Fading Effects
Alright. Ready? Can you handle this? It’s going to blow your mind. Fade cues can fade all sorts of things, including rate and including effects.
So far when we used fade cues, we’ve made adjustments in the Audio Levels tab of the Inspector. This time I’m gonna go to the Audio Effects tab. If the targeted audio cue has effects applied, you’ll see those here.
In the likely event that you can’t remember what properties the audio cue was using, click on the “Set Audio Effects from Target” button to pull the rate value and any effect values.
So let’s take our old timey music we were playing with earlier. If we wanted to remove the effect over time, we could enable both effects in the Fade Cue. For the Lowpass filter I’ll just adjust the effect until there is essentially no effect. For the Distortion effect I’ll simply lower the mix to 0%, no effect applied. Now over a few seconds the audio will become clear.
Now, let’s say that we also wanted to shift the sound from our special speaker on stage into the main speakers. I could simply adjust the main outputs as well. The original audio cue only is going through the special, so I’ll bring up the cue outputs for all the speakers as well.
This is great! But what if I want the volume fade to happen at a different pace than the effects adjustment. What I really want is to fade the volume over 5 seconds and remove the effects over 15 seconds. That’s not a problem! I can simply make two cues; one for volume and one for effects. I’ll even put them together in a “Start All” group so that they execute together.
Assignment
Make a piece of music sound like the device playing it suddenly runs out of power, slows down, and dies. Using a combination of effects, rate fades, and volume adjustments you can create something pretty great.
Were You Listening?
How can you fade the effects of an audio cue?
Answer
Using a fade cue enable the effect, change the effect until there is essentially no effect, and set the time to the desired length.