Working on a film analysis video:

I have three tracks

• video (capture clips, graphic stills, titles, etc.)


• background music


• vocal narration

When I wish to have no background music or narration, and just want to show a clip, I run video in the main video track.

But I have another video track as well for when I just want to display video from a clip, sans audio, and run the music track and narration over the clip. So it's actually two different video tracks, I just alternate between them. Hope that makes sense.

I want to be able to just turn off the audio entirely for the video track so that just the video displays but sound for it is muted. The problem is that when I select "Mute Clip" I can still hear a slight bit of audio distortion to the muting as such, i.e., it is detectable as a sort of overlayed artifact of the muting, and it and interferes with the music and narration tracks.

So what I have been doing to try to eliminate audio on the video track is by opening the audio "mixing room," and I manually hold the slider for audio level for the video track all the way to the bottom (to zero sound) as the video clip plays. That does get the job done. But this is a cludgy way of working. This can't be the best way to go about it! But I'm just diving in and experimenting as I go along.

Anyway, what is the best way to achieve the desired result of lowering the volume to zero for a video track? Thanking you in advance!