Limit your headphones!
As editors, we probably spend more time than we like to admit having to cut tracks on headphones. I definitely do. Iām sure weāre all aware by now that listening to material too loudly can cause permanent hearing damage, and headphones are no exception. Itās easy to creep the volume up to high levels that you otherwise would not listen to on speakers for various reasons, neighbours being one of them. So, if you canāt limit your usage of headphones, I suggest limiting their dynamic range.
Production sound is often extremely dynamic, sometimes -50dBFS up to 0dBFS in very short order. A character whispering a line, followed by a live prop gunshot can easily reach this, and just one listen in headphones has the potential to cause damage. When Iām editingĀ production tracks, I bus all tracks through a master bus with a limiter across it. In my case I use the Avid Pro Limiter and I start with a threshold and ceiling of -16dB, and if the dialogue is recorded relatively hot I will move both up to -10 and then turn my volume down to compensate. (Side note: another cool thing about the AVID limiter is that it will show you instantaneous LUFS readings, which is useful for predicting how the mixers are going to treat the tracks). A drawback of using a limiter is that you might think a loud recording has been compressed at the source (hitting the limiters on the way into the field recorder) so itās important that you have this plugin open and visible at all times so you can see how much gain reduction is being applied to the audio. Ā Also, you can bypass the plugin and re-listen so youāre making good decisions, while still getting an extra bit of protection from peak levels hitting your eardrums.