From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Audio Finishing Techniques

Automatic ducking - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Audio Finishing Techniques

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Automatic ducking

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- How many times have you started a piece with music and then the voiceover comes in? I'm willing to bet that this happened more than once. Well, if you do need for the music level to go up and down depending on when the voiceover comes in throughout your piece, look no more. Automatic ducking is for you. Let's try it. Please go ahead and open the sequence named 4.6 automatic ducking. So project panel, sequences, chapter 4, 4.6 automatic ducking, and there it is. Now, let's select the music track. Change its type to music, and let's select the voiceover track and change this to dialogue. Now, we're going to be talking or interacting with the music clip. In here, you're going to see that, obviously, we have duration. We don't want to affect that right now, but we have ducking. If you check this, these options become alive and you can duck against dialogue or the music, sound effects, ambience, or of course any clip that doesn't have an assigned audio type. Now, the sensitivity parameter, it adjusts the threshold at which the ducking triggers. So higher or lower sensitivity results in fewer adjustments but focus on maintaining a lower or louder music track respectively. Reduce by is how much the level will come down. Measured in dBs. The fades is like you don't want for the audio to fade down immediately. You want a gradual fade up or fade down. And this is going to be measured in milliseconds. 800 milliseconds is almost one second. So that's good. Now I'm going to leave the sensitivity at six. I find that to be a good value and I'm going to change the duck amount to be higher. So I actually want to do -27 or so. That's close enough. And now all I have to do is click on generate key frames. And here we go. We now have key frames that were created automatically for us. If we play this, you're going to hear how the audio of the music comes down whenever the voice comes in. Let's try it. (bright music) - [Man] Construction drone mapping is Mid-Atlantic Drones specialty. (bright music) Why choose Mid-Atlantic. - [Instructor] And that's pretty cool. Now imagine for one second that I think, "Oh, you know what? It went down a little bit too much." I can change this value here. I can change the sensitivity value. For example, I could have a higher value and I can say, okay, you know what? The fades, I want them to be much longer. Let's say close to two seconds, right? All I have to do is click on generate key frames once more and there go. Notice that now I'm getting fewer key frames on my audio track because I changed the sensitivity value to a higher number. (bright music) - [Man] Construction drone mapping is Mid-Atlantic Drones specialty. (bright music) - [Instructor] Also the fade is much longer. One more thing. If I change where the voice is say I change it to here. I can now generate the key frames again, changing the values. Now I'm going to have a sensitivity that is much shorter. I'm going to have a duck amount of much more and say a fade that is much shorter. Say 74 milliseconds. I can click on generate key frames and then new key frames are generated. Look at this. There's hardly any key frames. There are pretty sudden. Let me zoom in so you can see it, pretty sudden. And it's obviously, it's because the fade is set to 74 milliseconds. That's next to nothing. So I like the default values. You can go back to any of the default values that you want simply by typing the numbers. Let's say -23 here, and I'm going to go back to 800 milliseconds. And when you click on generate key frames again, when you zoom out, you see that the key frames were generated with your settings now. If you listen to it, you're going to hear that is actually pretty good. (bright music) - [Man] Construction drone mapping is Mid-Atlantic Drones specialty. - And that was so easy and seriously, I love the fact that even if I have to re-edit something and change where the voice comes in, I can always regenerate these key frames in no time.

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