Audio Ducking Made Simple

A couple of years ago, I posted a suggestion that BMD take a look at automating their audio ducking feather for Resolve/Fairlight. My reason for making this suggestion had to do with the program I used before switching to Resolve. Don't get me wrong, I love Resolve and would never go back to PP or anything else but here my pitch. As a documentary producer we live and die by the ability to edit a effortlessly as possible. I previously used CyberLink's PowerDirector which has one of if not the best audio ducking feature out there. Heck, one time I even edited a 2.5 hour documentary using their audio ducking feature and it rocked. I seems to me that BMD might want to take a look at PowerDirector's ducking feature and consider making some improvements to Resolve/Fairlight. Here is a link explaining PowerDirector's ducking feature. Go to YouTube and search for PowerDirector audio ducking and look for a tutorial by The Sharper Turtle and I think you will agree that they have done a fantastic job.

As a documentary producer we live and die by the ability to edit a effortlessly as possible.

I don't know much about this topic, but I thought JayAreTV's video about sidechaining audio tracks so it auto-ducks music was super-exciting:

Does that help?

~Luke

Sidechaining with a compressor is fine as far as it goes but it has issues such as not anticipating the duck at the start of a clip (but rather, reacting to it) hence it's always a fraction late; and whilst you want a degree of hold between breaths perhaps, you don't want that hold at the end of a section of VO, so the ducker needs to work out where it's merely holding between clips and actually at the end (combinations of hold / release do not achieve this)

+1