Streamlining Audio Management for Filmmakers: The Ins and Outs of Automated Ducking with Final Cut Pro X 2023

How to Do Automatic Audio Ducking in Final Cut Pro X

Benjamin Arango

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

If you are working in post-production, then you might be familiar with the concept of audio ducking. In nutshell, it is a process in which the background sound of a clip is reduced and the voiceover is amplified. Therefore, with the help of sound ducking, we can focus on the dialogues without a noisy background track.

Lately, a lot of people have asked us about the process to do automatic audio ducking in Final Cut Pro X. Since it is a clip-based editing tool, it lacks a dedicated mixer to help us do FCPX audio ducking. Thankfully, there are third-party plugins and tools (like the FCPX AutoDuck) that can help us do the same. In this post, I will let you know how to do audio ducking in Final Cut Pro and its best alternative.

If you don’t want to use any plugins, see this article: How to sync in FCPX.

Part 1: How to Perform Audio Ducking in Final Cut Pro X?

If you have a video in which you have background music and a voiceover, then you can perform sound ducking in it. This will automatically enhance the quality of the voiceover and would mellow down the background music selectively. Sadly, the feature of audio ducking in Final Cut Pro has to be done manually as there are no instant automatic options in the tool presently.

Therefore, you can use any reliable third-party FCPX tool like Audified or AutoDuck to meet your requirements. For instance, let’s consider the example of FCPX AutoDuck, which is a paid macOS application. To perform FCPX audio ducking, you first have to export the music and voiceover as two dedicated files. Later, you can import them to FCPX AutoDuck to perform auto-ducking of the music.

Step 1: Export the Music Files

To perform audio ducking in Final Cut Pro, you can first launch the application on Mac and open your project. Since there is no FCPX audio ducking option, you first have to export the music files.

For this, you can just go to the main menu on Final Cut Pro and select File > Share > Master File. This will help you explore and save all the media files from Final Cut Pro.

Now, once the Master File window would be opened, you can go to the “Role” tab and select “Audio Only” as the output role. This will display a list of the background music and the voiceover file.

You can now select the files of your choice and click on the “Next” button to save them to any desired location on your Mac.

Step 2: Use FCPX AutoDuck to Do Automatic Sound Ducking

Great! Now, you can just open the FCPX AutoDuck application on your Mac via its Application or Spotlight. You can just give it a project name and drag-and-drop the speaker (voiceover) and the music files here. If you want, you can also import a filler file of your choice.

FCPX will also let you select the level of music ducking from its dedication option. There are also different options to set up things like setting up the window or pre-roll for the audio.

In the end, you can click on the “Duck” button and let FCPX AutoDuck perform automatic audio ducking on the files.

Step 3: Insert the Modified File to your Project

Once the FCPX audio ducking process is completed, it will generate an XML file. You can now just drag the XML file and drop it to your project in Final Cut Pro. Here, you can choose to select the XML file in the same project.

You can now copy the modified music clip, go to the timeline, and paste it at the starting of the video. Here, you can just mute the previous music clip and let the auto-duck audio play instead.

Part 2: The Best FCPX Alternative for Mac to Perform Automatic Audio Ducking

As you can see, it is pretty tough to do audio ducking in Final Cut Pro as there is no automatic feature in the tool. Therefore, you can consider using Wondershare Filmora for Mac to perform automatic sound ducking and save your time. It is an inbuilt feature in Filmora that would perform auto-ducking instantly, and you can also mark the level of ducking in the video.

Ideally, you can perform audio ducking on voiceover or another soundtrack in Wondershare Filmora. To perform music ducking via Wondershare Filmora on Mac, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: Import the Video Clip or Record Your Audio

To begin with, just launch Wondershare Filmora on your Mac and just drag-and-drop your media files to the application. You can also go to its menu and choose to import media files.

Once your video is imported, you can drag it to the timeline at the bottom to work on it. If you want, you can click on the voiceover icon (adjacent to the preview section) to record dialogues right away.

Apart from that, you can also import music files to your video or use the extensive range of royalty-free audio files that are available in Filmora.

Step 2: Perform Automatic Audio Ducking

Great! Now, on the timeline of Filmora, you can see your video and the music track. From here, you need to select the track that you want to amplify (like the voiceover).

Afterward, right-click the audio track and select the “Adjust Audio” option from the context menu.

This will open a dedicated Audio Mixer window on the screen. Just go to the Audio tab and enable the “Ducking” option to lower the volume of other audio tracks. You can also select the desired level for music ducking to implement.

Step 3: Export the Edited Video

That’s it! After performing audio ducking on Filmora, you can preview the results and further make the needed changes. In the end, you can click on the “Export” button and save the file in the format and resolution of your choice.

There you go! After following this guide, you can easily learn how to do audio ducking in Final Cut Pro X easily. Since there is no inbuilt FCPX audio ducking option, you can use a third-party tool like FCPX AutoDuck. Apart from that, if you are looking for a better alternative to do sound ducking, then simply use Wondershare Filmora. It is a user-friendly and resourceful application that would let you perform automatic music ducking like a pro.

Benjamin Arango

Benjamin Arango is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Benjamin Arango

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