For this tutorial, I'm using the Audio workspace.
You can reset that workspace by clicking on the Panel menu in the Workspaces panel and choosing Reset to Saved Layout.
In this sequence, we have some dialog with continuous background music.
I'd like the music to play in the background, but I want it to dip and be quieter during sections of speech.
This is called audio ducking.
Let's listen to a little.
How are you feeling?
A little confused...
First off, I'm going to set the Audio type for the dialogue in the Essential Sound panel.
I'm just going to drag across all of these clips and click Dialogue (Dialogue) to set the Audio type.
I'm also going to use the Loudness section of the Essential Sound panel to automatically set the dialogue to a pretty standard useful level.
I'll click Auto-Match.
Now let's do the same for the music.
But, of course, we'll set the Audio type to Music.
I'm selecting the clip and choosing Music in the Essential Sound panel.
I'm going to the Loudness section, and I'm clicking Auto-Match.
Now that we've defined the types of audio that we have in the sequence, we can use the settings in the Ducking section of the Essential Sound panel.
To have the music get quieter every time there's speech, I'm going to turn on Ducking.
And let's have a look at the options.
First of all, we can choose the types of audio that the music's going to get quieter in response to.
And you can hover the cursor over each of these icons to choose the types of audio that you want to impact the music.
Next up, we've got a Sensitivity slider.
And this just means you can specify how loud the other audio needs to be before the audio will duck.
So, for example, if there is just a quiet background sound in amongst the dialogue that might not trigger Audio Ducking.
But if there's full blown speech, it will.
Depending on your dialogue audio, because in this case we are using Dialogue, you may need to adjust this slider to get more or less response in the music level.
Next up, we've got the Reduce By slider.
It's pretty straightforward.
How much do you want the music to be reduced by when the ducking occurs?
And then how quickly do you want the audio to get quieter and get back up to full volume again.
That's how long the Fades will be.
And they're measured in milliseconds, so there are 1,000 of milliseconds in a second. 800 ms means it'll take just a little under a second to get louder and quieter.
With all of these controls, you can make adjustments by sliding.
And you can reset the control by double clicking on it.
So, we're all set, and I'm going to click Generate Keyframes.
And right away, you can see the keyframes have been added to this music clip.
But actually, the sensitivity is set so high that pretty much the entire clip has had the audio level reduced.
There's just this gap where there's a pause in the dialogue that we're getting full volume again in the music.
You can manually adjust these keyframes.
They're just the same as any other keyframes you might add.
I can hold Control on Windows or Command on Mac OS, and add new keyframes, and adjust these as much as I like.
I'll just undo with Control Z or Command Z to remove those extra keyframes.
And let's have a listen.
That's good.
It's not...
Well, it's worked but we definitely want to adjust that sensitivity.
So, I'm going to pull this slider down quite a bit.
Let's go for something like that.
And I'm going to click Generate Keyframes again.
Now we've got a lot more variation.
And you'll notice when you try this that any keyframes you add to the clip before you click Generate Keyframes are removed.
They'll be replaced by the new keyframes that are generated by the Essential Sound panel.
In this instance, the dialogue is pretty much constant.
So, we're getting quite quick changes in the audio level or flat level adjustments overall.
You'll find that if you have more gaps in your audio, it's more pronounced when these key frames are added.
So, that's Automatic Audio Ducking in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
