ADVANCED Volume Control in Davinci Resolve Fairlight!

if you're new to Da Vinci resolve you might not know this but the fair Light page is a fully functioning doll and being a doll there are a lot of different things you can do with your audio including multiple ways to control the volume of your audio clips let's talk about [Music] it before we get into some of the more professional level techniques for adjusting your audio volume it's probably a good idea to cover the basics of adjusting the volume of both the individual clips and the overall tracks in your project let's jump into Da Vinci resolve and take a look all right we are here in the fairlight page of Da Vinci resolve I've got a couple of tracks here we've got the yellow track which is all of my dialogue it's labeled vo for voice over and I've got my music track which is the green clip and the green track and when it comes to changing volume there's a couple basic ways to do it let's take a look at how to control the volume or change the volume of an individual clip first it's really really easy if we take a look at our clip we'll see this thin white line going across the clip we've got it on both the left and the right Channel and we've got it on each one of these dialogue clips and in order to change the volume of an individual clip all we have to do is grab that line so we'll Mouse over it until we have an arrow above it and an arrow below it and we'll just click and bring it down and you'll see when I'm doing it on a stereo track both the left and the right are controlled so it's all happening at the same time let's undo that the other way to change the volume of an audio clip is to select the clip and open up your inspe vector and you'll see volume right here at the top we can go ahead and adjust the volume and you'll see the waveform is changing as I'm adjusting the volume really really easy and to reset it back to zero we can just double click now let's say you wanted to change the volume of an entire track that's usually the case when you have multiple clips on a single track and you want to change the volume of all of them at the same time there's a couple ways we can do this the first way is to select the track and then come into your inspector and you can adjust the volume and one thing to note here is no matter what I do with this volume slider here in the inspector the waveform isn't going to change because we are not changing the volume of the clip we're changing the volume of the overall track and again to reset it to zero we can just double click on volume and we're back up to zero another place on the track where you can adjust the volume is this little box right here where it says 0.0 that's the volume reading and if we click on that and we drag down or up we can adjust the volume just like that really really easy and then the last place to adjust track volume is right here in your mixer if you don't see your mixer in the fair Light page you can just come up here to the top right and you can turn that on and off but you can use this mixer this fader right here and you can turn the track volume up or down and the last thing that we should look at here is normalization normalization is a way to adjust the volume of a single clip or multiple clips to a specific loudness level it's really really easy to do what we're going to do is we're going to select all of my dialogue clips and we're going to rightclick and we're going to come down to normalize audio levels and if you take a look at this drop down box you're going to see a lot of different options we're not going to worry about all those right now it's just different parameters depending on what you are editing for we're typically going to stick with the itur BS 1770 D4 and that's going to allow us to normalize for loudness while at the same time limiting our Peak the thing we really need to worry about is this relative or independent if we choose relative it's going to take a look at all of the clips that we have highlighted and it's going to adjust them all the same amount so the overall loudness is where it's supposed to be if we choose independent it's going to take a look at all of our Clips separately and it's going to adjust each one separately so each individual clip hits the right loudness level now if you have dialogue on a track and you are normalizing dialogue I will always suggest to use relative that way you don't have one clip that's one loudness and then the other one is a lot quieter and then the next one's a lot louder it's that's going to be a mess so I will always choose relative and then adjust manually from there so we have relative we have our Target loudness level at -7 lkfs we have our Target level as Min -2 DB and we're going to hit normalize and you'll see if we select on our tracks you'll see that in our ins Vector our volume has gone up to 2.1 same thing with this one and this one pretty simple right now it's time to get into the fun stuff whenever you're in a situation where you need to adjust your volume multiple times on the same track you basically have three options key framing Automation and listening key framing is a fully manual way of telling denture resolve when you want the volume of a clip or a track to change and it's pretty pretty easy to do let's jump back into Da Vinci resolve okay we're back in Fair light and let me just run over the situation here we've got a voiceover track with some dialogue Clips in it and we've got a music track with a music clip in it and the goal of all of the exercisers that we're doing today is the same we're going to make the volume of the music go down while we're talking and go back up while we're not talking and the first