Leveling Tool

This tool was first created during The Last of Us Part II by Emily Scrivner, one of Naughty Dog’s Dialogue Designers. It’s purpose was to do a quick temp level pass of all the assets in a session, leveling them according to the information in a file that included all of our loudness targets.

In the beginning it only leveled an item by using the item’s volume (i.e. the generic volume that applies to all takes across the entire file). This made the tool useful, but still resulted in a lot of hand-tuning to take care of individual transients that were screwing the original loudness calculations.

So in order to improve the accuracy of the tool I ended up making it a bit “smarter” - adjusting it to level a file by using both the item’s volume and the take’s envelope automation. This allows the tool to do a blanket pass on a file whenever the entire file is too quiet/loud, while also giving the tool the ability to do a fine-tuned pass and level any individual transients that are adjusting the file’s loudness.