DaVinci Resolve 15 - Fairlight Audio Production Part 2

hi I'm Mary and this is part 2 of our introduction to fair light tutorial in this section we're going to work on some of the more specific mixing techniques to finish up our scene such as we're going to do EQ balancing on our track some dynamics and some other elements to get to our final mix so let's get started if you're following along you'll want to open up the timeline 7 balance clip levels which is right here you can just go to the timeline popup menu to find that timeline so here we have our checkerboard dialog edit and what we want to do is now get to balancing the levels for each individual audio clip so we have 3 different character tracks we have a melee honest track here we have Philips track and then we have a does voiceover track and we're gonna start with a melee honest and I'm just going to go to these two Clips right here to look at the levels and we're adjusting volume levels we might as well as oome in here so let's just zoom in on that particular clip so we can really see those I'm also going to bring up our mixer and we're going to talk a little bit about what we want to focus on with our levels so I'm on a mealy honest track and you notice that's track 1 if you're ever not sure of your track just select the track and that way you can see that it highlights in both locations in the mixer and also in the track itself now what you're focusing on is I've mentioned this before I'm going to solo this track and you can solo it from either the track header or from the mixer and if I solo that track and play it you can see the levels right here in the mixer now these same exact levels will also show up in the track header as well as the monitoring panel up above what I want to focus on is what the levels actually are and let me zoom in on this a little bit when you're dealing with dialog you want to make sure your dialog levels they'll be in the yellow on that particular clip I'm going to play that again and this yellow area right here is really where you want to focus your dialogue and that's going to be averaging around -12 - -10 so that your average is going to be the thick part of the meter let's do that again one more time and you'll see when your solid color that's going to be your average and there's also Peaks so if you look for any of those horizontal lines that stay in the mixer whenever you see a horizontal line that's going to show you your last peak and then when you see the solid lines inside of the meters those are going to be your averages and so you can focus on those and we're really looking at this area right here in the time line in your meter between minus 10 and minus 15 and when it comes to dialog occasionally you'll want to go below that if it's an inaudible a whisper that you just barely want to hear but you want to know what they're saying you would play that as low as minus 20 never below that because then you just won't be able to hear it and then if it's a scream that if you have a blood-curdling scream that's going to take over the entire scene you want that scream to really be audible then you would want to make play that and as high as minus 3 but that's also the same level as explosions and other major effects so you want to only use those sparingly when you need to so let's focus on this little area right here I'm going to play that shot one more time okay so that's where I want it to go and you notice the peak was way up there and minus 5 so I can clearly see right there in my meter what's going on with this particular clip I'm gonna jump out of here and now we're going to adjust it on the clip itself all we have to do is just lower that level and I can just manually raise or lower it her levels are fairly consistent I can look at the waveform and see that let me make it a little bit bigger so you can really see her track just zoom in and now we can really focus on her clip as I play that through okay I've lowered it and now it looks like my average level is better if I want to look at the inspector I can actually select a clip and I can see that I've lowered it too it's at minus or it's actually at 13 so if I play this through if you double click a clip it'll reset it to the starting point or this is what I originally had to work with and I had as high as minus 13 was where it just was which I think is a pretty good level okay so you're watching your meters so once I've done it with one clip you zoom out a little bit let's move on to her next clip and I'm gonna assume it's gonna be very similar to the first clip so you can use the visuals as a guide sometimes to get things close so let's try that let's look at the waveform here and by just lowering these levels a little bit I can see they're about the same height as the one on the other side and I can play that let's just see what that level is let's look at our meter looks like I'm right there exactly where I want it to be again we're aiming for that yellow zone now that you know it you will always know look for the yellow when you're dealing with dialog and I can see that those levels are fairly consistent so these clips were easy now let's look at something that's a little more challenging and we're gonna go into one of Philips clips where his levels are fluctuating more it's part of it is for his performance and part of it is just the words that he's using and we're gonna have to adjust them within the clip itself let's go down the Philips track I'm gonna shift Z for a second I'm going to come down here to the part where he talks about the explosion so let's navigate down to about one minute and nine seconds in the timeline and then I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so I can really see that clip again always adjust the interface as needed so that you can really focus on the parts that you need and notice that you have a lot of flexibility to do that so I'm gonna just zoom in a little more and something I will point this out that I got these this scene came from editorial and it clearly someone had made some adjustments to the levels but when I'm about to work on them I like to start from scratch and find out what I'm really have to work with and I'll add my own points and levels if I need to so if you ever want to reset the levels of a clip just select the clip and over in your inspector you can just reset that and you can right here reset the clip back to its original levels and that way you can make all the changes you need yourself you can even select all the clips an entire track and reset them all at once and start from scratch