Video content such as DVDs and video files have different volume levels. When you watch a DVD usually you have to increase the volume of your TV or speaker system, but when you switch back to regular TV, the volume is a lot louder, forcing you to turn the volume down a bit.
To eliminate these volume issues, DVD Catalyst 4 uses a unique feature we call “Volume Maximizer”
People who have used different conversion tools and methods in the past know how annoying the volume levels can be when you create video files for portable video players. Devices such as the PSP and the NOOKcolor are designed to play audio over the headphones, and while they do have a speaker build-in, due to limited volume adjustment options, its usually impossible to get the loudness you desire from them.
While many conversion tools are capable of boosting the volume a bit during conversion to take care of this, the volume setting needs to be determined on a per-video basis. DVDs need a larger increase, DIVX files only a little, TV recordings usually nothing, so for each conversion you do, you will need to adjust the volume manually before you start the conversion. If you forget this, or set the volume too high, you end up with distorted sound, or whenever you watch something on your device, you will have to adjust the volume.
DVD Catalyst 4′s “Volume Maximizer“, not found in any other application on the market, takes care of this.
This feature, which is enabled by default, overrides the manual volume adjustment found in “Modify”, acts very similar to a “normalize” feature in media players such as iTunes, but besides making the volume equal to all other files, the maximize feature increases the volume to be as loud as possible without causing distortion.
To show what the “Volume Maximizer” actually does, we created 3 5 minute audio clips (Audio only > MP3 in DVD Catalyst 4) using 3 different settings.
First we turned off the maximizer setting (Global Settings > Advanced), and reduced the volume adjustment setting in “Modify” to 0 to give you an indication of the volume from a standard DVD (v for vendetta to be exact) For visualization, we used a free program called Audacity, which displays a nice graph.
The 2 blue lines in the screenshot represent the actual volume levels of the beginning of the movie. The maximum volume without causing distortion is represented by the 1 and -1 at the top and bottom of each grey area. As you can tell, there is plenty of room left to spare.
Next, we left the volume maximizer setting turned off, but in “Modify” we increased the volume to 5:
As you can tell from the screenshot, the volume is much better (the blue area is closer to the 1 and -1) , than without the adjustment, but still there is a lot room left for improvement.
Next we turned on the Volume Maximizer setting (since it overrides the volume in “Modify” you can leave that as is)
As you can tell from the screenshot, the volume levels are improved considerably. There is still some room left, but this is because of the safe-setting used for the volume maximizer. If you do increase it even more, you will likely experience distortion of the sound during loud explosions and things like that.
Summary:
Because of the “Volume Maximizer” setting in DVD Catalyst 4, you never have to change the audio volume of your conversions. Every conversion you do with DVD Catalyst 4 will be as loud as possible without causing distortion, and regardless of the volume of the original video or DVD, all of your created files will end up with the same loudness, so you don’t have to adjust the volume on your playback device or audio system whenever you watch something else.
