From the course: Audio for Video Editors: Essential Terms

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What is gain vs. volume?

What is gain vs. volume?

- Now, let's move on to signal flow and gain stages, and show how signal flow goes through your system for mixing. Signal flow is following the path the audio signal is taking within your mix and then your output. Gain stages can happen anywhere along that way until you go out. Sometimes they're kind of hidden. We may not exactly understand where we're gaining volume or energy in our mix. Let's start by understanding what gain versus volume actually is. We talked about energy in a clip before with amplitude and we saw a little glimpse of what gain and volume is, but let's review that for a minute. Our first step in any type of signal flow in gain stage is the actual clip itself, or the energy of the clip itself. In Premiere and in most MLE's, it's gain. Gain also happens before any faders. We'll talk about pre-fader and post-fader in a minute. But here we're just going to do G for gain, and we're going to adjust gain quite a lot. You're not going to do this ever in real life…

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