Audio DYNAMICS in DaVinci Resolve 17 Fairlight Tutorial | Compression | Gate | Expander | Limiter

what's happening guys we are back for another video here in our audio series and today we're going to be going over the dynamics panel there's a ton of great stuff in here i'm going to show you what each part is and how it works and how you might need to adjust some settings in there so covering dynamics today now yesterday we had a huge announcement with davinci resolve 17 tons of new features all kinds of awesome stuff going on which i'm going to cover in upcoming videos but just so you know if you see something that looks a little different on the screen here in this video it's because i did update to the beta version of davinci resolve 17 so if you haven't updated yet maybe you want to consider it because there's a lot of cool stuff in there but if you see something that looks a little different here that's why because the previous couple videos of our series here was done in davinci resolve i think it was 16.2.7 and now i'm upgraded to 17 and i am using the studio version here just so you know so getting back into the dynamics today we're going to cover that we're going to get that all set and after that moving forward we're going to start going through all of the different effects audio effects that is that you can use on your clips or on your tracks here in the fairlight tab and you can use some of these in the edit tab as well so i'm looking forward to going through all those different effects and just sharing them with you guys so you know what they do and kind of how they work so if you just stumbled on this video because you want to know about dynamics there are a few other videos in the series so far about setting your levels and some eq so be sure to check those out if you're interested in those and if you want the sample file that we're using here you can go on over to my buy me a coffee page and download that i'll leave the link in the description below make it easy for you all right so let's get over into resolve and start working with some dynamics oh yeah real quick some good headphones are good speakers if you got them it's going to help make you uh be able to hear those little nuances in the sound a little bit better so uh without further ado into davinci resolve we go all right so we're in davinci resolve here i'm in the fairlight tab and i do have the clip up that you guys were able to download if you've been following along here and if not you can just try it out with your own clip it'll work out too so we've already set our levels we've already done our eq and now we're going to go in and take care of some dynamics so to get to the dynamics you want to come and make sure your mixer is open if you don't see your mixer click on this icon right at the top here it says mixer then you want to come down your mixer and right here we have a section called dynamics now if you don't see dynamics for some reason you can use your middle mouse wheel to scroll around try and find it and if you still don't see it come on up to these three little dots right here click on that make sure you have dynamics checked on to open the dynamics panel just go ahead and double click it so here's our dynamics panel we've got a lot going on here a lot of great tools i'm going to explain them all to you how they work and hopefully by the end of this video it's going to make some sense for you so just going over the window real quick right over here we have our input and that's going to be the signal of our audio coming into the dynamics panel here is where we're going to see the changes that we're going to make whether it's the expander the gate the compressor or a limiter moving over to the next few meters we have here it says gain reduction so this first bar is going to tell you any reduction based on the gate or the expander the middle one is going to show you any reduction based on your compressor and the last one here is going to show you any reduction based on the limiter and a quick easy way to remember that is they just go in the same order as you see them down here expander gate compressor or limiter and same up here expander gate compressor or limiter so the next section we have here is makeup and no it's not the kind that you put on your face and what makeup does is it boosts the output signal of your clip so you're gonna see once we get playing here your meters are gonna show what the input level is and when you apply some of these things like gates and compressors and limiters it may reduce the volume of your clip a little bit so in order to boost that back up you can grab your makeup slider and push it back up and one thing to note the makeup only works when you turn on your compressor down here so you can see as i move the makeup up and down in the graph here the signal is actually getting boosted up here so i'm just going to turn that off for right now the next section we have here is the output signal so that's going to tell you what kind of levels you have on your output and then you have your side chain meter all the way on the right all right let's get down into this bottom section here which is where all the magic happens so the first item that we're going to take a look at is the limiter because it's pretty straightforward and i think it's a good place to start so hey why not so if i want to activate the limiter you just go ahead and click on the word limiter and now when we look at our graph here you're going to see two different color lines this green line which represents what's happening with our audio so right now all the levels are just how they were nothing's changed until it gets to where this blue line is so this blue line represents the limiter and what a limiter does is it says okay once any audio gets to this certain level that we set don't let anything get louder than that that's the