Gate

The gate turns a clip down in its pauses. When the sound falls below the threshold it’s pushed further down, so room noise and breaths between phrases get quieter while the speech itself is untouched. Above the threshold the gate is open and leaves the sound alone. It turns the pauses down, it doesn’t cut them out. To take pauses out of the timeline, use Remove Silences.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Sound ▸ Gate
Agent tools: set_audio

The Gate section of the Sound tab with Gate pauses ticked: Threshold −10 dB, Ratio 4.0:1, Range 20 dB, Attack 1 ms, Hold 50 ms, Release 100 ms, Status reading Opens above −31.8 dBFS, and Loudness −21.8 LUFS.

Gate the pauses

Select a clip with sound, and open the Gate section of the Sound tab.
Tick Gate pauses. It starts at the defaults, which work from the clip’s own loudness.
Play the clip. If the ends of words are being cut, raise Hold or lower Threshold.
If the pauses aren’t quiet enough, raise Range. If they sound too empty, lower it.

The other controls are greyed out until Gate pauses is ticked. Reset in the section’s header turns the gate off.

The controls

Control	What it does	Range	Default	Quick picks
Threshold	How far under the clip’s loudness the gate opens.	−40 to 0 dB	−10 dB	−20, −15, −10, −6
Ratio	How strongly sound under the threshold is turned down. At 4:1, each dB under the threshold becomes 3 dB further down.	1:1 to 20:1	4:1	2, 4, 10, 20
Range	The most the gate ever takes away.	1 to 80 dB	20 dB	10, 20, 40, 80
Attack	How quickly it opens when the sound rises.	0 to 100 ms	1 ms	1, 5, 10
Hold	How long it stays open after the sound falls, so the ends of words aren’t clipped.	0 to 500 ms	50 ms	0, 50, 100, 200
Release	How quickly it closes after the hold.	1 to 2,000 ms	100 ms	50, 100, 250, 500

The threshold follows the clip

Threshold is set in dB under the clip’s own loudness, not at a fixed level, so the same setting works on a quiet recording and a loud one. A trim, a pan change or a different channel choice moves the loudness, and the threshold moves with it.

That loudness is the Loudness figure in the Volume section. It’s measured before noise reduction, the compressor, the volume, the fades and ducking, so moving the Volume slider doesn’t change where the gate opens.

Read Status and Loudness

Two readouts at the foot of the section show what the threshold means for this clip. With several clips selected, Loudness reads “—”. Status does too, unless the gate is off on the first of them, when it reads “off”.

Loudness is the level the threshold is measured from, for example “−21.8 LUFS”. It reads “measuring…” until the clip has been measured.

Status says where the gate opens, or why it isn’t working:

Status	What it means
off	Gate pauses isn’t ticked.
Opens above −31.8 dBFS	The clip’s loudness plus the Threshold. Here, −21.8 LUFS with a −10 dB threshold.
Waits for its loudness	The clip hasn’t been measured yet. See below.
Not gating: too short	The clip plays for under 0.4 s, too short to measure.
Not gating: too quiet	The clip is too quiet to measure.
Not gating: no sound	The clip plays no sound in this timeline, or it’s a nest clip.

Before the clip’s loudness is measured

The gate, the leveller and the de-esser all depend on the clip’s measured loudness. Until it’s measured, the clip plays without them, and the preview picks them up by itself.

An export waits until every gated, levelled or de-essed clip has been measured. After five minutes without a measurement it stops, saying that the clip’s loudness or speech hasn’t been measured yet, and to wait for the Status rows to show the clip’s loudness and export again.

A clip that can’t be measured, because it’s under 0.4 s or too quiet, plays and exports without them, and the export doesn’t wait for it.

Good to know

The gate runs after noise reduction and before the leveller, the de-esser and the compressor. See How audio works.
The gate doesn’t look ahead, so a loud start after a long pause can lose its first moment while the gate opens. At the default Attack, that’s about a millisecond.
There’s no way to listen to only what the gate takes away, so judge it by playing the clip.
With an action selected, these controls set where the action ends. The numbers glide across the action, and turning the gate on or off changes at the action’s end.
The gate does nothing on a nest clip. Open the nest with ⌘↓ and set it on the clips inside.

With an agent

set_audio sets the same controls through gate, with threshold_db, ratio, range_db, attack, hold and release. The three times use an agent’s time units, not milliseconds. An empty gate turns it on at the defaults and null turns it off. See Tools: clip sound.