Sound balancing

[mwsing]

I am using VideoStudio Ultimate 2018 and am having sound balancing problems. On my computer the sound is completely balanced among the original, voiceover and music tracks.. However, when I copy it to a USB stick and run it on my television, the sound from the original clips is very loud, but the sound from the voiceover clips is much quieter than when I view the project on my computer.

Does anyone have any ideas why this might be and how I can overcome this problem?

[weaver]

That depends on several factors.
The original sound from the camera is more or less compressed and optimized by the camera itself. The voiceover tracks do not have this feature. When the VS renders the edited video the sound will be combined with the optimized original soundtrack and the added voice over tracks without compression. On the original soundtrack usually there is no "space" or "headroom" for the added sound, therefore they will be added only at the level what the original optimized (normalized) soundtrack permits. ( how much space is available for the new sound data).
I usually reduce the level of the original sound by 50% ( depends on the camera) and do the rendering in this condition or use the external program ( audacity etc) for soundmixing to get the optimal balance of the original and added sound.
You can try also to add normalisation fx to the local voice tracks. Sometimes I have got overmodulation (clipping) in the sound so in such cases I prefer the external audio processing.

[mwsing]

Thanks. However, for most of the original soundtracks I have muted the sound before adding a voice over. Shouldn't this this make a difference, since you say that you reduce to 50% before rendering in Videostudio? I am not familiar with using external audio processing. Is audacity the name of the program to do this. If so, where do I get the program and how does it work? I did have this same problem with previous versions of Video studio and usually had several attempts before I got the balance more or less acceptable. The problem seems more extreme with 2018 version.

[weaver]

Thanks. However, for most of the original soundtracks I have muted the sound before adding a voice over. Shouldn't this this make a difference, since you say that you reduce to 50% before rendering in Videostudio? I am not familiar with using external audio processing. Is audacity the name of the program to do this. If so, where do I get the program and how does it work? I did have this same problem with previous versions of Video studio and usually had several attempts before I got the balance more or less acceptable. The problem seems more extreme with 2018 version.

I also cannot understand exactly the logic in VS audio processing, but the described method usually helps. When you put the clip on the timeline there is an option to reduce the sound level ( a small box in the options with 100 in it) change this to 5 etc.
You can also increase the level of the voice over track ( same box change the level from 100 to 200) if there is no distortion try to render a short peace to hear the final quality.

The audacity is a free sound editor, you will find it by google. Download this. Before you add the voiceover tracks you should create the otiginal soundtrack, ie the video editing is done, render the whole video with original sound. After that you can render only the original soundtrack - ie you will get the osound.wav file. Keep this for later processing.
Now place your rendered video to the timeline and quit the sound completelly. Add your voice over track(s). When everything is done render just the new voiceover sound (vosound.wav).
Now open your audacity, impoet the osound.wav and select the videoducking function. This will ask for the vosound.wav, and will modifiy the level of the osound. If you are happy ( there are many options to modify both soundtracks), you can export the mixed sound as mixsound.wav ad replace in the VS the entire soundtrack with mixsound.wav file.