How to Adjust Volume, Remove Noise, and Balance Audio in PowerDirector

Bad audio loses an audience faster than bad picture. Four problems account for most of it: the level is wrong, clips do not match each other, the recording is noisy, or the music is burying the speech. PowerDirector has a separate tool for each, and they are easier to find once you know which problem you have.

The quickest route never leaves the timeline. Click the clip, hover the white line running along its audio track, and drag it up or down.

Gone too far? Right-click the clip and choose Reset Volume Level rather than trying to drag it back to where it started.

For fades, double-click the clip, open the Audio tab and choose Volume / Fade under Tools. The two sliders at the bottom add a fade in and a fade out.

To bring the level up from a particular moment rather than across the whole clip, hold Ctrl and click the volume line to drop a keyframe. Put one where the change should start and another where it should finish, then move the second.

To remove one, hold Ctrl and hover it until a bin icon appears, then click. If keyframes are new to you, the keyframe basics are the same here as they are for picture.

Clips recorded at different times rarely sit at the same level, and the listener notices every jump.

Open the Audio Mixer from the button at the top left of the timeline. Each track gets its own strip, and the strips line up with the timeline tracks in the same order.

Find the track you want and click Normalize at the bottom of its strip. PowerDirector analyzes the audio and brings every clip on that track to a consistent level.

To move a whole track by hand instead, park the playhead over clips on that track and drag its volume slider. Every clip on the track moves together.

Rooms are rarely as quiet as they sound at the time. Air conditioning, traffic and computer fans all end up in the recording.

Double-click the clip, open the Audio tab, and under Enhance click AI Audio Denoise. It asks what kind of audio the clip is first, because speech and music need different treatment.

It then analyzes the clip and proposes settings. The preview switch below flips between Fixed and Original, which is the only honest way to judge whether it helped, and the sliders stay available if it went too far.

The same Enhance section holds separate tools for speech, wind and reverb, which are worth reaching for when the problem is one of those specifically rather than general noise.

Music almost never matches the edit. Rather than cutting it short or looping it, select the clip and use Smart Fit for Duration on the Tools tab: it remixes the track to the length you ask for, to the playhead, to the end of the project, or to a length you type.

The same thing works on the timeline: hold Shift, take the edge of the music clip, and drag. White lines on the clip afterwards mark where the remix joined the music back together.

Lowering the music by hand around every line of dialogue is the kind of job that takes an hour and still sounds uneven. Audio Ducking does it by detecting the speech.

Select the music clip and open Audio Ducking. There are four sliders: Sensitivity for how readily it decides something is speech, Ducking level for how far the music drops, and Fade-out duration and Fade-in duration for how quickly it moves down and back up. Then click Apply.