HD ones. My clients always freak out when I send them the files and they come back saying the volume is very low. I have to remind them that's how it needs to be.

[Steve Yager]

Let me run this by you. I'm exporting my project in FCP, does the audio need to peak at -12, or 0?

[nigelsmith]

-12 for US, -10 for Europe broadcast masters - it's called headroom.

[Cail Young]

It shouldn't peak at -12, the dialogue level should be normalised to -12.

I suggest you talk to an audio post mixer.