Balancing Audio and Visuals for Effective London Travel Promo

I'm working on my London travel promo project. Previously, I created a sequence, imported my files, and organized them. I'm using the video from the video bin here.

I'm going to go back to my main project so you can see it. I've got a video bin, an audio bin, and the sequence. I made the sequence from the animation video here and added the audio.

I just grabbed, like, goodness, about 35 seconds of that. And then I basically just added in the videos in sequence like this, no problem at all. I previously adjusted them so I could find, like, a nice point to make the edit line that matched the beat of the music.

I changed the parts of the film he was showing using the slip tool, and got a pretty decent product right now, I think. So what I want to do is deal with the audio because it's really loud. And the thing about audio is that, currently, the assigned volume is zero.

Whatever it was recorded as, whatever it comes in as, the current value assigned is zero. It's a relative value. I can raise it or lower it from here.

I can also add transitions to fade in and out, okay. And I'd like to do that. So I'm going to unlock my audio track.

I previously locked it. I'm going to select it with my selection tool, okay. And when I'm hovering over it, when it's active, I can actually see right here that there are some transitions here.

Now look, this is the volume line. If I adjust this, it will change the audio. When the audio clip is selected, I'm also going to get in the properties panel the same exact volume line.

That's what this slider is, okay. I can either grab the slider handle directly or just scrub the values. Click and drag to scrub the values down or up.

Then notice I can go a lot lower than higher. There is a limit to how much I can boost the volume without adding effects to it. Now, I could arbitrarily do it.

Just drag it down, listen to it. But you can actually do this in real time. So I'm going to do this, and I'm going to adjust the volume until it sounds right.

Now, all I have to really care about right now is that it doesn't go red. When it's playing, that indicator means it's too loud. It means it's actually hitting zero or going beyond it.

Now, this audio was recorded very loudly, by the way. So I want to pull it down. So if I want to do it by ear, I'm just going to do it like this.

I'm going to play my timeline by pressing the space bar. I'm just going to drag that line or drag this slider. Getting it to a more manageable volume.

Now, I'm not really worried about what the actual value is. I'm just trying to make sure it doesn't ever go red. But if I am trying to hit an exact value, I've got a couple of other ways to do it.

When the clip is highlighted, up here is the audio clip mixer. It will show you this clip's volume. I can actually adjust the value numerically here as well.

Okay, so I pulled it down to like negative 10. No problem at all. Okay, now, if I'm trying to hit an exact value, for example, when I worked in television, we used to master the audio to like negative 12.

I could actually do it right now. So I'll just click on the number right in this field or right here in properties, negative 12. And that just sets the value.

Okay, now, if I'm trying to match a specific volume or like a loudness setting for maybe matching YouTube, there's another step for that. Okay, but this is pretty decent for when I'm just basically trying to get it more manageable while working on it here. Okay, now, I can also, if I don't want to do it this way, I'm actually gonna reset this.

I can also do it by affecting what's called the gain of the file itself, the gain of the audio itself. I'll right-click on the clip on the timeline. So I undid my changes.

I'm looking for audio gain. Adjust gain by, I'm actually looking to set the gain to. So I basically have the ability to set the gain, which is technically not the volume, but it'll work in a similar fashion to an explicit value.

So again, if I needed to master this to negative 12, I could do it right here. If I needed to set it, some people online use negative three, for example, I could do it right from here. So it's another way of doing it.

Okay, the main difference is that this affects the actual clip. My setting, and this is not animatable. I can't change it over time.

The audio and the audio clip mixer, and that line, which are all the same thing, can be animated. Right here in the clip mixer, there's a little dot keyframe icon. I can animate the slider movement.

Right here in audio, I can turn on animation if I want to make this move up and higher and lower over time. And then in the timeline, I can just hold down the command or control key, click on the line, and it will make keyframes for me. Those are keyframes that I can now drag up or down over time.

And notice the waveform actually does adjust for that. It's pretty cool. I'm gonna undo that because this again just needs a general change.

So again, I'm just gonna knock that down a little bit. Let's go like negative 12 in this case, more manageable. I don't have to worry about making this low enough to hear a voiceover or anything else.

I'm just trying to get it so it's not peaking, not like actually hitting the red warning message. When dealing with the volume meters right here, green is good, red is bad, and yellow is close to red. Simplest thing to keep in mind. And if you keep working with audio, you'll realize that there are certain things to be recorded, and it takes a little more practice.

Okay, that'll work for what I'm doing here. Okay, now I also wanna add a little fade. So I'm gonna zoom in on this a little bit, plus, plus, plus.

And that icon right there, that little split square, that is an audio fade. I'm gonna double-click on it so I can set the value. I'm gonna do exactly a one-second fade-in, by the way, 100.

So now my audio fades up over time like that. I'll go to the end of the clip. If you have the end key E and D on the keyboard, that'll definitely work.

You can also press Shift O to go to the out point of the timeline right there. And then the same thing, hover over that audio clip, drag it in. And then if you wanna set an exquisite value, again, double click on it, open the dialogue, and I'll do another one-second fade out.

Backslash will zoom out, or just dragging your handles on the zoom slider right there will zoom out, and you can see everything in your timeline. I like backslash because it fits specifically to the content that you have. If you do it either with the keyboard shortcut, plus and minus to zoom in and out, or the scroll bar, it doesn't really set to anything specific.

So now I've got my nice audio fade, and it's cool.