Fading Up or Down an Audio Cue

Sometimes fading from nothing or fading to silence isn’t what’s best. Think of the beginning of a scene in a movie; no one is talking, we just see action, and the music is loud, letting itself establish. Once the dialogue begins what wants focus, so we might want to lower the music. At the end of the scene we go back into a montage, a series of snippets, and we want to raise the volume again. We can do this in real life in QLab by once again using Fade Cues.

To lower the volume of a cue, add a fade cue, apply it’s target, and adjust the volume. Again, it’s nice to have the cue playing so you can hear the new volume. By the way, if you just want to adjust volumes without hearing the changes live (perhaps if you’re in rehearsal and don’t want the change to disrupt what’s happening on stage) you can simply turn off the “Live Preview” button.

Add another cue to fade the cue back up to the original volume for the end of the scene.

Which ones happen first? Well it all matters how you order and execute the cues.

Now we have an audio cue, it fades up, lowers the volume, raises the volume, then takes the volume out and stops the cue.