Audio Cleanup in Davinci Resolve (FREE Masterclass)

so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up hello welcome to my editing desk I've got a clip here with some audio that's really really bad we're going to try and clean it up this is actually uh fun fact this is actually my primary role as a video editor most of the client work that I get is things like help my audio is messed up can you fix it so this is a really bad example of audio that I might have to clean up uh or a really good example either way we're going to we're going to take a look first thing we need to to do though is set some expectations you heard this clip at the beginning in the video it's bad so we need to set some expectations this is not going to be a perfect fix we are not going to get rid of all of that exhaust fan noise we're probably not going to get rid of all of the Reverb in the room it's just not possible without making the voice sound absolutely horrible so first things first setting expectations we're not looking for perfect we're looking for better second thing you need to know is that we're not going to be using any tools that can be found in Da Vinci resolve Studio we're going to be using only tools that can be found in the free version of Da Vinci resolve and the reason why is because those awesome AI Power Tools in Da Vinci resolve Studio don't always get the job done and when that happens you need to know the actual process for cleaning audio so you can get the job done cool all right let's jump into Da Vinci resolve I've got my clip lined up here we're ready to go we are in the fair Light page and let's just give it a listen so we can refresh our ears and get an idea of what we have to work with here so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up okay so like I said lots of exhaust fan noise lots of Reverb it sounds absolutely horrible first thing we need to do is think about the order of operations how are we going to work here most people would grab the noise reduction plug in drop it on the track or on the clip and start from there but I'm actually not going to do that I want to start with EQ and here's why if you push that noise reduction plugin too far you get all sorts of weird artifacts in the voice and we don't want that so we're going to use other tools to take care of as much noise as possible before we start working with the noise reduction plugin so the first thing we actually need to do here in devinci resolve is come over into our mixer and where we see order this is what HS D Vinci resolve what order to process the audio in are we going to do effects first and then Dynamics and then EQ or if we click on that we've got all sorts of options what we want to do is actually start with EQ then go into effects and then go into Dynamic so let's go ahead and click on that bottom option right there and now we're set up EQ effects and Dynamics next thing we want to do is get an idea of where where our noise what frequency is our noise living in because that way we can use our EQ in order to take that down and the best way to do that is actually to drop a multiband compressor onto our track and see where that noise is peaking so we know where to drop the frequency in the EQ let me show you what I mean I'm here in diviny resolve if we come into our effects Library if you don't have your effects Library open you can just come up here click effects that will turn it on and off in audio effects Fair light you'll see multiband compressor go ahead and drop that right on the track and we're not actually going to be doing anything with the multiband compressor yet so we can go ahead and byass it because really all we want to do is analyze our frequency right now and we want to analyze just the part where we have noise so we'll set an endpoint at the beginning of our clip and an out Point somewhere right there where that noise is that's good and what we want to do is have this looping we have our Loop control activated right here and all we need to do to get a looped playback is hit alt and forward slash on our keyboard we'll turn that on okay see right there at 223 that's about where we have our first Peak so when we get into our EQ we're going to want to make a drop at 223 and we have another one right there at about 564 okay 223 and 564 I'm going to turn my multiband compressor back off and I'm just going to move it over here so I can keep those numbers handy and I am going to open up my EQ over here my mixer and we're going to go ahead and activate band one and band Six we're going to make sure all of these here are bells and band Three is our closest one two are 223 band so let's bring this frequency down there we go 223 and what we're going to do is we're going to drop the gain on this frequency and we're going to listen to what happens to that noise so that's already done a lot of work there we do want to tighten that Q factor up though just a bit next we're going to take band four and bring that around 564 so bring it down 563 close enough tighten up the Q factor just a bit and drop that gain between -8 and - 9 DB get a quick before and after okay so that didn't do a whole lot but it did cut down on that noise just a little bit we're going to do a lot more work with this to take care of the rest of it but this is a good start next thing we're going to do is continue on with our EQ to try and get rid of some of the Reverb that we have and it's kind of the same process of getting rid of the noise but a little bit different what we're going to do is take all the remaining bands that we haven't used so that's Band 1 2 five and six and what we're going to do is we're going to bring our Q factors all the way up on those bands and then one by one we're going to take each one of these bands and we're going to bring the gain all the way up and we're going to play through our entire clip listening to the frequencies and when we hear this really annoying whistling sound that's when we're going to stop sweeping the frequencies we're going to drop the gain and we're going to rewi that Q factor a little bit to get rid of those really really annoying frequencies and that should help the Reverb a lot so first thing I need to do is get rid of of my in andout points actually I just need to expand my In-N-Out points we'll bring our playhead to the end of the clip hit o and again we'll start looping the playback so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and any okay that whistling sound right there that's what we need to get rid of so what we're going to do is we're going to drop the gain on that to about between Min - 8 and -1 and we're going to widen that Q factor a little bit then we're going to grab band two raise the gain start listening again who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up that was horrible all right let's bring that one down and the Q factor a little bit now band [Music] five so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into DiVinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up and band six