Learn to control audio in Descript with fades, ducking, and volume keyframes. The tutorial covers applying fades at clip boundaries, separating audio and video fades, using ducking to lower background layers by specific amounts like 10%, and adding keyframes to set precise decibel levels throughout your video.
Today, you're going to learn how to use volume keyframes and fades to perfect your audio levels throughout your video and podcast projects. In descript, the first thing is fades. Fades are really easy to apply, and you can apply them at the start of anywhere that you have a cut in a clip. So, for example, right here at the start of this clip where my mouse is, there's this little white dot in the top left corner. And if you click it and you drag it in, you see a number appear below it. And that right there plus 1.00s is telling me that this is a one second fade. So at the first keyframe that this clip starts, it's gonna be completely black in my canvas. And then by one second, it's gonna be completely opaque. So watch what happens when I play it. I'll put my playhead at the start of that scene. I'll hit play. This is a demo of Zoom and it fades in. And now what you need to know is that this doesn't just apply to the visual, it also applies to the audio. So my audio is going to start completely silent, and then over the course of a second, it's going to fade in until it reaches its full volume, which in this case is plus 1.6 decibel, which brings up a point. If you click on any layer, you can change the audio level for that entire layer right here under the audio heading. And you can click and drag to make drag to the right to make it louder, drag to the left to make it quieter. So that's how you affect the whole clip. But that is fade in to fade out. You do the exact same thing. There's a white dot in the top right, you can click on it and you can drag it in. And same thing, it gives you a number in time. So this one's 0.5, 85 seconds long, meaning that 0.85 seconds out from the end of that clip, it's going to be completely opaque. And then by the time that 085 seconds is up, by the end of that clip, it's going to be completely black and you can change it. So if you don't want black, you can click into the gray part of the canvas and you can change the background right there. So right now it's a white background. You can make it any color that you want. So that is fades. And again, the fade applies not only to the video, but also to the audio. Now, if you don't want it to apply to the video, if you want it to apply Just to the audio, you can click on that white dot, just a left click and you can see it separates it from audio and video. And by default they both apply the same amount. But let's say I want the video to not fade out. So I'm going to make that 0 seconds and then. Or I can just hit this remove and now it goes to 0 seconds. Or under audio I can make this like a 2 second fade out. So then it's gonna gently, over the course of two seconds, fade out from full volume to nothing. So that's fades. Now let's say that we have this music layer and we want it to increase and decrease volume at various points throughout our video. Well, one thing we could do is apply ducking and ducking. If I go to my video, I scroll down here in the properties menu right there where it says ducking and I toggle it on. And then if I hit this effect settings, it says the amount is 10%. And what that's telling me is whatever layer I have it applied to, it's going to lower the volume of all other layers other than this one, the one that it's applied to, to 10%. So while I'm talking, this music layer would be 10% of its full volume. So that's a very useful feature to apply through an entire video where you're using a lot of different sounds or have music in the background, you want it to just play gently. And then maybe at parts where you're not talking, you want it to increase in volume. So that's ducking. To have more granular control over our volume volume settings on a layer, we're going to add what's called keyframes. And keyframes are a way that we can set the volume at very specific points in the video. By default, this whole track is set to, if I click on it, it says negative 18.1 decibels. So it's pretty quiet. It's just background music, so it should be quiet. But let's say this first opening part where there's no video, I'm not talking, it's just a picture of nature. I want that to be louder than the rest of the video. So what I can do is apply keyframes. And I'm going to come right here just right before the end of that clip, right before I start talking. And I'm going to right click and I'm going to click add volume, keyframe. And now if I click out of this layer, you can see this little white dot. And if I hover over it, it turns orange and there's four arrows around it. And what I can do is I can drag it up and there's only one dot. So this whole line is moving. It's make a decibel level for my whole project. And you can see the number behind the blue circle there. It says 8, 8 decibels. So I just made it a lot louder. But let's say that by the time I start talking just a little bit after this scene boundary, I want it to be quiet. I want it to be barely audible in the background. So I'm gonna right click again. I'm going to click add volume keyframe. And now there's a second dot. And you can see it slopes down from the first one to the second one. That's indicating that the volume will gradually decrease over a course of about, in this case, a second or two. But I'm just going to go ahead and bring this down even more. So it's like a negative six decibel. And I can slide it to the left to make that transition shorter, or I can slide it to the right to make that transition slower and more gradual. And now let's see how that sounds. This is a demo of zooms I'm going to show you. All right, so you can hear by the time it. It gradually fades out, it gets really, really quiet. And I had my fades here on the. On the spoken parts. That's a little weird. But here, let's see if you can hear the music zooms. I'm going to show you how you can take something like this. Zoom in. Okay? And then let's say all the way at the end of my video, I'm just gonna make a new scene here, and I'll just add some B roll, Just something random. Let's do this beach scene. And then for my outro, I want it to get loud again because I'm not talking anymore. I'm not gonna be covering anything up. So I'm just gonna extend this audio clip all the way through the end of the video. And what I'm gonna do is add two more keyframes. So if you can see this gray line down here, that's where our level is. That's where we last left it. At that second keyframe, I'm gonna add a third keyframe. By right clicking, hit add volume keyframe. And when I click out, there's that white dot. And I'm gonna just move over a couple seconds down so it fades in gradually. Right click, add volume keyframe. And there is my fourth keyframe, and I'm going to bring it up so it gets louder and let's see how that sounds. A GIF up here, and then it's going to zoom out. Awesome. So that's how you do it. And you can get as granular as you want with this. You could just have it the volumes spike up by adding key frames in the middle of your project. I'm just going to add like four right here so you can see how this would work. And so I'm just going to raise this one, and then I'll raise this one, and then let's see how this sounds. And then you're going to see some text and then it's going to zoom in and it's going to zoom out. So you can play around with that and get yourself a lot more granular control of your volume levels. And this applies to video layers and audio layers.
