Create A Professional Audio Experience in DaVinci Resolve 18 | Dynamic Range - Don't Ride the Volume

have you had this happen to you before you're sitting on the couch you're trying to watch a YouTube video on your TV and you find that when the volume is quiet in the video you have to turn up the volume on your TV just to be able to hear it and when that volume gets real loud you have to turn down the volume on your TV because it's too much and you don't want to blow your ears out but what you're hearing there is a wide dynamic range for your audio and that just means we have the loud Parts really loud and the quiet part's really quiet and this is why it is important to think about the dynamic range of your audio while you're editing it in DaVinci Resolve we want to make sure that our loud Parts aren't too loud and our quiet Parts aren't too quiet we want to bring them a little bit closer so that we still see a difference or still hear a difference but we don't want our audience to have to use the remote control to change the volume of the video while they're watching it so today we're going to talk about that improving the Dynamics of your audio in your videos right here in DaVinci Resolve and I've got an example that's going to demonstrate this for you on how we can take the loud Parts make them a little bit quieter take the quiet Parts make them a little bit loud and give our viewers a good listening experience while they're watching our videos your audio stinks nobody's gonna hang around and watch your videos if you want other tips on making your audio awesome in DaVinci Resolve here for your videos make sure you subscribe to my channel because I got a ton of good stuff coming up a lot of stuff in the back catalog if you need to check any of that out let's jump in and resolve and I'm going to show you how we can work with our Dynamics and make it sound better for a viewer let's go so I'm in DaVinci Resolve right now let's play the sample clip so you can hear the difference that I'm talking about between louder parts and quiet parts and then we're going to help balance all that out in DaVinci Resolve here so take a look at this example so sometimes in our videos we talk loud like this we set our levels based on us talking loud or our subject talking loud but then there's times where people maybe they're a little farther away maybe they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you something about the game that's going on here that I don't want everybody else to know about well for your viewers they may need to adjust the volume on your video and you don't want them to have to do that so we can use compression here in DaVinci Resolve to help reduce our dynamic range and make it a better listening experience for our viewers and I'm gonna show you how to do that with this clip so there's our clip notice in our waveforms here in resolve we have what appears to be louder parts and then in the mid section here you can tell it's a lot quieter because the waveforms are smaller now we could come in here and manually keyframe this and bring up the quieter Parts but we can use the Dynamics and the compressor to do it for us automatically in order to access our compressor we need to jump over into Fairlane so right now I'm in the edit tab right here and we want to jump into fairlight the musical notes at the bottom here so now that I'm in fairlight I'm just going to make my audio track a little little bit bigger here so we can see it nice and good now we want to work with our compressor and our Dynamics so in order to find that you need to have your mixer open if your mixer is not open click on this icon at the top and then down here we have Dynamics you should see it here in your mixer if you don't click the three little dots and you have mixer or Dynamics I'm sorry Dynamics right here so go ahead and double click on your Dynamics now when we're looking at our Dynamics panel the compressor right here is the section that we're going to be taking a look at right now so I want to go ahead and turn on the compressor now a compressor when we turn it on here what it's going to do is take those loud parts of our audio and compress it down a little bit right it's just gonna make it so it doesn't get as loud as it otherwise would if we didn't have a compressor on there it's going to squash it down just a little bit in basic terms so we can adjust our compressor by changing our threshold right here if you want to reset it you can just double click any of the knobs here and then the other one you want to take a look at is ratio right so for dialogue usually between two or three is going to be go good maybe around 2.5 kind of like this 2.5 to 1. it's a good place to be for your dialogue so I'm going to play through our clip we're going to reduce the loud Parts just a little bit and then we're going to work with the Quiet parts and make those quiet Parts a little bit louder so let's go ahead and play through the clip and all I'm going to do is adjust this threshold right here so that it is compressing some of my audio now we'll know that it's getting compressed by looking at this middle slider right here it's going to light up and tell us how much compression is being applied so let's go ahead and play through this and we're going to adjust our threshold so I'm going to double click just to reset it to start from scratch and here we go sometimes in our videos we talk loud like this we set our levels based on us talking loud or our subject talking loud but then there's times where people maybe they're a little farther away maybe they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got it okay