so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up that sounds so much better just with EQ we're not even done yet so there we go we've used the EQ to minimize a little bit of that exhaust fan noise and we've gotten rid of a lot of that Reverb which is nice moving on now we get to start playing around with our effects the first of which is that multiband compressor so we're going to bring that up multiband compressor is a lot like a regular compressor which lessens the dynamic range between the loudest and the quietest parts of your volume the only difference is with a multiband compressor is you can have different Dynamic ranges for different sections of your frequency range does that make sense I think that makes sense let's jump in and here we go we're going to activate our multiband compressor and we're going to take a look and try and first thing we're going to do is we're going to figure out what bands we need or what frequencies we need our bands to be at so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up all right so the first thing that I know I want to do is I want to use this band one as kind of a a highpass filter or a low cut filter which is going to get rid of all of the noise underneath where the human voice usually lands so that way that'll clean up some of that exhaust fan noise as well so what we're going to do to use this as a as a cut all we're going to do is we're going to bring this threshold all the way up we're going to bring the gain all the way down and bring our limit all the way up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up and I want to expand this as much as I can without affecting the voice so I'm just going to sweep this low frequency here so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into in you resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super okay so now we've got our low cut filter placed and it took care of a lot of that hum from the exhaust fan it made that noise a little less harsh and a little less ugly it's still there but it's not as distracting as it was and it's going to be a lot easier for our noise reduction plug-in to focus on now we're going to move on to our next set of bands and that's going to take care of some more of the noise and it's going to even out some of the harshness in our voice here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up okay that's good and I'm going to keep this mid-range pretty much untouched here but what I do want to do is I want to create a high pass filter high pass filter or not a high pass filter low pass filter or a high cut filter that's going to get rid of those higher end frequencies that are outside of the normal dialog range and that will clean up some more of the audio might get rid of some more of that exhaust fan noise and normally just to let you know normally we would do this with an EQ but because we use that EQ to clean up some of that noise and take care of that Reverb we're going to do all of this in the multiband compressor as far as I'm concerned it works just as well so here we go what we know is that our range we want to start right around 13,000 and we're going to have the same things we're going to do the threshold right around 20 we're going to bring our gain all the way down expand our limit quick attack long release and we're going to start playing and we're just going to drop this back we're going to bring this frequency back until we here it noticeably affecting the dialogue so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up okay so we're sounding better we've gotten rid of that hum from the exhaust fan which was really annoying it's still there it's still prominent the Reverb is really well taken care of and really well managed we've got a a low pass and a high pass filter on there that we did with the multiband compressor now that we've minimized that noise redu or minimized that noise as much as we can now it's time to put our noise reduction plug-in onto our track and push that as far as it can go without making the dialogue sound really weird so let's go into our effects Library we are going to grab our noise reduction plugin we're going to drop it onto our track and the first thing we want to do is teach our noise reduction plugin we're done with multiband compressor we're done with our EQ so the first thing we want to do is teach our noise reduction plugin where the noise is so it knows where to remove it so first thing we're going to do go back to the beginning of our clip we're going to make sure we are in manual we're going to hit learn and we're going to go ahead and play and we're going to make sure to click this learn button off before it gets to the dialogue so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up okay so we're pretty good here we've taught our noise reduction plugin where the noise is which is good and it got rid of it the only thing I really needed to adjust here is this threshold and when you're just starting out with noise reduction these settings can get really really confusing really really fast so if you're just starting out and you're just learning how to do noise reduction there are only two dials that I want you to focus on the first is the threshold you find your threshold by listening to the noise and looking at your input meter to see where it lands see if we play that you'll see it's just above -40 so I set mine around - 35 and the other setting is your dry and wet mix your dry wet mix is literally the mix between before putting noise reduction on and after putting noise reduction on dry is before wet is after the farther you push this to wet the more artifacts you're going to get also the less noise you're going to get so let's take a listen and we'll play around with that so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super re so there we go what we're looking for again is not perfect we're not looking to get rid of all the noise cuz if we did that it would just be weird warbly artifacts and that would actually sound worse than the exhaust fan noise so what we're looking for is to get rid of as much noise as possible without introducing those artifacts and that's what that dry wet mix dial does now there's a couple other things that we're going to do to our dialogue to make it sound a little bit better and to clean it up a little bit more but before we do that like I said this is typically my job when it comes to video editing I know I love playing around with visual effects and all that stuff but I am an audio guy through and through and the bulk of my client work is receiving Clips with bad audio cleaning them up and sending them back and to do that sending and receiving I use today's sponsor postbase postbase is a platform that is dedicated to helping video editors and video creators like you and me share and collaborate on on videos it's super easy to create projects upload files share them with collaborators get real-time notes and you can even do video calls right within postbase so you can review materials together plus if you're a Premiere Pro or after effects user