way we're going to do this is with key framing key framing is super simple it gives you a lot of fine control and there's a couple different ways we can do it the first way we're going to do it is by adding key frames directly on our audio clip super easy everything we don't have to open the inspector or anything in fact let's just go ahead and close out our inspector so we have a little bit more room to work with now I want my audio to start fading about 1 second before I start talking let's go ahead and zoom in just a little bit here and what we're going to do is place our playhead at the beginning of our dialogue clip we're going to hold down shift and hit the left Arrow that's going to bring our play head back exactly one second from there all we have to do is mouse over our little volume control line on our clip we're going to bring it right where that playhead is and we're going to hold down alt and we're going to click on that little white line and that's going to add a key frame see that little dot that's a key frame next thing we're going to do is bring our play head back to the beginning of the clip we're going to hold down alt again we're going to Mouse over our playhead right over that white line and we're going to click again and then we're going to do this on the other side of the clip as well so let's move to the end of the clip we will add a key frame there and we'll go forward one second by holding down shift and hitting the right arrow on our keypad and we'll hold down alt and click that white line right where the playhead is to add our last key frame and then all we need to do is mouse over that white volume control line on our audio clip and we're going to click and we're just going to drag it down we'll say we're going to bring it down to about Min -4 DB let's bring it back give it a listen and see what we've got going on when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the summer that sounds good to me next thing we're going to do is add some more key frames around this dialogue clip but this time we're going to use the inspector so let's go ahead and bring our playhead to the beginning of the next clip again we're going to go back 1 second by holding on shift and clicking on the left Arrow of our keypad and we're going to open up our inspector now nothing here is showing up because we don't have any audio clips selected so let's go ahead and select our audio clip and now we can see our volume controls now it's really easy to use the inspector to set a key frame all we need to do in this volume area right to the right of the volume slider you'll see this little Diamond if we click that that will turn red indicating that there is a key frame underneath the playhead and if we come back to our clip and take a look you'll see little white dot that is a key frame and the cool thing about using the inspector to add key frames and control your key frames is that once you set this first one anytime you change the volume you are going to add a key frame automatically so the only time you need to click this diamond again is if you are one deleting a key frame or if you're adding a key frame as a placeholder saying hey we're going to start the next adjustment here and we're going to end it somewhere else so let's go ahead and move to the next place where we are going to adjust the volume which is right at the beginning of our clip and we'll go ahead and check that box or select that box so our numbers are highlighted and we're going to bring our volume down to -14 and we'll click enter and you'll see we've got a new key frame we come back to the end of that clip come into our inspector we'll set a placeholder key frame right there by clicking on the diamond in the inspector and then hold down shift press the right arrow on our keypad to move forward 1 second and if we doubleclick volume that's going to bring it back up to zero and it will add an additional key frame so if we play that back we should see another volume adjustment I would spend hours outside with my friends it did didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were together that's perfect but that is not now let's say for whatever reason you wanted to delete a key frame maybe you added one accidentally and you don't need it that's really really easy to deal with all we have to do is select a key frame on our clip and we can hit backspace on our keyboard or you can navigate through your key frames right here where our little key frame logo is or our little diamond we can just hit these arrows to the right or left of our key frame indicator and that will navigate us through our key frames when we get to the one that we want to delete all we have to do is click the little diamond and the key frame will go bye-bye and we're good to go by the way the music that I'm using for today's video that's from today's sponsor art list art list has a huge selection of stock assets for video editors and I'm not just talking about music they've got sound effects footage effects project templates and even plugins that can help take your video projects to the next level oh and an nle did I mention that they have an nle art List's AI powered search filters make it super easy to find what you're looking for and they're constantly adding new stuff to their site so it never feels stale or out of date art list has a plan to meet any budget in including plans with an unlimited license that allows you to use their assets anywhere at any time on any project so if you're looking for a piece of music or footage or whatever else you might need to finish your next video click the link and check out artless today if you sign up using that link you'll get two free months