so we're compressing down to about -6 DB which is a good spot to be for your dialogue and as we got to the quieter part here we saw that the compressor wasn't doing anything because that compressor doesn't need to because the audio is too quiet right so now let's talk about how do we make our quiet Parts a little bit louder so we're going to use the makeup slider here in our Dynamics panel to do that which is this guy right here so I'm going to play through the quiet parts of our audio here and I'm going to boost this up and I want to watch my output meters and I want to see where does that quiet audio start so for example if I play a little clip of it here decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you you can see it's a little over 30 minus 30 DB so maybe it's about minus 27 DB somewhere around there well I want to make that a little bit louder I probably want that to be somewhere between maybe -15 and minus 20 somewhere around there and then that should be a good level for us for our final audio clip here so let's go ahead and make the adjustment as we play through the quiet part of our audio here and all I'm going to do is take this makeup boost it up and I'm going to watch my meter my output meter over here to make sure we're getting the levels that we want they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you something about the game that's going on here that I don't want everybody else to know about well all right so let's try maybe right about there right now when the audio gets loud again I don't want it to get screaming loud too loud right so we might have to adjust our compressor a little bit just so that it doesn't get too loud so I'm going to watch from the beginning I'm gonna watch my meters so as the video is playing I'm gonna watch the meters over here I want to make sure the loud Parts aren't much more than -10 DB a little bit over is okay but we want to kind of keep it around that minus 10 and then our quiet Parts should be where we just set it somewhere around that minus 20 to minus 15 somewhere in that range so let's play through our clip watch our output meter here and we can make adjustments to our makeup if we need to for The Quiet parts or our threshold right here if we need to compress our louder Parts a little bit let's see what we got so sometimes in our videos we talk loud like this we set our levels based on us talking loud or our subject talking loud but then there's times where people maybe they're a little farther away maybe they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you something about the game that's going on here that I don't want everybody else to know about well for your viewer they may need to adjust the volume on your video and you okay so I think that's pretty good watching The Meters while we're playing it back it sounds okay in my ears and as far as where do our levels fall on the meter it's looking pretty good right so let's just do a quick little before and after so here is Dynamics off I turned them off and here's what the original clip sounded like times where people maybe they're a little farther away maybe they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you all right so you can hear the difference there now if I turn on our Dynamics but then there's times where people maybe they're a little farther away maybe they just decide to talk a little bit quieter because I got to tell you something about okay so can you hear the audio there it's a little more consistent there's not such a wide variation between the loud parts and the quiet part right now when you're recording you want to capture all that right because we can work with it in post here and make it sound the way that we want you know work with our Dynamics a little we do want to capture that dynamic range when we're recording just so we have the options of doing different things with it but you want to make sure that your levels are at least good enough for your quieter parts that you've got something good to work with so by improving the Dynamics of your video by using the compressor along with the makeup slider there in our Dynamics panel is just going to make a better viewing experience for your viewer now there are some times where you want a big difference between the quiet parts and the loud Parts but in general we want to make sure that that dynamic range is in a good spot so that our viewer doesn't have to ride the remote control and turn the volume up and turn the volume down when they're watching your videos because if you have audio problems with your videos there's a good chance people are going to jump off your video and not keep watching it because it's just hard to watch it's hard to hear so Dynamics super important try it out on your videos make sure your Dynamics are set up good here in daventry resolve when you're working on your projects guys with that said thank you so much for watching questions comments leave it down below you want to learn more audio stuff in DaVinci Resolve here subscribe to my channel hit that like button if you learned just a little something and I will see you in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 24,196

Keywords: davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve 18 fairlight, fairlight mixing, davinci resolve audio editing, Compression DaVinci Resolve, Compressor, Dynamic range Audio, how to make my audio sound better, davinci resolve fairlight tutorial, audio mixing davinci resolve, Dialogue Editing DaVinci Resolve, how to use audio compression, audio compression, fairlight audio for beginners

Id: CE1oFjljh8Y

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023