Audio ducker?

Hi,

I've looked and looked but can't find an automatic audio ducker for FCP. Any suggestions?

thanks,

HarryD

Afraid not. It's called work. You have to do it manually with keyframes or with the mixer.

Garage Band has this.
I'm pretty sure SoundTrackPro 2.0.2 has this (side chaining).

Just to be clear-- you are asking about sound ducking -- like you might use to control sound under voice track-- not "Automatic Duck," which is a similar sounding thing but a totally unrelated software for file translation.

My businesses handle both sound and video, but I am originally an audio post mixer by trade, and I still mix. The best ducker I ever "heard" was a hardware noise gate made by Drawmer.

The truth is however, while I've played with duckers, I've never -- not once -- relied on a ducker in a TV show or commercial or anything I've worked on. They are simply more trouble than they are worth and don't lead to a professional enough sounding mix (too mechanical and not flexible enough). In the end it really is about fader moves and automation. No way around it.

Best to leave duckers to doing the job of lowering the music when your hostess announces that your table is ready.

Mike Klinger
Tree Falls Post/Clonetown
Los Angeles

Thanks for the responses. I'm definitely looking for an audio ducker, not automatic duck.

I'm also an audio guy (and musician and composer). i used to side chain two Urei compressors, which worked like a charm.

Boy, that manual approach really seems outdated. it's the way we did it 20+ years ago. I'd think FCP would have this, since it's more or less a standard thing.

I guess my table's not ready yet.

thanks.

HarryD

One quick-and-dirty way to accomplish audio ducking is to use a standard compressor/limiter. Use a moderate release time, and make sure the background sounds are about 6-12 db below the foreground sound. Use a low threshold. Then, when the foreground sound is not present, the limiter will bring up the background sound. When the foreground sound is present, it will bring down, or duck, the background sound.

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

Any chance of a tutorial with pictures on that, Travis? It sounds intriguing.

I'll to put something together in a couple of weeks( after recovering from NAB).

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

Friends...

I've used "side-chaining" for years in audio post. In my opinion, no amount of mixing - manual or automated - works as well for ducking down the music under an announcer giving the illusion that the music track is hotter without getting in the way. I use a 4-1 ratio with an attack time of 5 and release time of 20. (milliseconds) (They've been doing this on radio for many many years)

I would KILL - well not really - but I would love to find a sidechain plugin for FCP that would let you choose which audio tracks would trigger a limiter on the music tracks.

I do have an interesting work around - IF your A/D converter has 4 channels of audio...and assuming you're doing a standard stereo mix.

Assign the V/O track to 1-2. Assign the music tracks to 3-4. Now all four sources come up on your outboard audio mixer. Put an outboard stereo comp/limiter (like a DBX 166XL) on channels 3-4 on the mixer. (Either as an insert on the channel or between the A/D converter and the mixer) Now use an aux send from channels 1-2 to key the limiter. As mentioned, set the ratio at 4 to 1, attack 5 millisec, release 20 millisec. And be sure to set the limiter to external key.

The results are terrific for a stereo mix to your VTR.

Of course if you don't have 4 channels on your A/D converter or you're creating Quick Time files instead of outputting to a machine....you're out of luck. (I should say I'M out of luck since I'm using a Deck Link with only 2 channels of audio.)

Your Decklink card may have more than 2 channels of audio... you just may need to de-embed them from the SDI signal and DAC them to feed your audio mixer.

On the Avid I use the punch-in (VO) tool to then re-record the mixer output back in and cut it into the timeline. Haven't used the FCP punch-in tool so don't know if it can work in the same way, guess it would depend on IO configuration too.

trevora...

How would I de-embed the additional audio channels from the SDI signal?