The last audio ducking post was in 2020 and it’s closed now. So I give it another try. Is there any way to control the audio volume in the timeline? I have a video, a music track and a voiceover. An everyday video editing situation imho. As in any other video software it should be possible to click on the audio, set two keyframes to lower the volume while the voiceover speaks and then fade in the music again to the regular volume (audio ducking). I think that should be a basic function in a video editor software. I dream about automatic audio ducking as in other editors but don’t wanna go that far. I would be satisfied with a manual audio volume reduction during the voice over. But even that seems impossible. If you use filter for the audio volume, the timeline and the voiceover track disappear and you only see the music track. You can now set a keyframe to lower the volume for the ducking .. but where. You can’t see any other track. And if you go back you can hardly see where the keyframes were set. An export to Audacity? Come on, an easy volume adjustment via the regular timeline is not luxury. It’s mandatory for a video editor. And an export to another software just for some volume changes? Are there any workarounds or update-plans to solve this ‘goes without saying’ function? If not automatically at least manually?
As you noted, you can already do it manually. You can easily rearrange the panels to view both Keyframes and Timeline at the same time. Your tone is whiny and entitled.
You can also do ducking on timeline by splitting and on
That was turned off by default because it was interfering with trying to move clips.
And you can use fade in/out as well to smooth the ducking.
Yes, my tone was ‘whiny and entitled’ and I want to excuse myself for that. I’m very very sorry about that. I was working for weeks on a 20 chapter/hours long travel vlog and the last thing to do was to add voiceovers. This was when I ran into that problem and I was pretty much devastated when I searched for a ‘how to audio duck’ manual for well over 4 hours. Watching Youtube, reading articles. And it seemed I was obviously the only one who adds voiceovers to his videos and who has this problem. After all these weeks of work I feared to fail on a problem that does not exist in other editors. After 20 years of video editing I only knew “Click on the music track twice. Drag that second keyframe down .. and that’s it. Or let the magic happen automatically”.
Why it’s so complicated in Shotcut was frustrating for me and yes .. when you see 12 weeks of work going down the drain you become whiney and entitled. But again: I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I know Shotcut is free and a lot of people invest a lot of time in this project. But as ‘naughty’ as my post was, maybe one day it leads to an updated functionality as I think the change in audio volume is an often used basic function that should be as easy as in other editors.
Anyway I do very much appreciate that you replied to my problem. I think after I get used to the workflow I will get the work done. Thanks again for taking the time to trying to help me. I highly appreciate your work.
Hi @yellowstone, I just made this short demo video showing how you can “duck” an audio track to accommodate a voice-over. Is this what you are trying to do?
It took me a minute or two. The trick, as Dan says, is to have the Timeline and the Keyframes showing at the same time. Tips: Press the “clock” icon on the Keyframes panel to create a new keyframe. Create two - one for the current gain level, the other for the next gain level you want. Advance using the “next” arrow icon on the keyframes panel, then reduce or increase the gain with your mousewheel on the “db” spinbox.
Hi @yellowstone I continued the demo…. so you can see what I was doing clearly. For me, there is an improvement which could be made in that I had to right-click the keyframe and select “From Previous” then “Linear” each time, which was a little annoying. @shotcut, I wonder if there is a way of making the gain filter keyframes “Linear” by default?
Keyframe type is based on the previous keyframe time-wise. I think the problem might be that at some point it defaulted to hold and then you did not change it any time before adding new ones. So, it kept propagating.
I have personal experience at doing ducking for voice over, which led me to add that to the road map a while ago. So, while it is possible, the intention of the road map item is to make both something more convenient manually as well as the automatic ducking. In the meantime, use the multi-step manual methods.
I think I read that somewhere on this forum quite a while ago. It’s working now, thanks. But I’m not sure how I got it to work - for a while, it wasn’t doing what I expected. It is now, though:
From memory (I’m not home) maybe this would help:
- Select a clip using a filter.
- Go to the Keyframes panel.
- Add a keyframe on the first frame of the clip and one on the last frame (or anywhere past the first keyframe)
- Right-click the first keyframe.
- Choose: To next > Linear (or any other type)
All the keyframes you insert between those 2 keyframes will use the same type as the one set on the first keyframe.
Ah, that rings a bell. I seem to remember that’s what I did in my example above to achieve the expected result. I’ll try to do some testing on this later. Thanks. @MusicalBox .
After a short while testing, your advice was spot on, @musicalbox.
Following your steps worked perfectly. I internalized the process like this:
Set the first and last keyframe, then go back to the first, and tell Shotcut which type of keyframes you want. It’s like you are setting a range for your keyframes.
Then any new keyframe created inside the range will be given that type of keyframe.
(I’m repeating what @MusicalBox said here, but thinking of it as setting a range first helped me)…
One more point. I remembered also that pressing ALT whilst dragging a keyframe horizontally restricts it to horizontal movement only.