🎛️ AUDIO LEVELS CRASH COURSE | 🎥 Camera to DAVINCI 🎞️ RESOLVE to Render/Deliver 🎉

how often are you guys thinking about your audio levels when you're filming to when you're in DaVinci Resolve to when you're exporting your final project for the whole world to see you should be thinking about it right at the start so we're going to talk about audio levels from camera to DaVinci Resolve and on your export in this video I'm going to give you all the tips that you need to know as far as where to set what for dialogue for sound effects for music how do we set all these different levels how do we set it in our camera what should it be at and how do we ensure that we've got good levels in our project when we're working with it in DaVinci Resolve and then when we export it how do we know that we're going to get some good levels for wherever we might be putting our project whether it's film TV maybe it's YouTube whatever it might be you need to have all of your audio ducks in a row everything's set up properly so that it's easy to understand it's easy to watch and the audience is captivated by your awesome video so the first step in the audio process is right here it's filming into your camera where do you like to set these levels now for me on my cameras generally I try to aim for around -18 to -12 DB somewhere in that range that way my audio is not too loud I'm going to have enough Headroom that I can play with the audio a little bit in DaVinci Resolve and I should have enough signal to work with the audio well and not too much so that I'm end up peaking so take a look at these couple Clips here I'm going to show you what it looks like when you record properly on your camera versus when you don't maybe you're a little too quiet you got to boost it up and then what it sounds like if your camera's just levels are too high and it's peaking so check out these videos and tell me which camper you in when it comes to send your levels when you start recording check it out so when it comes to your audio it's super important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be around that -12 DB range because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work with once you get into fairlight so this is what it sounds like with some good audio levels where it should be we're going to take this and bring it into resolve and work with it there 's what it sounds like if your recording levels are too low on your camera if we take it and we bring it into fairlight and then we boost the level so you can actually hear it kind of like this it's going to introduce extra background noise that we don't need to have there that doesn't need to be there if we set our camera levels properly so we get the good audio to bring it into fairlight and then make it even better yet and if you say your level is too high it doesn't matter what you do in fairlight you're not going to be able to fix it it sounds like this it's distorted it's peaking it's no good you want to make sure you set those levels good in your camera first so in that first example there we had some good audio levels we were in that minus 18 to minus 12 DB range let's take a look in the resolve and see where our levels are falling once we bring it into resolve so taking a look at that first clip right here this is what we've got and when we play through our clip we're going to watch our meter right here and see where our levels are currently falling important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be all right so that's it's good it's in that range of you know minus 12 to minus 18 DB somewhere in there and then I can always boost it or lower it if I need to here in DaVinci Resolve which we'll talk about more in a few minutes now the second example there I started out with my levels way too low and then once I got into post I boosted it up and when you do that sometimes it does introduce some of that background noise maybe an extra little hiss or something and the reason that you get that is because the preamps a lot of times in in a lot of these cameras like these guys the preamps are not great so when you have really quiet audio and you try to boost it up it just introduced background noise that we don't want to hear in our videos so if you have to do it you can do it you can always use something like voice isolation to clean it up a little bit but if you can set your levels properly on your camera that's more important and I would focus on that first so that once we get into resolve we don't have to try and fix things right we'll just have a good Baseline a good clean bunch of audio to start with and the last example here I did lower the volume but when I recorded it it was just peaking you could see on the meters on the camera it's actually peaking check it out in fairlight you're not going to be able to fix it it's so when you're peaking there's not a whole lot you can do to bring back the data in your audio right that audio is chopped off it's kind of lost you can maybe work with it a little bit but it's not ideal and it's not going to give you the best sound for your videos so step number one is making sure that you get good audio levels when you're recording with your camera set it properly all cameras in general can you can can jump in the menus and set your audio levels manually I wouldn't set it automatically because that's going to create lots of fluctuations potentially in the recording of your audio but set it manually pick a good spot where it's going to work good for you in your situation and you're a filming environment and then start recording and get a good base level of audio to start