Audio Ducking
the fix for videos that feel amateur

Think in relative terms. Music should sit roughly 6 LU below dialogue while someone is speaking and can rise to about 3 LU below in gaps. Absolute fader positions vary per track; the gap is what the ear judges.

Sidechain compression driven by the dialogue track automates this, but manual keyframes are perfectly fine and often cleaner on short-form where there are only a handful of transitions.

An attack around 80 to 150 milliseconds ducks fast enough to clear the first syllable without an audible pump. A release of 300 to 500 milliseconds lets music return smoothly rather than lurching back between sentences.

Fast release settings are the reason ducking sometimes sounds worse than no ducking at all — the music breathes in and out and draws attention to itself.

High-pass at 80 to 100 Hz to remove rumble, apply gentle broadband noise reduction rather than aggressive cleanup, de-ess lightly around 5 to 8 kHz, then compress moderately for consistency before setting levels.

No amount of music balancing rescues a poorly captured voice track. Where source audio is genuinely unusable, replacing it with a clean re-record over B-roll is faster and better than repairing it.