limit of where my audio can go so that's what the limiter does so looking at some of the settings we have here for the limiter right now we see its default setting is minus 21db and if you're not sure what that means just think about it in terms of your faders over here on your mixer channels if you look at them you can see you start at zero and it goes down so minus 21db right here minus 21db now i'm not saying this is where you would want to set it this is just the default setting but let's play through the clip with the limiter off and then i'll turn it on and you can see the difference that it makes here what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our level okay so you can see as i crank that way down to minus 29.9 db you can see that um the blue line up here moved down to about 20 minus 29 and we could also see some of the reduction the gain reduction happening here so let me go ahead and just mute this track and let's play through it again and just watch our meter so we have our input signal and it's obviously going above where we set our limiter which is why over here in the gain reduction graphs we see our limiter kicking in and when we look at the output levels we can see that it's cutting those output levels way back so it should be around that minus 29 db now just to cover the buttons below here and this is going to be the same for each section here we have the attack so the attack is how quickly is that limiter or the compressor or the gate how quickly is that going to start once we hit our threshold that we set so the lower that number the faster that that limiter in this case is going to kick in so you can leave this at the default if you want you can slow it down or you can speed it up a little bit and 0.7 milliseconds is the fastest you can go there and if you go ahead and you make any changes to any one of these knobs you can always just double click it and that's going to bring it back to its default settings so next up here in the middle we have hold so what is hold so what hold means is once that limiter kicks in it's going to hold those settings for a certain period of time after nothing is reaching the threshold that would initially cause that limiter to kick in so for example it's going to kick in let's say there's talking that limiter is working it's limiting your audio and then there's a space where nobody's talking well how long is it going to hold on and keep that limiter active until that limiter turns off and if we look back at the dial here you can see you can have it activate right away or you can change it in milliseconds to however long you might want it to be so depending on the situation typically i might use something around i don't know anywhere from half a second to a second and a half which is 500 to 1500 or 1600 it just depends on how it sounds and what kind of effect you want on your audio the next item that we have here is release so what is release so release means once the effect stops in this case the limiter once it stops do you want it to jump right back to normal really quick or do you want it to gradually go back to normal almost like fading back to normal so you got to kind of think about these three things together the attack how quickly does it jump in and get started the hold how long does it last after we don't need it anymore and then the release do we want it to jump back to normal really quick or do we want to gradually go back to normal with no dynamics or in this case no limiter so that's kind of the idea of how the attack the hold and the release work let's talk about a little bit more when we get into the compression here because i'm gonna use those more there i don't really use the limiter much myself generally i don't worry about the settings on these guys all right so i'm gonna go ahead and just turn off the limiter because like i mentioned i don't use it much anyway so let's go ahead and turn on the compressor and i definitely use the compressor fairly often pretty much all the time pretty much all the time so if you're not familiar with what a compressor does a compressor will basically detect any peaks in your audio and will bring them down a little bit now why do you want to do that well let's say your audio was kind of quiet but you had some parts that you know had some peaks in it and were pretty loud well you want to bring up your whole audio clip right but you don't want any clipping to happen with those uh spikes that you might have in your audio so a compressor is going to reduce those peaks of your audio and compress them down a little bit so that way they're not peaking and getting distorted or anything like that you can kind of think of it as reducing the dynamic range of your audio signal so a lot of times compression is used just to give voices a little bit more presence in your mix um it can also be used to help smooth out the differences in levels that you might have within a given track so looking at the compressor section here i'm going to go ahead and click it and turn it on and now you see we've got our green line here which is our audio signal and what we're doing to it you have a vertical blue line here now and that's going to be our threshold so that's going to say okay once your audio signal gets to this point that's when the compressor is going to kick in and moving down to the settings here the default setting for the threshold is -15 db so let's leave that there and see how that does so the next item we have here is ratio and ratio says okay once that compressor kicks in how much am i going to reduce the audio signal so typically you want to use maybe two to one maybe three to one or something for uh voices you don't want to overdo it because then it's going to sound mush down and it's just it probably won't sound so good so try with two to one and see how it works out starting with that and this says for every