Make audio levels change with speaker

[taylorf65758665]

Hi! I am putting together dozens of videos (in premiere pro) of people saying something to the camera. I have music in the background, but it has to be low in order to hear the speaker...and I'm not getting the effect I want. I'm hoping there is some easy way to make the music volume lower when the next speaker speaks, and between, it would raise so you could here the song. Is this possible in audition without doing so manually? Thanks!

[Bob_Howes · Accepted solution]

Assuming you're audio editing in Audition (and have the latest version called CC2018) there's a very useful feature called "Auto Ducking".  I've just had a look and there are several tutorials available and this one looked as good as any:  Auto Ducking in Adobe Audtion CC 2018 - YouTube

One thing to note i that you want your voice clips to all be at a similar level or the results won't be as good as they can be.  Some dynamics processing/compression on the voice track(s) can be worthwhile.

Finally, if you have an older version of Audition you can likely still do this with an effect known as "side chain compression".  (The auto ducking above is just a semi automatic way of creating a side chain compression.)  A quick Google will find you detailed instructions on how to do this.

[taylorf65758665]

This worked so wonderfully! Now that i've discovered it, I want to use it in the rest of my video...Should I just re-do it or is there a way to go about it since a portion of it is done already?

[_durin_]

Auto Ducking creates and entirely new keyframe envelope, so it won't really work to apply to old edits.  IF you like the results, you could replace the manual keyframing with the Auto-Ducked keyframes, which shouldn't take very long to apply.