Loudness for Social Without Distortion
Answers how loud should video audio be for social media
Two things happen to your audio the moment it goes on a platform. It gets turned down to a target the platform chose, and if it was mixed too hot, it gets turned down after already being distorted. Only one of those is recoverable.
The numbers worth knowing
Platforms normalise playback to roughly minus fourteen LUFS integrated, and most turn down anything louder rather than turning up anything quieter. So a mix at minus eight does not sound louder on the platform. It sounds exactly as loud as one at minus fourteen, except that its peaks were already clipped before it got there.
The practical target: minus fourteen LUFS integrated, true peak no higher than minus one dBTP. That is it. Everything else is taste.
Why mixing hot backfires
Say your music bed sits at minus six and the voice is pushed to match. Your limiter is working hard, transients are flattened, and the consonants have started to splatter. The platform then turns the whole thing down by eight decibels to reach its target. Now it is quiet, and it is still distorted, because distortion does not come back out when the level goes down.
The mix that survives is the one that never needed the limiter in the first place.
What to do instead
Mix in the middle, not at the top. Leave four to six decibels of headroom while you work, and only lift the master at the end. Everything sounds softer and more controlled when it is not fighting a ceiling the whole time.
Get the balance right at a quiet level. Set dialogue, music and effects so the relationship is right when the whole thing is quiet. Then turn it up. If the balance only works when it is loud, the balance is the limiter's, not yours.
Use a limiter for safety, not for loudness. One or two decibels of gain reduction on peaks. If the meter is pinned, the problem is upstream.
Check the phone speaker before the headphones. A mix that only works on headphones is a mix that has not been checked.
The three versions you actually need
The hero mix, minus fourteen, for the platform upload.
A quieter version for anywhere that does not normalise: a website player, a presentation, a file someone opens on a laptop. Minus eighteen to twenty.
A vertical cut-down, mixed separately rather than exported from the same master. Vertical tends to play on a phone, held at arm's length, sometimes with the speaker covered by a hand. Speech needs to sit a decibel or two higher than in the hero.
The one mistake worth avoiding
Do not normalise to a number and stop. Loudness normalisation manages the average; it does nothing about the balance underneath. A mix at exactly minus fourteen with the music four decibels too loud is still a mix nobody can follow, and no platform will fix that for you.
If your films keep coming back with "can you make the audio better", that is a mix problem rather than a recording problem, and it is usually an afternoon of work rather than a reshoot.