two decibels of volume over my threshold reduce it in half basically that's what two to one says if you go up you know three to one is going gonna say for every three decibels over my threshold reduce it down to one decibel so let's start with the two to one and see how that sounds now down below there you have your attack hold and release and again it's the same thing as what we talked about with the limiter the attack is how quickly does that kick in the hold is how long do i hold on to it after there's no more signal and i don't need the effect anymore and release is how quickly should i go back to normal with no compression applied so typically i leave these settings at the default and that works out pretty good the last thing that you have here is your send and listen buttons so if you want to do some automatic audio ducking here in davinci resolve you would want to come and click on the send button here because i would want my speaking track to be sent out to my music track so that way the music can automatically duck below my speaking you don't have to do it manually or anything like that davinci resolve can do that all for you so generally i always turn that on i hit on the send button on any of my vocal tracks all right so let's play through our clip and see if we have any compression being applied based on the settings we already have how are we going to know if any compression is being applied well we're going to look at our middle meter here and that's where our compressor will take effect so if it lights up then we know the compressor is active so let's play through the clip and see what we got what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything okay so you see there's not much compression happening there so just for example sake let's drop this back to say -20 and uh see see if we have any compression then what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to do so we have a little bit of compression but not too much so let's say all right my levels are a little low i want to boost them up guys here is because we can see yeah it's a little below the tent so i'm gonna come and grab my makeup and i'm gonna push that up to five so you can see that it boosted my whole signal of my audio so now let's play through and see if we get more compression kicking in and just see if we're getting more output on our meters here what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too so we can see that the compressor is kicking in and it's just kind of helping bring together that dynamic range of our clip a little bit so that the volume is loud enough but we don't have any um really loud points in our clip and it just kind of gives it a better overall sound and you don't have as many quiet parts versus loud parts it kind of brings it all together a little bit and if you wanted to just see you know what it sounds like if you crank it all the way up here let's just do that for example's sake here what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully so you can see it starts to sound a little wonky there when this is cranked up and you bring it down too much so i'm just going to bring this back up let's say there i'm going to reset this and i think we'll go with something like this for now all right so there we go i think our compressor is good and again you can make presets for all this stuff so if you use the same microphones all the time or the same setup you can just apply your preset you don't have to go through this process every time and i do have a video on that check out the card above here and you can go over and check out how to make some presets so the next part we have here is the expander and the gate and these are super helpful and i definitely use them all the time so you can only have one of these on at a time you want to use either your expander or your gate so the expander basically takes the quieter parts of your clip and brings them down a little bit relative to the louder parts of your clip so for example you might have some background hiss a little computer fan going or something by turning on the expander it's going to make the quiet parts of your clip or your track it's going to make it a little bit quieter so that way you don't hear it as much so what's the difference between an expander and a gate so a gate actually allows you to set a certain point and then below that point you can lower the volume as much as you want a gate you can effectively mute anything below a certain threshold so let's take a look at the settings and see how they work all right so i'm going to turn on the expander here and again if you take a quick look at it we've got our green signal here now we have another looks like a turquoise vertical line here and that's going to be our threshold for the expander so if i look down in my settings here we've got threshold and if i click and drag on it you can see it changes and it doesn't move too much it goes down about minus 50 but i'm going to leave it at the default settings for now which is minus 35 db so what happens is once our signal hits that minus 35 db the expander is going to drop that down to make sure it reaches 0 db by the time it's at the bottom of our graph here and what that's going to do is lower the volume of anything down below our threshold so if i turn it off you can see this line pop back up so it just shuts down the sound as it gets lower and lower towards zero so lowers the quieter sounds of your track or your clips and again you've got some other settings here you can change the range a little bit just to change how much it's cutting down that volume you can change the ratio if you want and all these are going to have a different effect on it you can see how it works out based on your particular clips but i'd say try the default settings first and see how that works out and again down here we have attack hold and