Audio Ducking in DaVinci Resolve 16 | Automatically Lower Music Volume when Talking

what's happening guys welcome back to another video on the channel today we're talking about audio ducking and it's a great feature here in DaVinci Resolve I use it all the time and I thought that you guys might find it helpful too I did make a video about this about a year and a half ago we've had a lot of new people come to the channel since then and I don't know if anybody goes back and watches the old videos so I figured I would just put it out there again and maybe there's some new things we can learn here as we go through it but if you're new here my name is Jael offski and on this channel we talked a lot about the Venturi's off we even cover a little bit of camera stuff some microphone stuff some gear stuff there bit less into gear stuff right so if you're into any of those consider subscribing to my channel alright let's roll that intro and get into the video so you might be thinking what is audio ducking never heard that I don't even know what it is so audio ducking is basically when you have a music track playing in the background below say me talking for example and you want that music track to get a little quieter while I'm talking and when I'm done talking you want that volume to come back up well we can get DaVinci Resolve to do that automatically for us you don't have to keyframe and do all kinds of stuff so let's get right into DaVinci Resolve and start learning how to duck our audio alright so we're in DaVinci Resolve here I'm in the Edit Page and I've already got one clip of me walking and talking on my timeline and I also have a music track below that so the first thing you want to do is make sure you've got your audio level set and everything is sounding pretty good a quick way you can do that and the way I do with music tracks sometimes since they're already edited and remastered and all that kind of stuff I just come to them I right-click and I come to normalize audio levels and then I'm gonna come to true peak and I'm gonna set that somewhere down around seven or eight I'm just gonna hit normalize and then it's gonna correct our audio for us there I also want to make sure my audio track of me talking is that a good level and sounds good so I'm just gonna have my mixer open here in the Edit Page if you don't see your mixer come up to the top it should be this a little icon right here click that and that's going to open the mixer for you I'm gonna start by muting my music track just so I can double-check my talking track and make sure that sounds good so here's our talking track and I'm gonna watch my meters make sure that falls somewhere in the -10 DB range here's our sample clip of how audio ducking works when I'm talking that music should be ducked down below at a lower volume than my voice when I stop talking we should hear that volume of the music come back up and if I start talking again that volume of the music should come back below my voice okay so there's our clip it does look like the levels are a little high so I'm just going to open my inspector here I'm gonna drop it back just a little bit and we're just gonna go with that for now and turn my music track back on so now we want to get into audio ducking so if I just drop in a music track here and we play through that you can see how that sounds and it's not gonna sound good so let's play through with the music track below and see how that sounds real quick [Music] [Applause] okay something to play through the whole clip but you get the idea the music is loud now I can lower the entire music track and have it play quieter below me and that's fine you can do that but let's say there's different parts where you're talking and you're not and you want the music volume to go up when you're not talking so we can automate that here in DaVinci Resolve so if we come over to the Fairlight tab and in here we've got our two tracks we've got me talking on the first track here and we have our music on the second track we can make these a little bigger by coming to this icon just so we could see the waveforms a little bit so in order to tell DaVinci Resolve how to duck the audio we need to take the signal from my talking track and send it down to here so DaVinci Resolve knows when to lower the volume of the music track so how do we do that the first thing we need to do is come and open our dynamics so if you have your mixer open here if you don't see your mixer go again come up to the top you should see mixer right here just go ahead and click on that and that's gonna open the mixer for you now under audio track one if you scroll down you can see I can't see the dynamics one I know it's this one if you're having trouble seeing it you can either make your window a little bigger if possible or come to these three little dots right here and you can turn some things on and off so hopefully you can see the dynamics so let's just say I'm gonna turn off my EQ for now and there's my dynamics so just double click on your dynamics and this brings up the dynamics for our audio track one and we can be sure that by looking at the top audio one so in order to have DaVinci Resolve send this signal to the sidechain to use on another track you want to come down to the compressor section and click on this send button now normally I would have some settings set here in the compressor maybe the gate and expander but in this example it doesn't matter you don't need all that turned on you just have to have this send button turned on the next thing we want to do is open the dynamics for our music track so you can do that really easy by leaving your dynamics window open here and just selecting the next track and if we look at the top of our dynamics window here it says audio - so that's how we know we're on our audio - track now I want to come down to listen in this same section under the compressor I'm gonna turn that on so now we know that DaVinci Resolve is gonna be listening to the signal from the audio track so now that we have the listen turned on the next thing we need to do in our audio track to hear is turn on the compressor because the compressor is going to tell DaVinci Resolve at what point should I start to lower the volume and how much so if we look at our threshold here that's going to be at what point do we start to lower the volume of our music track so down here at the bottom of the threshold we have our decibel level so we know that our speaking track is somewhere up here around minus 10 well we want the music track to be quite a bit below that so I'm gonna come down say around 20 let's start there and see how that does now the ratio tells it how much do I lower the volume do I have lower it to 2:1 once it goes over top of the threshold well in this example let's just lower it down quite a