In this extended free Pro Tools video tutorial, Paul Maunder goes through his process for compression and EQ dialogue in post production using Pro Tools. The methods he shows in this tutorial are his own approach to this, so take what you find useful from it and adapt it to fit into your own workflow.

In this tutorial, as a response to a number of requests including this one from Paul Krunz asking “When are getting how to compress dialog and eq” [sic] I am going to demonstrate practically how I go about this process and it is a longer video than normal (over an hour) because I want to accurately reflect the processes and methods involved.

I am going to focus mainly on documentary-style content but many of the concepts covered will also apply to dialogue for film and TV.

Before we get started I mention in the video the issue of target loudness for a variety of platforms. If you want to learn more about loudness then check out Mike Thornton’s excellent series Understanding Loudness.

I use De-clip and Dialog De-noise from iZotope RX and if you would like to learn more about using iZotope RX, then check out Mike’s series on using the iZotope RX Plugins in Pro Tools.

To help get the dialogue close to target loudness I use the Waves WLM Plus loudness meter and use the Short ~Term reading to get the dialogue to be around the target loudness, in my case -23LUFS. For more on using the Waves WLM Plus plugin then check out Mike’s tutorial How To Use Waves WLM Plus In An Audio Post Production Workflow.