release so how quickly do you want that expander to kick in how long do you want to hold it after we don't need it anymore and how long should it take to go back to normal so generally if i'm using the expander i'm going to leave these settings at the default settings but where i do change them is if i'm using the gate so let's turn on the gate so you see as soon as i turned on that gate we still have our threshold set at that minus 35 db but look how quickly that signal drops down and we're reducing the volume in this area here anything below that minus 35 shoots down real quick and it's gonna knock all that sound out now you can come down and play with the other settings for example right here i'm reducing everything below 30-35 db it's basically gonna mute all that so you can play with the range to see how much you need to knock that signal back if it's something like you know fans in the background or uh some kind of background noise that you don't want to hear especially between your talking maybe you take a break or you take a breath or whatever you don't want to hear that stuff so by adjusting these settings you can effectively get rid of that for the most part the ratio here you don't need to use when you have the gate activated so you don't need to worry about that and then down here again with our attack hold and release the attack i'm going to leave that where it is hold maybe i want it to stay active a little longer so i might bring that up i don't know to say half a second and how long do i want it to take to go back to normal uh you can boost it up a little bit and let it ease back in to our normal sound so if i turn on the gate i'm going to play through the clip and i'm just going to adjust the range here a little bit so you can hear how it might cut it off a little so let's try and see if we hear anything right in the beginning here so you can see actually before we even get to it that we were having a gain reduction here based on our gate settings it was just cutting out all that noise so if i turn off the gate you hear that and if i turn on the gate you can see it's already being applied here and listen we should hear nothing what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so let's get into editing some audio so you can see it didn't quite kick in at the end there but maybe say i wanted it to um because you know that's going to be a quieter part of the clip well i can just boost the range and i can actually bring down or bring up the threshold a little bit here because i want to catch any of those signals that are in that quieter range so if i just bring this down let's just select uh this last range here so i select my range i'm going to hit my loop key and then i'm just going to hit option in forward slash and it should play in a loop for me so if i turn off the gate here's what we hear and now i want to get rid of that so if i turn it on you can see we're getting rid of some of it if i bring it up a little more see how it's getting less and less now generally i'm not going to bring this up that high for the gate i'm going to keep it a little bit lower but you get the idea that's kind of how it works and if i want to drop the signal down even more after that pretty much takes care of it you can hear that little spike in there a little bit but that's the idea of how the gate works but it can be super helpful to help get rid of some of that background noise again not necessarily while you're speaking but in between those uh parts where you're speaking or the quiet parts of your clip and i use the gate all the time especially in my little studio setup down here it makes a lot of senses you know background noises that go on all the time so i definitely use the gate all the time and if not the gate i definitely at least enable the expander because that works out good and i use that pretty often all right so just to play through my clip here and get things dialed in i'm going to turn on my loop i'm going to select the entire clip here and just let it loop through as i make some adjustments to my settings here in the dynamics all right so i think that's going to be good enough for now i'm happy with that and we should be all set here in the dynamics panel again remember you can save all this stuff as a preset if you want to um and that way you don't have to go through and apply the same settings all the time i do and it saves a lot of time it's like a one click thing you just boom pop into preset and you should be good to go with at least somewhere good to start all right guys so there you go that is the dynamics panel here in davinci resolve in the fairlight page i use it all the time i'm always turning on the settings in there a little compression and definitely a gate or an expander so if you're like me and you love some good audio be sure to subscribe to the channel make sure you keep up with this series and all the audio stuff we're gonna be going through here in the fairlight tab so thank you guys for watching give it a thumbs up if you learned a little something definitely subscribe the little bell too so you get notified when i put out a new video and i look forward to seeing you guys in the next video peace

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 19,361

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, Davinci Resolve 17 tutorial, Davinci Resolve, Resolve, Davinci Resolve for beginners, Davinci Resolve 17 tutorial for beginners, DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial for Beginners 2020, Compression, Gate, Expander, Limiter, Audio Editing in DaVinci Resolve, davinci resolve audio compression, Audio Gate, Dynamics DaVinci Resolve, Gate DaVinci Resolve, Limiter DaVinci Resolve, DaVinci Resolve Audio Tutorial, DaVinci Resolve 17 Audio Tutorial, Audio Effects DaVinci Resolve

Id: H08721S3Z38

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020