bit and we'll just try it right here for now now if we scoot this window over a little we come to the beginning of our track now we're gonna play through and see how it sounds so here's our sample food without water you've got me worried when I'm talking so you can see that the gain reduction was working there and it was lowering the volume but it sounded awful choppy let's just listen to another second or two of it you can hear that and listen for that and then I'm gonna show you how we can fix that so here's our sample flipping out what do you worry when I'm talking so if you're trying this and it seems like it's not working out for you try playing with the threshold more maybe you need to bring it up a little bit more maybe you need to bring it down a little more it all depends so if I brought this way down and played through it again now listen to what it does so here's our sample clip of how audio ducking work when I'm talking so you can see once that music volume hits this level which is about 30 decibels it quickly cuts that volume way down so depending on where you put this threshold will affect how much it drops the volume of your music track so I'm gonna bring mine back to around 20 there now let's talk about how do we make it sound a little bit smoother because it sounded awful choppy well that's where these three buttons down at the bottom come into play so the attack is how quickly does that compressor kick in when it gets a signal from our audio channel one which is me talking so how fast does the compressor start to reduce the volume of our music track once I start talking most of the time you can leave this where it is you can try playing with it and seeing if it makes a difference for your clip most the time I just leave the attack where it is and if you adjust that you just double-click it to get it back to its default setting so the next item we have here is hold so how does hold work well let's think about how this whole thing is working here so we have our music track it's playing through here and then as soon as I start to talk the attack button over here says ok within 1.4 milliseconds activate the compressor once the compressor is activated it will remain active until I stop talking or until there's a break between my words or my sentences or whatever so the hold says how long do I keep that active after you stop talking so for me most of the time I find that if I bring this up to around 1600 anywhere from 1 to 2 seconds really is where I usually set it but somewhere around 1600 1500 which is about a second and a half after I stop talking then it will go back to its normal volume so I'm gonna lower my threshold just so it's a little more clear on how this is working here so let's come back crank that up so that way we can really notice the difference so let's play through here now listen to the music volume and then once I stop talking listen to how quickly it goes back to its normal volume that volume of the music has come back up so if we boost this hold up to about 1600 here and play through again now listen to how long it takes for it to go back to its normal volume volume of the music come back up so you can see it was a long time here is one and a half seconds about for the music to go back to its normal level so in this case I think that's too long I'm gonna bring that back down - let's try it's got a little less than a second here maybe 3/4 of a second so now let's play through you can hear how that sounds you move the music come back up so you notice it comes up a lot quicker there so you just play with the settings and see what works best for you but you're definitely gonna have to adjust the hold here so that way it doesn't just cut straight back really quick to the normal volume because that's gonna sound a little weird so next thing we have here is release so what does release do release says how long will it take for the music to go from our volume while I'm talking back to its normal volume it's gonna happen really quick or is it gonna gradually fade into its normal volume again so this one I usually also bring up around say a second and a half or so because I like to music to ease back into its normal volume so let's play through this clip here and see how that sounds that volume of the music come back up okay so you could see there it really eased into it now if we just drop the hold down so that let's say as soon as I'm done talking it's just gonna ease right back into its normal volume let's see how that sounds to hear that volume of the music come back up and if I start talking again so you can see it just kind of ease right back in so I think that sounded pretty good so you just have to play with these two options here and just see what works best for your clips and the way you're speaking or how quickly you want your music to return back to a normal level but I use this all the time for all my talking head stuff anytime I've got music underneath it it works really good and it's a lot faster and easier in my opinion than going through and keyframing your music track and raising and lower the volume at different points in the video I just think it's way easier to let DaVinci Resolve do the hard work and do the heavy lifting for ya alright so now that we've got it all set up let's play through the clip one more time so you can hear the whole thing in its entirety with the audio ducking here's our sample clip of how audio ducky works when I'm talking that music should be ducked down below at a lower volume than my voice when I stop talking we should hear that volume of the music come back up okay and if I start talking again that volume of the music should come back below my voice all right guys there you go audio ducking here in DaVinci Resolve it's an awesome feature I use it all the time on pretty much every video and if you're doing talking and music and you want to duck your audio below you should be using it too so hope you found this video helpful if you did give the video a thumbs up if you like videos like this and you want to see more go ahead and subscribe to the channel click the little bell so you get notified when I put out a new video and I look forward to seeing you guys in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 28,138

Keywords: Audio ducking in DaVinci Resolve 16 | Automatically lower music when talking, davinci resolve tutorial, DaVinci Resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve tutorial video editing, video editing for beginners davinci resolve, Audio Ducking, how to lower music volume in davinci resolve 16, video editing for beginners youtube, davinci resolve 16 automation, davinci resolve 16 editing audio, davinci resolve 16 audio, DaVinci Resolve Audio Editing, Fairlight

Id: dw88MGM9w0o

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020