on top of an annual subscription oh and you'll be helping to support this channel so you know win-win thanks so much to artlist for sponsoring this video and for continuing to support creators like me and with all that being said let's talk about automation automation is a lot like key framing but the key frames happen automatically hence the name basically when you're using automation Da Vinci resolve is recording the movement of your audio sliders and then adjusting the volume automatically when you play the video back oh and volume isn't the only thing that you can automate either but that's for another video entirely for now let's jump into Da Vinci resolve and take a look at how to automate your volume okay we're still in Fair light we've still got our voice over track with our dialogue Clips we've still got our music track with our music clip and the goal is still the same bring the volume of the music down while we're talking and back up while we're not and this time instead of using key frames we're going to use automation automation is basically the process of recording your audio fader movements which will tell D Vinci resolve hey when you get to this point bring the volume down when you get to this point bring it back up it gives you more fine control over your volume but it does require a steadier hand and it's a little bit more of a complicated setup so with all of that out of the way let's start setting this up first thing we need to do is enable Automation in the fairlight page to do that we're going to click this symbol right here it's got two key frames line going through it and a little onoff switch we select that and it'll turn red and we now have automation enabled if we want to get into our automation settings we can go right next to that onoff switch you'll see the little key frame symbol with a settings gear click on that and now we can basically say this is what our automation is going to do like I said you can automate a lot of different stuff but we're currently just going to automate our fader we're also going to make sure that when we stop recording our automation we are going to hold our current volume we're not going to bring it back to our original volume we are going to hold our current volume and we need to make sure that we are writing our automation we are not trimming trimming is basically adjusting an automation that you already did this is brand new from scratch we are writing our automation touch don't even worry about that leave it off we don't need to worry about that so now that we have automation enabled in Fair light now that we have our automation settings set up we can close out our settings give us a little bit more room to work with and now we need to make sure that our track is enabled for automation to do that we are going to come down to our music track if you don't see this drop- down box or this key frame symbol it's probably because you need to expand your track so expand your track and you'll be good to go next thing we need to do is change this drop down box from none to fader level that's going to show our fader level bar it's basically the equivalent of that little white line in your audio clips but instead of for a clip it's for the entire track and then from there we're going to click this little key frame symbol on the track head and that is going to enable Automation and from there all we have to do is play our video and we're going to move the slider when we need the volume to change and it's going to record those movements so that when we play back it'll all happen automatically hence the name automation when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the [Music] summer I would spend hours outside with my friends it didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were were [Music] together granted not everything we did was safe I'm pretty sure that's a rock we're throwing [Music] around still I wouldn't have traded that time for anything in the [Music] world and there we go once we stop recording and we look at this you'll see in the fader we've got a whole bunch of little mini key frames these are all of our fader movements right here there's a whole bunch of them every little shaky twitch of the mouse is recorded in there but the cool thing is is if we go back to the beginning and we play this this slider is now going to move on its own when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the summer pretty cool right before we move on to listening let me just say this about automation while it is a much less timec consuming way to control your volume than key framing is I would personally only do automation if you're using an actual mixing board otherwise it can get kind of clunky when you're trying to bring your volume up and down unless of course you're extremely gifted with a mouse and with that let's move on to listening which is actually a more automatic process than automation is basically listening is the process of using the Dynamics from one track to tell the other track when to change the volume which I know sounds confusing but it's actually really easy let's take a look okay real quick before we actually get started with this I made a horrible embarrassing mistake that I'm sure you guys are going to bash me about in the comments that's fine go ahead this is not called listening it's called side chaining that is the technical term for what we are doing we are side chaining that will make sense in a minute but first let me explain exactly what we're doing we are setting up audio 2 to listen to audio 1 and so when audio 2 gets a signal from audio one which will happen whenever the playhead goes over one one of these audio clips it's