I am extremely new to FMod so I apologize if this is an elementary question. However, if there is reading material on this subject please send it my way!
Question:
-I am used to mastering and exporting all of my own audio for television productions and usually have a master on a finished track with a limiter set to either -1.0 db or -0.3 db. Is it common to do any mastering for game audio before importing it into FMod? Or is it best practice to just leave lots of headroom to then allow for gain staging within FMod itself? I love my VSTs so I hesitate to use FMod’s native plugins to do my mastering/gain staging. Just wondering what is common practice.
The problem I ran into:
I have a track that I want to break up into layers to add as the player progresses, but my master started clipping because I didn’t leave enough head room on the stems before importing them to FMod. I figured I could fix this by slapping on FMod’s limiter on the master as a temporary fix as I learn more about FMod but the native limiter introduced a lot of artifacts and distortion. Again, I am a mega-noob but I am just wondering if I am doing something wrong with the built in limiter or just not doing proper preparations of gain staging before importing my files.
Also, say I have the background track and then start introducing sound effects, is it common practice to have a limiter on the entire FMod project so it never breaches 0 db? With this limiter, or at least the way I am using it seems like it could introduce artifacts…is there just a common practice of having lots of head room in all game audio?
Sorry for the noob question, any insight or materials you can point me to is much appreciated I attached a screen shot of my project for reference.
The answers to your questions are very much informed by the realtime nature of game audio when compared to most other audio processing contexts.
The typical recommendation is to do most of your mixing and mastering, especially for things like music tracks/stems, in an external DAW. This is because primarily because FMOD is designed for real time audio processing, and as such additional audio processing is done alongside your game running, which increases the CPU and memory overhead.
As for mixing and mastering within Studio, given the dynamic nature of game audio, it is very common to leave headroom and gain stage the audio chain, especially because you may not be in full control of which assets are playing at once in-game. Setting up automation/modulation across different events/buses (sidechain compression/filtering, sends, etc.) is often done to help dynamically mix/master audio within Studio.
Regarding FMOD’s built-in limiter effect, it comes back to FMOD needing to operate in real-time - many of FMOD built-in effects are designed to be efficient, sometimes at the cost of quality compared to a VST effect designed for non-realtime usage. I have seen projects that make use of it on the master, and projects that don’t use the limiter at all; you may find that it is more effective to manage event/bus headroom instead, and to leave the limiter as a “last resort” so that you don’t push it too hard and potentially introduce the unwanted artifacts you mentioned.
I hope that helps answer your questions - if you have any more, feel free to ask.
That makes a lot of sense. I didn’t really think about the fact that the in-house plugins of FMod have to work in real-time. It is kind of crazy how different game audio is to everything else, so it feels like I am having to re-learn things like gain staging and mastering for loudness all over again.
I have one additional question if you don’t mind!
I will admit that as a prod music composer, I have fallen victim to the brickwall limiting for loudness that seems to be all the rage these days. Like, setting your limiter to -0.3 or -1.0 and then pushing it as hard as you can. But that is definitely why when I exported my stems (through my master) that they all started clipping in FMod. I guess my question is a general loudness question as it relates to games…In your DAW is there a common practice for limiting when doing your mastering for your game audio? Is it common to maybe limit to -3 or -6 db to leave head room or are brick wall limiters just not as common in game audio?
Or is there any common practice for exporting stems of a full track that you would like to partition into “layers” in FMod? I guess in my instance exporting the stems through the Master bus with a limiter at -0.3 is just a recipe for clipping.
I’m not sure if these questions are making sense, and I could see the answer just being to leave headroom and maybe stay away from limiters. But anyways, thank you so much for your long and well thoughout response. I didn’t expect such an in depth response so quickly, thank you!!!
Personally, I would say that when managing assets in a DAW, best practice is probably to try to achieve a target volume for an asset without a brickwall limiter, or to use one and not push too hard into it. However, it may be more useful to consider the actual effects a limiter will have on your audio, and whether those effects will be useful for your target context.
A limiter enforces a hard volume limit, but will also effectively reduce the dynamic range of an audio signal. This can be useful for creating/enforcing headroom when handling audio assets in a DAW before importing into FMOD Studio, but if you don’t want the lower dynamic range you may wish to gain stage them in the DAW or in FMOD Studio instead. That said, reduced dynamic range can be useful for some contexts, for example when people are playing mobile games on mobile phone speakers/in-ear monitors, etc.
As for rendering individual stems, a limiter adjusted for limiting all the stems at once obviously won’t have an effect on each individual stem, so leaving them unlimited with headroom and adjusting volume/limiting in FMOD Studio is probably the thing to do - unless you do want a track with maximized volume/reduced dynamic range, etc.
Not sure if that exactly answers your questions, but I hope it helps.
No that actually helps a ton. I think I just needed to shift my mind set a little bit and you helped me gain that perspective. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond, that was extremely helpful
I attached a screen shot of my project for reference.
