How To LEVEL DIALOGUE in DaVinci Resolve FAST (New Built in Dialogue Leveler)
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How To LEVEL DIALOGUE in DaVinci Resolve FAST (New Built in Dialogue Leveler) - In this video, Will walks you through how to level your dialogue audio fast using 3 different ways; the new built in Dialogue Leveler audio effect, a full audio compressor breakdown, and a less complicated audio compressor that has other features and benefits.
In this video, I'm going to be teaching you how to level your dialogue tracks very quickly inside DaVinci Resolve. You, as an editor, probably bring in footage where you have an interview, where the dialogue is all over the place in terms of the dynamic range. You have loud parts, quiet parts, and it can take a while to manually adjust all of those so that the voice sounds level and consistent. But there's actually a much easier way to do this, and it's built into DaVinci Resolve, and that's called the Dialogue Leveler.
I'm also going to walk you through and explain what an audio compressor is and how it can be helpful. It will have a few extra settings that the Dialogue Leveler doesn't, which can give you a little bit more options in fine-tuning to get the result you're looking for. If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos, so lots of content for you to learn from. And if you want to know any of the music or the gear we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. Let's jump in.
Alright, we're in Resolve, and I have an audio clip loaded into our timeline. We'll give it a listen so that you know what we are working with. This is an audio test where I'm speaking very close to the mic, and this is an audio test where I'm speaking pretty far from the mic. So it's the same sentence twice. I just said the first one at a normal volume, and then the last one was much quieter. And depending on the type of projects you are working with, you may have a lot of different source audio clips where you have different volumes. This can be very tedious; it can take a long time to adjust all the audio at all the different levels throughout your project.
But Resolve has a couple of great ways to deal with it, the first one being Dialogue Leveler. This is built into DaVinci Resolve now, and you can access it by clicking on your audio file. Then, up in the Inspector audio tab, you'll see that down here we have Dialogue Leveler. You can enable that, and then you'll get some options for adjusting this. This is essentially just an audio compressor with fewer options. So first, we'll use this effect to level our audio. But if you want more options, then we'll apply an actual audio compressor, and I'll walk you through all of those settings, which can get a little more technical but can give you better results.
Alright, so first in the mode, we have a few different options here. "Allow Wider Dynamics." So if we have this option selected, it's going to allow the louder audio to remain loud and the softer audio to remain softer, just because we're allowing a greater dynamic range. I wouldn't recommend that setting if you have, let's say, one or two people speaking, and you want the dialogue to be level throughout. I don't think it makes sense to use this one because the whole point of the Dialogue Leveler is to level dialogue. So wanting to level your dialogue but also have wider dynamics doesn't really make sense.
We'll go to the next one. This one's "Optimize Moderate Levels." This one will focus on the moderate levels, and for the settings below, we at least want to have the top two selected, which is "Reduce Loud Dialogue" and "Lift Soft Dialogue," as that is the entire purpose of leveling audio. As for "Background Reduction," you can keep this applied if you want to remove some of the background noise, but there are better ways to do that, and we have other tutorials teaching that, so I'm going to keep that off. For "Output Gain," I tend to just maximize this; that way, any quieter dialogue will be raised by 6 dB instead of just 2. Because we're optimizing the moderate levels, that means it'll affect the louder part a little more.
If we look at our audio meters on the right, and if you don't have that, you can go to "Workspaces," go to "Show Panel in Workspace," and then click on "Meters." Let's listen again and watch where the louder one hits. So it hits about -7 or so, and the quieter one, about -12. So there's not that big of a difference. Now let's turn off Dialogue Leveler, and let's look at the difference now. The louder one hits about -3, and the quieter one hits around -14. So there's a much bigger difference when it's off. Let's turn it back on, and we'll go to "More Lift for Low Levels" and have a listen to that.
This is an audio test where I'm speaking very close to the mic, and this is an audio test where I'm speaking pretty far from the mic. So with this setting, "More Lift for Low Levels," you can see that the louder part hit the ceiling at zero, and the quieter part hit about -8 or so, meaning that it's still leveling the audio and bringing up the lower volume, but the overall audio is still quite loud, especially because we have the output set to 6. So let's go back to 2. Now it's about -3 for the louder part and around -12 or 13 for the quieter part. The fourth option is for really soft audio, but we won't work with that one, though it can be helpful. For us, we'll keep it to "Optimize Moderate Levels" and at plus 6. For the audio we're working with, that gives us a pretty good result and levels the audio well—I'd say about 8 out of 10.
For the second way of leveling audio, let's say we wanted more control. We'll turn off the Dialogue Leveler, and under "Audio Effects," click on "Fairlight Effects" and scroll down to the very last one called "Vocal Channel." Let's drag that onto our audio clip. This will open a panel with many other options, like a high-pass filter, equalizer, and compressor. We'll turn off the equalizer and enable our compressor. Now, this is a little hard to understand, but essentially, you have your threshold, which is where you want the compressor to start, your ratio, which is how strong you want your compressor to be—at 1:1, it won't do much, but at 7:1, it'll be much stronger—then your reaction, which controls how quickly the compressor turns on, and gain, which is a boost to your audio volume after applying the settings. The point of a compressor is to control the loud parts and bring them down so you have more headroom in your audio to boost the quieter parts.
For dialogue, you'd generally want a faster reaction time, so we'll leave it as the default. I like to work with a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio for the compressor. For the threshold, this depends on your source audio, so let's go back to the beginning and see what happens.
This is an audio test where I'm speaking very close to the mic. You can see a gain reduction of about 10 for the louder parts, but for the quieter part, there's barely any reduction because it's already softer. Now let's adjust the threshold to zero. You can see that the gain reduction doesn't do anything for either part. But if we set it all the way down to -40, you can see it heavily reduces the loud parts. The goal here is to play with the threshold and gain to get the softer and louder parts to sound similar in volume. I'll set the gain to 10 dB and the threshold to -30.
This is an audio test where I'm speaking very close to the mic, and this is an audio test where I'm speaking pretty far from the mic. The main benefit of using the compressor versus the Dialogue Leveler is that you can go beyond 6 dB, up to 20, and have more control over the threshold and how strong the effect is.
Also, I should mention there's another effect called the Dialogue Processor. We'll apply that and remove the Vocal Channel. The Dialogue Processor has many effects like de-rumble, de-esser, compressor, and expander. You'll notice it only has a threshold and amount slider, so we can set it to -40 and max out the amount, but it's harder to work with since it doesn't show the exact dB ratio, and you can't control how fast it kicks in.
I hope this tutorial was helpful on how to level dialogue inside DaVinci Resolve. There are a few different ways to do it, and while they all essentially achieve the same goal, one gives you more options. You can choose the one that works best for you. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs-up and subscribe to see more videos from us in the future. We have over 200 videography-related videos, so lots of content to learn from. And again, if you want to know about the music or gear we use, links are in the description. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
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