Matt,
I've been researching the dialogue normalization setting, too. On-line articles and tutorials simply say to set it to -31 or your audio will get screwed up. End of discussion. I've read lengthy explanations of how dialog norm works. And there are guides as to how to set it properly in other encoding apps, but nothing that applies to Compressor. I have a feature film that was a Dolby 5.1 mix with an average dialog level of around -18 in the center channel. In other encoding apps that would mean you set your dialog norm setting to -13 (-18 + -13 = -31). Then supposedly it doesn't change the audio, it just changes the metadata that the Dolby decoder uses inside the DVD players to figure out what level to send out. It also determines the center of the compression curve (if you've chosen Film Light or some other compression choice). But I've found nothing on determining an optimum setting. I even spoke with someone on the FCP team at Apple. He said he'd try to dig up some info but I never heard back.
sean
http://www.dantefilm.com
