Corel VideoStudio Help | Automatically ducking audio

Automatically ducking audio

Audio ducking (similar concept to side-chaining) automatically lowers the volume of one track so that you can hear another track better. For example, if you have a video project with music and voiceover, you can use audio ducking to automatically decrease the volume of the ambient music in the background when the narrator is speaking. VideoStudio lets you choose how much to reduce the volume of the background track and set the threshold that triggers ducking.

To use audio ducking

1 In Timeline view (Edit workspace), ensure that the track to which you want to apply ducking is below the video, overlay, or voice track that you want to feature.

2 Right-click the music track that you want to duck and choose Audio Ducking.

3 In the Audio Ducking dialog box, adjust the following sliders:

• Ducking Level — determines the volume decrease. Higher numbers indicate lower volume.

• Sensitivity — determines the volume threshold (read from the track above the selected track) required for ducking to occur. You may need to readjust the Sensitivity slider to achieve the results you want.

• Attack — determines the time it takes to lower the volume to the Ducking Level setting after the Sensitivity threshold is met.

• Decay — determines the time it takes to return to the regular clip volume from the Ducking Level

In these examples, the voiceover is the purple track and the music is the blue track. The yellow line in each example indicates when and by how much the volume of the music track is lowered by applying different Sensitivity settings for Audio Ducking: Top = 0, Middle = 2, and Bottom = 30. In this example, a setting of 2 worked best.

You can tweak audio ducking results manually by dragging, adding, or removing keyframe nodes on the yellow volume line.