When I first started making YouTube videos, I had no idea what mastering was. I knew how to record,...
Every platform your client's video ends up on has a loudness target, and at this point that's not a secret. Most video editors know the numbers, or at least know they exist. What almost nobody knows is how to actually hit those numbers without wrecking the mix in the process.
Here's the part that trips people up. Loudness isn't a limiter problem. It's a balance problem, and if you don't understand the difference, your "fix" makes the video sound worse, not better.
The Actual Numbers
Loudness is measured in LUFS, not dB, because LUFS accounts for how the human ear actually perceives volume across frequencies, not just raw signal level. The targets differ by platform:
YouTube normalizes to -14 LUFS, with a true peak ceiling of -1 dBTP. Go louder and YouTube turns you down automatically. Go quieter and it leaves you alone, sounding weak next to everything else in someone's feed.
Spotify normalizes to the same -14 LUFS for standard playback, also with a -1 dB peak ceiling.
Broadcast delivery under EBU R128 targets -23 LUFS, a full 9 LU quieter than YouTube or Spotify, which is exactly why a mix that sounds perfect for social falls apart if it ever needs to run on TV.
Knowing these numbers is step one, and plenty of editors get that far. The problem is what happens next.
Why You Can't Just Slap a Limiter on It
Here's where most generalist editors get it wrong. Hitting a loudness target isn't the same thing as turning the master fader up until a meter agrees with you. Slap a limiter on the master bus, crank the input until you hit -14 LUFS integrated, and technically you've hit the number. You've also crushed everything that made the mix worth listening to. Dynamic range is the distance between your quietest and loudest moments. It's what makes a spoken line hit harder after a quiet pause, what makes music feel like it's breathing instead of sitting at one flat volume the entire runtime. Loudness and dynamic range aren't the same target, and they actively pull against each other. Push loudness up without managing dynamics first, and you're not making the mix better. You're flattening it until every peak and every quiet moment lands at the same volume, which is the fastest way to make professional audio sound amateurish.
What Actually Gets You There
The real work happens before the limiter, not at it. Gain-stage first, so nothing starts too hot or too buried. Compression on individual elements, dialogue, music, effects, so the dynamic range within each element is already under control before anything hits the master bus. Balance between dialogue and music so the mix doesn't need a heavy-handed fix later. By the time a limiter touches the master bus, it should be doing small, transparent work, not rescuing a mix that was never balanced in the first place. That's the difference between a mix that hits -14 LUFS and sounds professional, and a mix that hits -14 LUFS and sounds like it went through a vice. Hitting the loudness target is the last step of a mix done right. It's not a shortcut you can take instead of doing the mix right.
Where We Come In
This is the kind of thing that's genuinely hard to teach a generalist editor in an afternoon, because it's not a checkbox; it's a mixing decision made dozens of times across a project. Riot Anthem Studios handles this as a core part of every audio post pass: dynamics managed properly through the chain, loudness hit on target for whatever platform the video is headed to, without sacrificing the parts of the mix that make it sound like it was actually crafted instead of squeezed into a number.
The Bottom Line
Loudness targets aren't optional; every platform enforces them whether you plan for it or not. But hitting the number is the easy part. Hitting it without gutting your dynamic range is the actual skill, and it's the difference between audio that sounds mixed and audio that just sounds loud.
