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A quick tutorial on automatic audio ducking in Premiere
I saw a few posts from people asking about audio ducking in Premiere, (think music level goes down automatically when someone speaks) so here it is…
If many of you request it, I can spend a bit more time and make a full blown tutorial, but this is a pretty simple task…
First, you will need a (free) copy of SideKick 3 (don’t forget to donate if you use it). Drag the VST to the Plugins/VST folder for Premiere.
For Vista it would probably be:
C:/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe Premiere Pro CS3/Plug-ins/en_US/VSTPlugins
Now, on to Premiere. We need 2 tracks, a voice track and a music track.
Bring in your favorite clips in the timeline.
Now, we go the mixer panel and add an instance of Sidekick to both the voice and music tracks.
It should look like this at this point (fig 1)
Fig 1Now let’s edit the first instance in the voice track. Right click on the Sidekick effect inside the mixer panel and choose edit:
Uncheck “bypass” and set the effect to “ducking” (fig 2).
Panel after editing (fig 2)Please note the “Alpha” sign that is highlighted. If it is set to Beta or other, please remember that for the next and last step as you will also need to set the input to Beta on the music track.
Close the VST panel.
Right click on the second instance in the “music” track and choose edit.
This time we want to uncheck the “Bypass” setting, set the effect to “ducking”, but we also need to set the input channel to “Alpha” (fig 3).
fig 3That’s it. Play the timeline and use the threshold slider from Sidekick in the music track to get the desired effect.
Post here if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Vince
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13 Replies
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Thanks very much for that. Shows that sidechaining is possible at least!
No handle on compression ratio – so presumably is infinity–>1 ?
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No ratio settings. ∞ > 1 is probably the default setting.
That’s the only effect with vitual channel that I could get to work in Premiere (I have tried many). Most of the others require more complex bus routing that’s just not possible here.
Vince
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I couldn’t get it to install properly. I put it in the system VST folder and the PPro VST folder.
Shows up fine in Vegas, but not in PPro (even though it shows as loading as PPro loads). Tried removing from PPro VST folder, still no joy.
Is there anything further I should be doing to install VST plug-ins?
(BTW am trying to use virtual routing on a virtual version of WinXP – on a MacBookPro)
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IU’m not surew how it will be handled through virtual routing. You could try putting it in the Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/CS3 folder.
Vince
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OK – this plug in only works on a stereo programme track. Won’t work on mono track or 5.1 track.
Found out because I was searching for the fill left/right effect – again stereo only.
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It does not come with a mono version. There are a couple of quick workarounds for that.
The first and easiest one is to use channel mapping to convert your mono track to stereo before you bring anything to the timeline, which I do no matter what; it avoids having to apply the fill effect to every clip.
Another option is the create a submix track, assign your mono track(s) to that submix and apply the voice instance of Sidekick to the submix instaead of the voice track. Works the same way.
Cheers,
Vince
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Vince,
Just to let you know, exporting to WMV, with Sidekick applied, resulted in a fatal error and PP shut down. It did offer the possibility to send the error report to Microsoft but then shut down.
Harm Millaard
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Hi Harm,
Thanks for the feedback. I have not experienced any crashes with WMV, but trying this on a different workstation, I found that the effect would not longer export, only preview…
(I guess that’s why they pay beta testers so much 🙂
I am testing a much better alternative from db Audioware ($85.00), which has worked flawlessly so far for me.
You can get a trial download here:
https://www.db-audioware.com/sidechaincompressor.htm#download
I will post back when I’m done testing.
Vince
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How were u able to export to output for audio using db audioware sidchain compressor? I was not able to do so I was able to add effects to tracks an i work in playback…but could not render.
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Vince
Thanks for the tutorial
Would you know of a ducking plug-in that could take the quiet passages in a voice over (breathing…mouth clicks between words etc) and duck them to a specified db level i.e. -8db?So…different than a gate, it could drop the level to a programmable db level.
Thanks!!!
mmish
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