New iMovie Audio Ducking

I think the range of volume for the ducking is relative to the volume of the clip. The particular clip I'm having trouble with has only a few words during a 30 second clip. Therefore, the new iMovie is trying to outsmart itself by only allowing me to have the background music at a certain level. If I turn the volume of the clip up to 400%, the background music would be louder but those few words are blasted. Make sense?

Speculating here because I haven't tried this: You could try splitting your 30 second video clip so that the part with the talking is its own little clip (but appears to be part of an unedited segment). And then try ducking just for that segment.

How to lower the volume of audio or raise the volume of audio. This tutorial will lower the volume of the music soundtrack you've added to a movie in order to hear the sound on the video temporarily. You may do this because all the talking on the video is boring, so you put music over it, but you want to hear someone make a joke so you need to turn the music down.

1. In your music soundtrack, hold the Command key and click on a point in the music soundtrack timeline before and after you want to hear the video's audio.

2. In your music soundtrack, hold the Command key and click the points in the music soundtrack timeline – not the video's timeline – where your video's desired audio starts and stops.

3. You will have four points now in your music soundtrack.

4. With the second and third points (from the left), drag it down to 0%.

5. Do the reverse with your video's desired audio points.

It looks like the attached screenshot.

This is great. Thanks for the screen shot. One small difference for me on my iMac: I had to hold down the OPTION key instead of the COMMAND key.

Otherwise worked great. Very nice feature for audio editing.

I have iMovie 10.0.2, and I can't get it to do this. I can't select just one section in the sound bar and decrease and/or increase the volume in that one point (i.e., 1—10 secs). I used to be able to do this — really easily — before the update.

There's no more clicking and dragging over a section to lower the volume in that section now.

And, when I hold down the Command and/or Option keys, I still can't section off an area for the purpose.

Arggggh.

I had this exact same situation, and got completely stumped by the 'reduce other tracks' slider. Not only does it not show the percentage so that you can easily make sure all clips have the same levels, but it's completely counter-intuitive to slide it UP to decrease the other tracks, and DOWN to increase them.

For those who didn't see the other user's replies... you need to drag that slider to the RIGHT to decrease other tracks.

I also had a little trouble getting the "dot" to show up when I was doing Option+click. It doesn't always take when you click on the audio line. (See Steven Vance's little image from the screenshot.) Try Option-clicking just above it or below it and you'll eventually get the dot you can drag.

Thank you for your post and screen shot. Nothing like it in any of the official Apple documentation. It was a bit confusing at first, based on your screen shot. What I found was that I had to "Create a Movie" using the new clips I had added before I could edit the waveform at the level you've demonstrated. Once I created a new "Movie" nad added my clips, I could then select the clip in question and even double click in the Waveform area to zoom in on the audio only.

When I was at the "Project" level (let's call it) immediately after import, I could only use the supplied iMove adjustment button, which allows only wholesale output level adjustment, not the granular editing you depicted.

I would have NEVER figured this out without your guidance.

Tip: If you are having trouble hearing the audio clip over the background music, you can also detach the audio track from the video and duplicate it. This way you can hear the audio at 800% instead of 400%.

1. Click on the video clip. On the iMovie taskbar, click Modify > Detach Audio

2. Click on the audio track, which is now separate from the video track.

3. On your keyboard Control + Copy

4. Select the beginning of the audio track, and then click Control + Paste

Now you have two audio tracks of the original. This trick can also be used if you want the background music louder than the video's audio. Just duplicate the background music track.

Hope this helps someone!

I Think that button is only for fading out. He wants to duck the music when he enters voiceover.

Hi, did you find a fix for this? Now I can only use the alt key to mark single spots in the background music and do the ducking manually. Sadly another Mac software that was good and now broken.