with so once we get into resolve then we can work with it a little bit more and fine tune it so now that we've got our recording it's in a good spot we're going to bring this footage into DaVinci Resolve and now we want to set our audio levels properly for our project right and for our editing and for me in general I'm going to set my dialog levels to around -10 DB let's jump into resolve and take a look at our first example here so this example it was recorded with good levels what I would call good levels to bring in the resolve but they're still a little bit lower than I might want them to be for my project so I'm going to boost the levels up and I want it to come to around that minus 10 DB now I'm going to do this work in the edit tab you can jump into fairlight if you want to but you don't have to so we are aiming for about -10 DB give or take a little it's not a problem if it goes a little over a little under but minus 10 DB is where we want our dialogue to live so I'm going to play through this and I'm going to adjust my volume of my clip or adjust the gain so that I get proper levels and my meter is showing me about minus 10 DB how can I do that so to adjust our audio levels or our volume we got a few different ways that we can do that if you hover over your clip you'll see this little white line there and I can click hold and drag it up and down now a little bonus tip if you hold your shift key while you do it it's going to drag a little more precisely for you so we can adjust it that way we can select our clip we can open our inspector go to our audio Tab and we can adjust our volume right here which is actually the same thing as adjusting that white gain line we saw on the clip so you can do that and then you can also come over here and adjust your fader if you want to now I recommend that you use either the inspector method or the clip gain line method first because I like to save any adjustments I make to the fader until the end to help blend all of my different audio tracks together so in this case I'm just going to use the gain line that's right on the clip because I think that's the best way to do it in this case so I'm just going to come in my inspector I'm going to reset my volume I'm going to play through the clip and I'm just going to watch my meters here and boost those levels a little bit until it looks like it's around that minus 10 DB so let's go ahead and do that so when it comes to your audio it's super important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be around that -12 DB range because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work with once you get into fairlight alright so that looks pretty good it's in the ballpark right now I want it to be about here it's okay if it fluctuates a little bit we can always work on improving that with some compression and some Dynamics later on but for now we've got good levels here and now I'm happy with where my dialogue is Right dialogue we want at that minus 10 DB range so now let's talk about some music right check it out in resolve here I'm just going to open up a power bin I've got all kinds of music in here that I use in various projects and I'm just going to grab something and drop it down into my timeline so I'm going to solo my music track so we only hear that now where do I want my music levels to be well that kind of depends on your video and what sound you're looking for now most music when you get it it's already going to be mastered and it's already gonna have a fairly loud volume because it's going to be created to some certain standard and it's going to be mixed in and create created as a good high quality file already so what you're going to find and what I find most the time is that when I bring it into resolve it's actually a little too loud right for my video I don't want it to be that loud so generally I'm going to drop back the volume a little bit so let's play through this music clip jumping back and resolve here and we can just see how it sounds and look at our meter and see where our levels are currently falling foreign so you can see we're all the way up up the meters there we're even peaking a little bit on the top there so generally when I put music into my video clips I'm gonna also come to my music clip and I'm going to lower this down sometimes to about minus 10 DB similar to where I put my dialogue right because if I'm editing my dialogue and it's at that -10 DB my viewers watching it I don't want the music to be crazy loud right I want it to be kind of similar right when there's no dialogue happening so let's just play through that and see where our levels are currently falling if I lower my gain line there by 10 DB all right so I think that's a better spot for my music and in general I'm going to set my music around that minus 10 DB range as well when there's no Dialogue on top of it right I can make it a little bit louder or a little bit quieter again it depends on the kind of music and the vibe and the feeling you want in your video but somewhere around -10 again is a good range to put your music if there's nothing else happening in your scene now let's say maybe you've got your music underneath your dialogue track right so looking in resolve here if I unmute or unsolo my track and now I have talking on top of my music let's play that you can hear how that sounds the music's gonna be too loud and we're going to want to drop it back super important to set good levels inside okay so too loud so the easiest thing that most people are going to do is just lower the volume a little more of the music track and you can totally do that