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Margaret Artola/2 min read

Working with Audio in Premiere Pro - Auto Ducking

Common Editing Shortcuts

J K L

Reverse, stop, forward. Multiple presses for faster shuttle.

Q / W

Trim from playhead to clip start (Q) or end (W).

I / O

In and out point markers — fundamental to source-side editing.

V / C / B

Selection, Razor, Slip — most-used tools.

Master Premiere Pro at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Video Editing & Motion Graphics Certificate teaches Premiere Pro alongside After Effects.

In this video, we'll go over a lesson on Audio Ducking. We'll automatically generate keyframes on a music track to easily balance dialogue and music.

Video Transcription

Hi, this is Margaret with Noble Desktop. Today, we're looking at ducking in Premiere Pro. Ducking is automatically generated keyframes from one audio type to another. We are going to duck music against dialogue, so when there is no dialogue (like right here), the music plays. When there is dialogue, the music will lower.

The first thing to do when you are working with ducking is to adjust the Premiere Pro Preferences Audio, setting a higher number. This tells Premiere Pro what audio type is being ducked against what other audio type.

We can select the whole audio or just the audio, and click on the word "dialogue" in the Essential Sound Panel. Then, select the word "music". Now, we see the word ducking ready for us to use. We can check ducking and adjust the sensitivity, duck amount, or fades.

Generating keyframes defines how much of a ramping of the keyframes you are looking at. It can go from low volume to higher volume gradually or less gradually. The duck amount can be increased for less or more.

Ducking can be a great solution, particularly if you have a lot of dialogue that you need to deliver quickly with music. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson in ducking in Premiere Pro Audio. This has been Margaret with Noble Desktop.

Video Transcript6 sections

1Full Video Transcript

Hi, this is Margaret with Noble Desktop and today we're going to be looking at ducking in Premiere Pro. Ducking is automatically generated keyframes from one audio type to another, and in this sample we are going to duck music against dialogue. So when there's no dialogue like right here, the music raises. When there is dialogue, the music will lower.

2Setting Up Preferences for Ducking

The first thing to do when you are working with ducking is for the Premiere Pro preferences audio, you have minimum time milliseconds. Yours might say 30 or something along those lines. Make it a higher number. The reason is because if you don't change that, you're going to have so many keyframes when you create your ducking keyframes.