In Pinnacle Studio you can use the audio
ducking tool to help you easily layer
audio. Let's say you are creating an
advertisement and are using both
background music and a voiceover. When
you use the audio ducking feature the
volume of the music will lower or "duck"
so that you can clearly hear the
voiceover. Before we get started, if
you're watching this video on YouTube
you'll find a link in the description
below that will take you to our tutorial
page on the Discovery Center. Here you
can download a written copy of this
tutorial to follow along. Let's get
started. Let's say I'm going to create a
commercial for a birthday cake service. I
have the video I am working with already
placed on AV track 2. Now I am going to
drag my commercial voiceover from the
project bin to AV track 3. Finally I'll
add the background music I want to use
onto AV track 4. If we press Play to
preview the video you'll hear that the
background music has the same volume
level as the voiceover and overpowers it.
"Your child's birthday only comes once a
year..."
We want the background music to be a
higher level when there is no voiceover
and to duck or lower when the voiceover
is present. To do this we need to use the
audio ducking tool. To begin using this
feature click on the Audio Ducking icon
on the toolbar. A dialog box will pop up
explaining more about audio ducking. Here
you will have to select your master
track - this means select the track that
contains the voiceover or the person
speaking. My commercial voiceover is on
AV track 3 so I'm going to select that.
Next you can adjust the ducking level
according to your desired volume level
for the background music. The ducking
level is the percentage that your music
volume will decrease. So for example, if I
wanted to completely fade out all the
music every time a person is speaking I
would adjust the ducking level to 100.
For this video I still want to hear the
music faintly in the background so I'm
going to adjust the ducking level to 70.
Next we can adjust the threshold. This
determines the master track volume level
that will trigger the volume decrease
for the other tracks. You can play around
with this until you're happy with the
results. I'm going to keep it set at 5. If
you want to apply ducking to all non
master audio tracks, enable the Apply to
Entire Timeline option.
To apply ducking to the selected track
only, enable Apply to Selected Clips. I'm
going to apply to the entire timeline
then click OK. Now look at the sound
waves on AV track 4. You can see that
keyframes have been added that duck down
when the voiceover is speaking and come
back up when the speaker has finished.
This happens repeatedly during the video.
Now if you want to manually adjust how
the sound fades in and out you can
adjust the green squares to change the
position of the keyframes. To do this,
click on the Audio Mixer icon. Now the
green squares have been enabled to edit
manually. I'm going to left-click on the
keyframe and drag it to the left just a
little bit to create a longer fade in.
I can do this again to create a longer
fade-out at the end of my video.
Now let's press Play to preview. "Your
child's birthday only comes once a year
so why not savor the moment
and buy one of our delicious birthday
cakes?" As you can hear, my music fades
nice and slowly before my commercial
voiceover and the music doesn't distract
from the speaker. If you're watching this
video on YouTube you'll find a link in
the description below that will take you
to our tutorial page on the Discovery
Center. Here you can download a written
copy of this tutorial to follow along
and find other helpful tutorials for
Pinnacle Studio.