and it's a good place to start so I'm going to grab that gain line I'm going to bring it down anywhere between -20 and -30 DB and you're just gonna have to listen to it because different songs are gonna sound a little bit different as far as how that volume reacts when you lower it down so let's just say in this case I'm going to go about minus 25 DB looks pretty good it'll play through it hear how it sounds your camera you want your levels to be around that minus 12 DB range so even that in this case might be a little loud so maybe I want to drop it back a little bit more come back to maybe minus 28 DB and again if you hold your shift key that's going to allow you to be a little more precise there so we're going to go about minus 28. change because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work with once you get into fairlight so this is what it sounds like with some good audio and looking at my meters here we can see it's only coming up to about -28 DB this is a good starting point for the music that's going to be underneath any dialogue track or any speaking track now that I do have some other great tips on creating some space for your dialogue when there's music underneath it so I'll link up there you can check out that card I'll also throw it at the end of the video you can check that out three good tips on how you can make it sound even better other than just lowering the volume like we just did but Basics lowering that volume is going to be a good place to start so like I said with that music anywhere between that minus 20 and minus 30 DB is usually a range that's going to work pretty good you have to listen to it a lot of audio is listening to it and I can give you numbers and rules but your ears are going to tell the full story for you so make sure that the music sounds like it's in a good spot below your dialogue track so if you're gonna mix it together kind of like we did just here the next part of audio that you might wonder where should my levels be is when it comes to sound effects now sound effects has the biggest range of where you can set those levels and a lot of it's going to be based on your ear what do you hear how do you want it to sound how do you want those effects to come across in your video let's take a look at resolve here I've got just a few effects here I'm going to solo my track now like with music sound effects are also already mastered they're already brought up to certain levels of wherever the Creator you know how they wanted it to sound and and the deliverable that they needed so a lot of times we're going to make some adjustments here I'm not going to just dump it in and leave it right because it's not going to make sense so for example this first one let's listen to it and it's just normal volume as I just dropped it into the timeline it's a an explosion a little detonation check it out questions [Music] okay so it's pretty loud right and depending on your scene maybe you want it to be that loud maybe you want that impact but a lot of times you may need to drop it back just a little bit even if it's only a few DB right maybe three DB and we can see that it's still peaking up to five here in my uh in my mixer on my meters there so we want to watch our meters we want to listen to it because listening to it is super important we want it to sound the way we want it to sound in our video right and just making sure we're not peaking right because if we boost any of these sound effects sometimes you're going to Peak and then it's just going to get distorted and we don't want that we don't want distorted audio check out another sound effect I have here it's crickets now something like that I might leave that at its full volume right if I'm have a nice scene and I'm looking out in the darkness all right I might want to leave it like that and in this case I could I could boost it a little bit if I wanted to and we're probably not going to Peak we'll watch our meters over here or maybe they're subtle more subtle and in the background I'll drop it down a little bit so in general I'm gonna set sound effects anywhere between -5 DB all the way down to -30 DB depending on the type of sound effect the last example here is like a whoosh kind of sound check this out thank you all right so maybe I'm using that for a transition I don't need it to be that loud so I'm going to drop it back to like -13 DB foreign a little more subtle maybe just blend in with my video a little bit more you don't want your sound effects standing way out and and just seeming like they don't fit into the project right the idea with audio is to blend everything together and that's why sound effects are going to require such a huge range that you could actually set for the level so it's really up to you on how your video is looking the feel the vibe what's happening as far as how loud do you want those sound effects to be so quick recap in DaVinci Resolve here dialogue levels you want to be about -10 DB music you could use it full full volume if you want I recommend dropping it back a little bit if there's no Dialogue on top of it to maybe minus 10 DB give or take in that range a little bit if you're mixing Dialogue on top of your music you probably want to drop that music down to somewhere between -20 and minus 30 DB based on the way the music sounds again we're using our ears your ears are your most valuable tool here when you're working with audio it's got to sound good right because if the numbers are the numbers and you'll like it doesn't sound good you need to go ahead and make an adjustment sound effects sound effects have a wide wide range of