Hi,
I've been quite surprised to see several corporate footage made by high-end prods and the internet deliveries were absolutly not "standart" in the sense that for a same volume, the audio levels between one footage and another were completly different. This was specialy truth for interviews were sometimes I had to turn volume up or other times turn it down, from one clip to another.
It surprised me because I thought that big companies using big productions houses would end to have a sort of standardized levels and it is far from being the case.
You can verify this fact included in the videos uploaded by (in their official channels) several motion companies like: the Foundry, Blackmagic, Arri, Avid etc...audio levels can be extremely different.
What do you think? Best practises or... we don't care and it's the wild west?
I don't know, really, but if I were to take a guess, I'd guess that the client/agency is using the mix in a place for which it's not intended. In the US, things got much more complicated when congress passed the LOUD act. (don't ask me what the acronym stands for, I've forgotten) It is intended to keep commercials, which are usually highly compressed and have very full sound, from blasting you out of your seat when they come on in the middle of dramatic programming, which is usually much less compressed, with a great variance in audio dynamic range. It does that by requiring metering in a much different way, that results in much lower audio levels than traditional mixes have used.
So... If you play something mixed for US TV next to something mixed using traditional levels, the TV mix will be
much lower level.
That's why we do different mixes for the web and for broadcast. (To BC's point.)
But we can't control what the client does with the files once they're out of our hands. And 100% of clients don't know any of this. For that matter, 98% of agencies who don't have a real broadcast producer on staff don't know any of it, either. Mostly only sound mixers a few really geeky producers know it's a thing... So you can see how the things you find on the web are not all sounding like they're mixed to a common standard.