they've got a bunch of additional plugins that you can download and add to your project files like Luts and graphics and titles and just all sorts of really cool stuff and postspace is constantly developing new features I really can't wait to see what they come up with next so if you're looking for a way to collaborate with other creators or sponsors or clients and you need it to look more professional than sharing links from Google Drive definitely click the link in the description and sign up for postspace today they've got a plan to fit any budget they're super cool people and I think you'll enjoy it thanks so much to postp for for sponsoring this video and for supporting creators like me and with that being said let's continue working on our dialogue see we've got most of the noise cleaned up we've got most of the Reverb taken care of but there's a couple other things that are really bothering me first of all we've got some harsh s's in there we got to add a dser so let's go ahead and do that we're going to come into our effects Library we're going to grab our dser drop it on the track and for this one I found that actually just putting on male s female if you're a female but for me male s right there is usually pretty good and we'll just listen to that and we'll tweak the amount until we like what we're getting for being here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into D Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up cool DS are done moving on now it's time to shape our audio a little bit we our EQ work from before plus our multiband compressor and our even our noise reduction plugin took away some of the body of our dialogue it's sounding a little thin a little boxy we want to fix that now there's a couple plugins we can use here my personal favorite though is vocal Channel vocal channel has an EQ and a compressor built in so we can really shape our dialogue the way that we want so let's grab our vocal Channel plugin we'll drop it onto our track and here we go we've got our EQ we've got our compressor we've even got a highpass filter so let's start with that and we're just going to play our audio we'll actually let's start right where the dialogue starts hit I set an endpoint and we're just going to Loop this playback so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up all right so I'm here in and now we're going to move on to our low medium and high frequency I'm basically just going to put a little bit of a scoop in here I'm going to raise my low a little bit I'm going to bring down my mids I'm going to raise my highs my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody okay so EQ is sounding pretty good now we're going to use that compressor again we're going to shorten that dynamic range a little bit and we're going to use some makeup gain to bring our dialogue up to an acceptable level let's go ahead and this is a very simple compressor by the way we've got threshold ratio ratio for normal dialogue I always keep it around 2 to one if you're doing something like voice over work then you're probably going to want something closer to four uh 4: one but we're going to keep it at two and then what we're going to do is we're going to play with this threshold until we're getting a reduction of about 3 DB let's turn our compressor on and start play audio on their desk into you resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video because I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute okay so that's basically everything we got to do next thing we want to do is actually a before and after comparison and that's not just to show you guys that's actually something that I always do because after doing so much work on a piece of dialogue sometimes it can start to feel like maybe nothing was accomplished maybe we didn't actually improve the dialogue so what we do is we actually are going to bounce this mix to a new track and that way we can compare the before and the after so first let's close out all of our plugins and we're going to go ahead and get rid of our In-N-Out points by just hitting alt X we're going to go up to top timeline come down to bounce mix to track bus one destination track new track hit okay and you'll see because we were bouncing our bus one it actually bounced it to a new stereo track I have a mono track above it so I'll just slide it up there we've got our monot track let's go ahead and normalize this we'll normalize it to what I typically normalize for YouTube videos now what we're going to do is disable all of our plugins and our EQ on our original track that way we can hear the unedited original and the edited version right after let's go ahead and normalize this one as well and let's go ahead and play our before and after so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super reverby in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into Da Vinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up so I'm here in my bathroom which is the absolute worst place to film a video cuz I've got the exhaust fan going it's super Reverb in here and anybody who got this audio on their desk into DiVinci resolve would probably have an anxiety attack let's see if we can clean it up okay so here's the deal like I said we weren't going for perfect we were going for better and yes there is still noise yes there is still a little bit of reav but the dialogue has been removed from the noise it has been unmasked from the noise just a little bit more the dynamic range is a little bit shorter so we don't have those harsh Peaks we don't have the s's trying to blow out your eardrums and it sounds a lot better in my personal opinion this is something if I was given this piece of footage and this audio clip to work with as a client project this is something that I would feel comfortable sending back to the client and saying hey it's not perfect you're not going to get perfect but this is a lot better than what it was that being said there are a lot of AI powered noise reduction plugins out there you've got one built right into Da Vinci resolve studio called voice isolation which does wonders on both noise and Reverb and that compared with some EQ could work wonders and you've also got third party plugins there's a great one from waves called Clarity VX Pro that I absolutely love but if you are working in the free version of D Vinci resolve and you need to clean up some dialogue that's the process that I would use cool let me know your thoughts down in the comments don't forget to go out and make stuff and until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Jay Lippman

Views: 1,656

Keywords: davinci resolve audio editing, davinci resolve fairlight tutorial, fairlight audio for beginners, how to remove background noise from audio in davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve noise reduction, remove background noise, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve tutorial, jay lippman davinci resolve tutorial

Id: bIwemfFHuZw

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024