where you can set those levels we can go from say minus 5 DB all the way down to -30 DB right make the sound effects fit in your scene get the desired result and the feeling that you want for your sound effects in your video and just decide where where it sounds good right again go back to using our ears we want it to sound good in our video feel like it fits in blend things together and then our sound effects will be more successful if we keep those things in mind now that you've set all of your audio levels for your dialogue tracks your sound effects tracks your music tracks we're gonna set all that up good first now it's time to start thinking about our deliverables right where is this video gonna live for me in my case it's YouTube and that's what we're going to use as an example here so when we export our projects we have a certain loudness level that we're allowed to have our videos be so that when we upload it to a service like YouTube it can get so loud out before YouTube says oh nope I'm gonna squash it down and you don't want YouTube or any other platform to squash down your audio or compress your audio because it can make it distorted and just make it not sound so good right we want to edit the audio and I want it to sound the way I want it to sound I don't want somebody else to come along after the fact and be like nope and squish down our audio not what I want right so we're going to take a look at the loudness levels for our overall video now you measure the loudness of your video at the very end of your audio process you don't want to worry about it on a track level it's not a track level thing it's measured in luffs and it's based on everything together as a whole so you need to edit all your audio individually first and then you can go ahead and check your loudness levels so let's jump and resolve I'm going to show you how you can check those levels how we can set our desired result and how you can make adjustments if you need to so that we're not exceeding those levels we can come up and almost meet them but we don't want to exceed those levels so let's jump into resolve and check it out so in order to check the loudness of all these random things I have in my timeline let's say it's a fully edited video I'm going to jump into the fairlight page I'm gonna go ahead and close my media pool and we're going to use a new tool here that you might not be familiar with and it's the loudness meter or the loudness scale so what you need to do is turn on this right here and that's going to allow us to see our bus one over here in our tracks now if we come over to our bus one and we just make it a little bit bigger here you'll see now we have loudness history and we want to go ahead and turn that on so as we play through our video we're going to see a line on this graph that's going to tell us where our current loudness levels are and again Luvs is a measure of everything together right it's not an individual track it's everything together where is that loudness level of our entire video now we can set different loudness Levels by coming up to the meter section up here if we click on this drop down we've got different options here that we can pick and now as of DaVinci Resolve 18.6 we actually have a YouTube setting right here so I'm going to select that and what we're allowed to do is go up to -14 lufts for YouTube now you can set this on a project level but I'm just going to do it the way I showed it here for now just for Simplicity reasons but now our our unit of measure is set to be -14 we can see it up here on our graph and if we look down in our bus one area we can see -14 that's a white line and that's as high as we want our audio to get if it's higher YouTube will compress it when we upload to Youtube if it's lower we can bring it up a little bit just so that way it's loud enough on YouTube so let's go back to the beginning of our clip I'm going to come up here and then these two buttons right here just allow us to reset uh the the metering here so I'm going to reset and hit start and now all I'm going to do is just play through the video and we're going to see the graph being created that's going to tell us what our loudness levels are so let's go ahead and play the video so when it comes to your audio it's super important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be around that -12 DB range because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work with once you get into fairlight so this is what it sounds like with some good audio levels where it should be we're going to take this and bring it into resolve and work random stuff happening in the timeline here but the concept is the same for your project right edit your whole project together good levels on everything now we're checking the loudness before we deliver it right so when I look at this graph here it's currently blue and it's below this minus 14 line which is what I want because if it goes over that -14 line YouTube's going to push it down and compress it and we don't want that so we can go all the way up to that line and let's say I want to boost it up a little bit more how would I do that well the easiest way is to come to our mixer I am just expand this out on our bus one which is our main output I can come down here and just use the fader and just boost it up a little bit so that's going to take all my audio levels I'm you don't have to adjust anything individually I can just bring them all up a little bit and I'm going to get that extra volume out of out of my clip right you wonder why some videos are quiet on YouTube and some videos are allowed it's