going to bring down the volume of the music clip pretty cool pretty simple to set up but you don't get as much fine control over your volume as you do with key Framing and automation okay with all of that out of the way let's go ahead and send our signal from audio one to audio 2 we're going to do all of this in the Dynamics tool so if we come over into our mixer you'll see Dynamics first thing we want to do is set up the audio one Dynamic so we're going to Mouse over our Audio One Dynamics and we're going to double click that's going to open our Dynamics and all we're going to do here is we're going to click Send and that's it we're done with the Dynamics in audio one so we can go ahead and X out of that and now we're going to open up our audio 2 Dynamics again we're going to Mouse over the Dynamics box we're going to double click it's going to open it up see says Dynamics music music is the name of the audio trap first thing we're going to do is turn our compressor on the second thing we're going to do is we're going to come down here where it says send and listen and we're going to click listen and now with our compressor at default settings and listen turned on we can go ahead and play back and see what exactly is going on here I warn you right now this is going to sound horrible because we need to adjust some stuff when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the summer see that didn't really do anything but if we bring our threshold down a little bit let's maybe bring it down to minus 35 and we play that back again when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the summer and if you were listening carefully you probably heard the audio ducking a little bit but whenever there was a pause in the speech it would jump back up that's where these settings right here attack hold and release come into play what we're going to do is we want this to be kind of a slow fade when the dialogue starts so we're going to bring our attack up let's go ahead and bring it up all the way we're going to bring our ho up maybe around 800 and what that's going to do is it's going to keep our music from jumping up in between the pauses and then we're going to bring our release up pretty far and what that's going to do is make it so once the dialogue stops it doesn't jump the music back up but it'll be kind of a slow Fade up so with those settings going on let's take a listen when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the summer that's pretty good but I feel like the volume is still a little bit too high on the music while we're talking bring our threshold down it all the way down to 50 and see what happens when I think back to my childhood you know what I remember the most the [Music] summer I would spend hours outside with my friends it didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were together [Music] and that sounds pretty good again you're not going to get a lot of control over how much the volume is affected you're not going to get a lot of control about your fade duration you're just not getting a whole lot of control but it does do the job it does work and if in certain situations it sounds really good now a quick Pro tip if you are going to be using side chaining to do all of this to do your volume control and you're doing it with music you want to make sure you're carving out space in your music so that your dialogue doesn't get swallowed up I know that makes not a lot of sense but let's open up our EQ and I'll show you what I mean if we rid of Dynamics we come into our mixer here and we go to our audio 2 EQ double click click that to open now a lot of the human voice lives around that 1K frequency Mark so if we take our EQ and we open up band 4 and we put it to that 1K frequency and we drop it down doesn't have to be too far maybe around minus anywhere between - 8 -1 DB you're going to get get a nice little area so you're bringing the frequency down in the music so that your voice can shine through a little bit more I'm going to give you a quick before and after go ahead and start at the beginning of this clip and we'll turn off the EQ to start I would spend hours outside with my friends it didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were together it was really subtle let's go ahead and listen listen to it again I would spend hours outside with my friends it didn't matter what we were doing as long as we were together and there you go so that's a little quick tip to when you're using side chaining to make sure that your dialogue isn't getting swallowed up by your music it's a really really handy little tip I do this in fact I have a preset in Fair light that automatically does this on my music track so that my dialogue doesn't get swallowed up so the music isn't super distracting and it doesn't affect the music a whole bunch which is really really nice oh real quick remember earlier when I said that you can use automation on more than just the volume of a track and how I said it was a topic for another video well it turns out that I already made that video you can check that out right here and until next time don't forget to go out and make stuff thanks for watching [Music] oh

Channel: Jay Lippman

Views: 1,206

Keywords: davinci resolve, fairlight audio for beginners, davinci resolve 18 fairlight, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve audio editing, davinci resolve fairlight tutorial, video editing, loudness normalization, davinci resolve tutorial, fairlight mixing, audio mixing davinci resolve, resolve 18, fairlight audio basics, resolve 18 tutorial, jay lippman davinci resolve tutorial

Id: wmaUADpqlAE

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024