VideoStudio 2018 - Audio Ducking question

[GE_Rik]

Hi all
With most of my videos, I need to duck the video audio when I add a voice-over. By default, splitting the video audio places it on the Voice track, which is where the voice-over is recorded. Is there any way the default can be changed to split the audio on to a Music track? It would make life a lot less complicated and ducking a lot easier when putting the voice over on to a video with loads of clips

Rik

[RobertOZ]

Not by default, you would need to split the audio before adding a voice over, then you can drag the split from voice to music track

[GE_Rik]

Not by default, you would need to split the audio before adding a voice over, then you can drag the split from voice to music track

Thanks Robert.
I'll have to relearn. Until now I've been recording the narration before splitting the audio from the video - which makes life a bit more complicated

After working it all out, I managed to get the video soundtrack to duck beneath the narration. It worked fine in the editor, but when I exported it the video track went back to its original levels.

From looking at other posts, it looks like this is something which is an ongoing problem with VideoStudio. A great shame as I've been a fan of it for several years. I'm now considering ditching it for an editor such as Power Director which seems to have got ducking on the video soundtrack sorted out.

Rik

[Ken Berry]

Looking at all this somewhat from left field, I make a lot of travelogues, so insert my voice quite a bit. I can certainly see the value of both voiceovers and ducking. But I've never been sure about how accurate you can be in just adding voiceovers while the video is playing. So I write a script for the various places along the timeline that need a spoken description. Then I record them individually in a third party audio editor. I use the freeware Audacity regularly for this, and it also gives me the opportunity to adjust the recorded voice if needed. I export them as .wav clips. Then I insert each of these sound bites to the relevant part of the timeline.

I have usually already added timed background music, so when I insert the sound bites, I will need to lower the background music. I could do this by using automatic ducking of the music. But I am old-fashioned and still do this manually by inserting nodes in the music audio line and adjusting them down manually until I get what I consider to be the right level.

This may all add somewhat to the editing time, but I have plenty of time and like the results, so I stick with it.

[GE_Rik]

........ But I am old-fashioned and still do this manually by inserting nodes in the music audio line and adjusting them down manually until I get what I consider to be the right level.

That's the method I've been using - plus audio ducking (but then the nodes still need to be changed to fine-tune it). However, when I render the videos, the audio stays at the its original level. Rendering seems to be ignoring the node data.

I've since discovered that if I reduce the clip's volume overall (ie right-click and 'Adjust volume...' to lower the blue line rather than the yellow line with the nodes on it), then it does get through the rendering process with reduced volume.

Is there a stage I'm missing in getting the system to recognise the nodes (yellow line) data?

Rik
PS - It's the video soundtrack I've been trying to lower - by splitting the audio from it

[lata]

I Have just tested 2019 to split Audio (I do not have 2018) then manually set the nodes and did not have any problems after rendering
However we do not need to Split Audio to manually set the nodes, if we switch to Sound Mixer the adjustments become available on the top video track

We have another option to first use the scissors to Cut the video (Keyboard Key S)
Make two cuts across the section to be reduced, now we only have to add two nodes, one for fade out at the start and a fade in towards the end.
The problem with nodes for me is actually setting the volume level.
We could do the cuts then adjust the volume level of that clip, although no fades and the change may be a little abrupt

[Davidk]

When it first came out, I thought audio ducking was great. But it changed in later versions of VS.
The idea behind ducking is that audio as part of a timeline or overlay track clip (eg background noise, or say wind noise that was recorded with the video imagery) would be volume reduced (the amount of reduction part of the ducking parameters) so that a voiceover clip commentary in matching time sequence is not drowned out by whatever is in the TL clip. Thus, the voiceover clip having been inserted in to the relevant part of the timeline in the voice track, audio ducking is selected to make it the dominant voice for the duration on the clip. And it worked great - saved a lot of fiddly work in the sound mixer.
In later versions it became apparent that the ducking focus had changed: when you selected ducking on a voiceover clip, that voiceover clip became the one with muted sound. Sort of destroyed the original intent of ducking. Complaints failed . . so I went back to using the sound mixer.
So before you use it, make sure that the audio being ducked is actually the one you want muted.

[GE_Rik]

I've now ditched ducking and simply turn down the volume of the video soundtrack. I'm still finding that adjusting the sound nodes on the video soundtrack seems to be overridden when the video renders. I do have VS2019 but stopped using it when it kept crashing whenever I used ripple editing - so I've reverted to 2018 which seems to be more stable.