because some videos don't account for the loudness levels that we are allowed to achieve right so if I come back to the beginning of the clip I'm just going to go ahead and reset and start the metering again and now as I play through you can see right here I boosted it up in my main bus now watch this blue line it's going to be a whole lot higher so when it comes to your audio it's super important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be around that -12 DB range because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work with okay so what do we notice here right now we're over top of that minus 14 luffs it's in the red even and then it actually comes and dips back down which is good we want it to dip back down but you don't want to go over that line at all and for me most of the time I'm going to make sure I'm one to two to three maybe DB below that line just to make sure that YouTube isn't going to compress it down on me so if we wanted to fix that I'm going to come back to the beginning of my timeline here I'm just going to lower this down let's say I want it to be a little lower I'm going to drop it below the unity gain there a little bit and reset my metering play through and let's see where the line Falls this time so when it comes to your audio it's super important to set good levels inside your camera you want your levels to be around that -12 DB range because if you don't it's just going to be harder to work all right so we can see that our our levels there are much better are much better and in this case because I set my levels good on a track level I can actually just leave this pretty much where it was right I don't really have to adjust it now one bonus tip here is just to make sure you're not peaking or going over any uh of the lufts levels right because we don't want you to compress it two things you could try one can open up your Dynamics and just turn on your compressor and I'd even bring this up a little bit because I don't need to compress it much just in case it gets close to the end I'm going to allow the compressor to just knock it back just a little bit just a little compression you can do that if you want or you can turn that off you can turn on the limiter right and I'm just going to bring it up and I'm going to limit this somewhere around I do like One DB right so that way if it gets up to those upper levels on accident maybe I had left a loud sound effect in or something it's not going to Peak right we're going to limit that audio and it's going to prevent anything going over that -14 lufts should we get up too high now this is for YouTube A minus 14 left right but if you're editing for something like broadcast TV maybe you need something like minus 23 loves other platforms have other requirements and you're just gonna have to check to see what you have to meet in order for your audio to sound the best that it can the loudest that it can and for everything to just be in the right spot so that it doesn't get compressed by wherever you're deciding to upload your videos now loudness is a whole video on its own I'll get into it more and make another video about that because I have one about it it's a little old techniques are very similar we do have some new tools that we can work with when it comes to loudness in our videos but that is how you're gonna set the final output there for your videos for YouTube for Netflix wherever it might be you want to make sure that your overall loudness levels are all set and remember set all your tracks first and then you look at your loudness levels at the very end so that way you make sure you're within the guidelines and the requirements for the given platform that you'll be posting your film or your video to so that is it guys that is audio levels in a nutshell from camera right here to DaVinci Resolve two exporting and uploading to the platform of your choice very very important to make sure we get these things set up properly right from the get-go because if you don't it just makes more work in the long run right and when it comes to your videos audio is so important it's almost if not more important than the way the video quality looks I I'm gonna say it's a little bit more important right because we can all watch a video that doesn't look great but sounds good but if we have to watch a video that looks beautiful but sounds like garbage let's be honest I'm being honest I'm not gonna sit there and watch it I'm just gonna move on to the next video so I hope you guys found this helpful if you did give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you want to learn more about audio all things audio here in fairlight and if you have any questions on any of this stuff anything about levels or your audio drop a comment down below I'm more than happy to jump down there and answer some questions if I can so with that said guys get your audio sounding good set those levels properly and uh I will see you in the next video [Music] thank you

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 5,066

Keywords: Audio Levels, DaVinci Resolve Audio Levels, Audio Levels for Youtube, Audio levels for youtube videos, loudness, dialogue levels, sfx levels, music levels, Audio levels background, Adjust audio levels davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18 audio levels, how to change audio levels in davinci resolve 18, normalize audio levels davinci resolve, Analyze audio levels davinci resolve, set loudness in davinci resolve, Jay Yadlovski, Jason Yadlovski, How to get better audio in videos

Id: uqg8C4g65wQ

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023