DAVINCI RESOLVE FAIRLIGHT TUTORIAL: Audio for Beginners in 16 Minutes
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In this DaVinci Resolve 16 Fairlight Audio Tutorial, Alli teaches you how to use DaVinci's Audio Editing Workspace. We'll look at Fairlights layout, how to access and use different tools and audio effects, how to get organized and much more!
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
I've gotten a lot of requests to create a beginner's guide to using DaVinci Resolve's audio panel Fairlight. So in this tutorial, that's exactly what we're going to be taking a look at. And if you're new to DaVinci Resolve and you want to learn how to use it, better check out our learn Davinci resolve 16 in 16 minutes tutorial.
All right, so we're here in DaVinci's editing panel. If the editing panel is brand new to you. It's where you put your video edit together. You can do some more general audio editing work here in the edit panel, but Fairlight is completely dedicated to audio work and that's what we're going to be looking at.
So here in the timeline, we have one of my YouTube talking head clips. Let's go into our fair light panel which you can do by clicking on the music note icon, and the same audio that we just saw in our edit panel is here in the Fairlight panel.
First I'll show you around Fairlight so you get to know the layout and what does what. We have our mixer panel here. The mixer panel allows you to balance audio levels add effects eq dynamics and pan your audio. We have our meters button and shows the monitoring panel which contains our audio and video content that's currently on our timeline metadata is where data about your clip or audio or whatever you have selected on your timeline is shown.
The inspector panel gives you quick access to several commonly used effects and tools and you can scroll this vertical slider to increase or decrease the height of your tracks, and use this horizontal slider to zoom in or out. We can drag our cursor over just our music track. Hovering your mouse over the end of the track gives you the ability to trim the audio by dragging it to the left let's zoom into our audio to get a closer look at it. To get more organized here we can rename our audio tracks by double-clicking where it says audio 1. Let's rename this track dialog we'll do the same thing here by renaming the audio to track music. Next, let's change the color of this music track by selecting it right-clicking and choosing clip color. I like to have a system, and recommend you create a system for yourself as well where for me I always make my dialogue the default green and my music navy blue. So we'll select navy great on each of our tracks we have the lock icon that we can use to lock a track so changes can't be made to it. We have r which we could select if we wanted to record audio like a voiceover directly into DaVinci and this specific project. We have s to solo a track so we only hear the audio on that track and we have m to mute a track if we want to change where our playhead is within our tracks we can grab it and drag it.
So here we have several tools like the selection tool the range selection tool that allows you to select a specific part of your clip, edit selection mode the razer tool to cut your clip. Our snap tool which I always have turned on, and iI recommend that you do too, I'll show you what it does right now. So I'm going to first turn it off for a second by clicking on it to deselect it, grab my music audio and I want it to sit right beside the end of my dialog audio but see as I move it closer to the dialog, it's very hard to tell if it's right up against it or if it's starting to replace some of the dialogue audio. I'll put that music back where it was click on the snap icon to activate it and try that again. Now the music track snaps to the dialog track really quickly and easily. That's why snap being turned on comes in really handy. When it's activated it will snap your clips or your tracks together. Try it out. It makes editing way easier, just going to put the music back in its original spot we also have some markers so we have this type of marker that sits inside your clip. You can change the color of it if you'd like. I'll just undo that using command+z on my keyboard and we have this type of marker that will sit over the top of your clips wherever your playhead is. You can drag it wherever you'd like on your timeline, click on it, add notes or keywords to it. You can change the color of it too.
Markers are another great tool to use when you are working with multiple clips or a larger project. They make editing more efficient more organized and just easier overall. We have different timeline views here. You can click them and check them out and choose which one you prefer. We can use this slider down here at the bottom of our timeline, drag it to the left or to the right to move over in our timeline and we can do the same thing at the top of our timeline here by moving it right or left as well. We're going to add an in and an out point to the beginning and the end of this clip. I'm going to tell you what they are and what they do in a second so use your up arrow key on your keyboard to go to the beginning of the clip. Next press i on your keyboard to create an in point and press the down arrow key on your keyboard to go to the end of the clip and press o to create an out point. The in and out points used on specific parts of your timeline select whatever's within those points and in this case we set an in and an out point so that we can utilize the loop tool up here which we'll check out coming up. If it's activated it shows in red and it will loop whatever's within your in and out point. You can hit the space-bar on your keyboard to play or pause playback. I just hit it to pause playback and this is something I always used to forget how to do when I started working in DaVinci. So if you want to clear your in and out point which you will want to do at times as you start editing more regularly what you need to do to clear it is, go up to mark and select clear in and out or you can press alt and the x key on your keyboard.
We can increase or decrease the volume of an audio track in a few different ways. A quick way to do so is to hover your cursor over this horizontal line in the track click on it and drag it higher or lower like so I'll undo that. Another way to adjust the volume of a track is to select it and go up to the inspector panel and where it says clip volume. Make sure you see the red dot which indicates the effect is active and you can use the volume slider.
Side note but very important when you're recording audio. You want to make sure it's not peaking from the get-go so depending on the device that you're using to record, in a lot of cases it should show audio meters make sure they aren't going red if they are adjusting your audio recording volume even lower, because if your audio's peaked in the recording itself, you can't fix it in post. There are band-aid solutions but you don't want to do the band-aid solutions you want to just record it right from the get-go.
Let's increase the size of our track and scroll over until we spot an area of audio that's taller than most of our other audio like right here. This audio looks like it's close to peaking so we'll manually add key-frames to lower the decibels of this specific part of our waveform. Go to clip volume and click on the key-frame here to place it and you can see it's showing up right here. Now i'll add another key-frame just after the waveform spike ends and I'll add a third key-frame over the tallest part of the spike itself right here. Now hovering your cursor over the key-frame in the center, you can click down and reduce the volume of this part of audio slightly so it doesn't peak and you can see the waveform shrinking. As we do this after you manually key-frame and adjust peaks in your audio, you want to listen back to make sure that the changes you made weren't too abrupt or too noticeable. You really don't want them to be noticeable at all and you also want to watch the meters during playback to check that you're no longer seeing your audio hit red, and another way you can add key-frames is you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard and click on the volume line. I'm going to quickly go over my dialog and adjust any of the remaining louder areas of my audio, and now under the inspector tab, let's listen to this audio as I adjust the pitch so you can hear its effect. We release new video edited so that's a really quick way to change someone's voice and make them sound like a chipmunk. Let's hit the reset toggle to bring it back to default.
I prefer using the equalizer eq effect which we're gonna look at coming up but in the inspector panel, we also have the option to turn clip equalizer on, and by default, it has band 1 activated which cuts the low pitch frequencies of the track that we have selected on our timeline and band 4 is also activated which cuts the higher frequencies. We could also manually adjust these right within the clip equalizer as well.
Next, this is a feature I love when I'm trying out different music in my project. Let's find our music audio which is here in the media pool, select it right-click on it and choose to replace the selected clip, and now we can choose a different music track. Select this one here open and this new music track has replaced the previous one. Let's use the slider at the bottom of the screen and drag it to the left to bring us to the beginning of these audio tracks. Notice that oftentimes in music tracks, there will be a second or so of no audio in the recording before the song begins. I want my music to begin immediately, so let's select the music track and hover our cursor over the very beginning of it, which brings up the trim tool and drag it inwards to the point we'd like this track to begin. I'll drag the music to meet up with the beginning of the dialogue and now go to the end of the track drag the end of the music track out to meet up with the end of the dialogue again.
Let's press s on the a1 track to solo our dialog so we aren't hearing the music as well with the music turned off. Let's listen through to a bit of the dialogue, there's a subtle background noise that I'd like to remove. So next we'll add an effect to reduce the background noise of our dialog by going over to the mixer panel and here's the dialog track so click on effects and the plus icon here and this will bring up a bunch of different effect options for us. Let's choose noise reduction and noise reduction again and here we can listen through to the defaulted noise reduction that's been applied and remember we have loop on which will continuously.
Loop the audio as we're listening through so the default noise reduction effect did a good job of removing the background noise. But it's also made my voice sound a bit robotic. Adjusting these dials down here can help reduce that robotic sound and also keep that background noise low and not audible in my dialogue but looking at noise reduction effects and all of these different options for adjustments is an entire tutorial on its own. So let me know in the comments below if you want to learn more about how to use noise reduction.
We'll close this window and we now have the noise reduction effect applied to our dialog track if you want to add more facts to the same audio track you could do so by clicking on this plus icon here and choosing more effects. I also work with eq when I'm working with dialog so beside where it says eq here there's this blue line click on it and it opens up our equalizer panel I usually turn band 1 on which cuts the lower frequencies and I bring it to around 100 because with dialogue you don't need the frequencies of 100 and below. I turn band 6 on and adjust the frequencies to around 14k, and remember you can turn the effect on and off to listen to the before and after. Overall it's a good practice to get into using eq and at the very least using band 1 and band 6 like I just showed you to cut out some of those high and low frequencies that you don't need in your dialog audio.
I'll just close this window and you can see that your eq has been applied to the a1 track here to add a track you can bring your cursor over where it says a2, right-click and click on add track and you can choose to add a mono track stereo track and so on. We'll add a stereo track which you can see has been added right here to delete tracks you can right-click and select delete track. Scroll back up here let's say you decide you want to remove the effects on one of your audio tracks like we'll remove the effects and the work we've done on this dialog track here, right-click on the track choose to remove attributes, and by clicking audio attributes you can remove anything you've done to the audio like the volume adjustments, plugins, and equalizer. You can also individually checkmark any of these options if you want to. I click apply and you can see that the audio waveform has changed and those effects have been removed. Just wanted to show you that so I'll press command z on my keyboard to undo that and another cool thing that you can do is right-click on your audio clip, choose to find in the media pool, and doing this will highlight that audio like so. When you're working with a lot of different assets on your timeline being able to find that original clip or audio track in your project comes in really handy.
Let's go to the end of our tracks here and what I like to do when I'm working with music is fade out the end of the track so that the music doesn't just like abruptly end to add a fade bring your cursor to the top right corner of the track click on this point here and drag it inwards. Doing this creates a linear sort of fade we'll just increase this fade a little more by dragging it a little more inward you can also click on this point in the fade here to round out the fade. I find it more pleasing to the ear so try that out and I recommend that when you're working with a talking head clip and you have music underneath you always fade out your music.
One more thing I want to show you is that I generally like to have my dialogue stay around -10 to -15 decibels so as I play it through I'll adjust the meters here. I like my music to sit around -25 to -30 decibels and main here consists of all of the different audio tracks together, so you can adjust the slider here if you'd like.
Alright, so that is a look at how to use the audio panel Fairlight in DaVinci resolve. I hope you enjoyed this video tutorial and found it helpful. If you have any questions please let me know in the comments below and to stay up to date and learn more about filmmaking every single week subscribe to our channel.
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