so I'm gonna hide my inspector and so now we're going to focus on this particular clip and the levels in that clip so I'm going to move that up a little bit and so I can just look at this waveform for a minute and I can see that this section is significantly lower than this part and I need to make sure all of them work so one of the first things I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add a couple of key frames in between those two phrases so I'm going to just option click right there on the overlay so I have can freely adjust those to different areas I'm going to go ahead and raise this up a little bit I can just tell it's a little bit low and then I'm going to play this and see it in context and one of the things let me solo this track I had a mealy honest track of me come up here for a second I had a mealy honest track so load I got to make sure you unsolo your trucks as you go or else you may not hear any audio so now that I've got Phillip Phillips track ready let's play it okay and I can see again look at your meters I could see that the peaks were in the red a little bit too hot so I'm going to go back in there look at that again there's a shortcut that's very useful when you are repeating a certain section you want to play it more than once and that shortcuts going to be all you do is move it here and if you want to listen again it's under the playback menu and you just go to this section right here where it says play again and what that will do is when you do a play it'll play back whatever the last thing is you did so we can use that numerous times in order to play it over and over again if you want to the shortcut is option and l4 listen or listen again it's how I remember it so let's go ahead and play that section check the volume I'm going to bring it down just a hair always looking at my meters for Philips track now and let's play that again okay and it looks like I've got it right where it needs to be now let me talk about those levels for just a minute I said anywhere between minus 10 and minus 15 is okay for your dialogue but you always have to put it in context with the character and what they're actually doing if you have three people in a room someone who's larger who's got a big booming voice you would play them closer to minus ten and if you have someone with a softer voice then you would play them a little bit lower closer to minus fifteen the average for most of the people that you're dealing with is going to be right around minus twelve and that's what you're going to do so once we have that let's go ahead and I've got this part it's working pretty well for me let's look at the next half of this clip in this case to make it easier I'm going to turn on my loop playback right here and I'm just going to mark an endpoint and mark it out I four in over out just like you would do on the edit page so just mark your clips whenever you need to or in this case mark the timeline for loop playback and that will make it easier to do so now that I have this set I'm going to just look at my meters and play this section to do loop playback it's option in the forward slash okay I've got some issues with this section so we're gonna zoom in a little bit let's make it even bigger to work with and there's a lot going on in this clip as you notice you're gonna see there's louder sections there's quieter sections and so we're gonna have to deal with this a little bit at a time and if you're thinking to yourself wow there's an awful lot of work on one clip just think about it visual effects artists spend a lot of time on one frame if you're a colorist you spend time on every single clip the same thing happens in dialogue editing or balancing your dialogue every clip matters for your entire scene or your entire show so let's get in here and really look at this clip I'm gonna select this and make it even a little bit bigger so I can focus on that even more by selecting the track I can make that track a little bit higher and now we're going to focus on what's happening here this beginning section I'm going to add a couple of more key frames just by option clicking and I can raise this section up a little bit more and let's see how that's working ok the boom is OK it can be a little bit quieter I'm ok with the boom but then we have something happens here do you see this giant section on the waveform it's here and there's another one further down and it there's a name for that those are called plosives and what applo civ is it's where your microphone gets a really big power hit from trying to pronounce consonants or words like that starts with P's and bees and it really takes a hit because it takes a lot more power to produce those sounds and so what happens is it gives you a spike as you can see right here and in fact he's saying the word explosion right there when he says explosion I'll start it back earlier surrounded the whole ship and it's got that pee on it again so when you have plosives what they can do is they're going to throw the levels off for everything else when you're trying to balance your track levels those plosives are always going to make things too loud so you're going to end up lowering the other parts of the dialogue too much because you're trying to accommodate those plosives so it's always better to just lower them individually so all you need to do is set a set put a set of key frames on there just option click and you can lower them you don't have to do it too dramatically you want it to sound natural but you see how I can adjust that and bring those down so they're closer to the normal dialogue levels that you already have let's also do the one here at the end for ship just option click twice and I'm going to bring this down as well I don't have to overdo it let's just bring it down and tame it and then I'm also going to bring down this the end of the shot we don't need too much there so you can always go in and make adjustments within your clip as needed so let's come back here and listen there we go so we just balanced out his shot now you're probably thinking wow that would take a long time it does it takes a little bit of time to get this through but it's just like color correction only we're doing audio correction and since dialogue is the most important thing in your project it's a good idea to take the time to really do it the right way and if you go through and you balance all of your dialogue clips within all of your tracks I've never touched my meter and what that means is when it's time to start mixing the faders can just be used to make sure that the volume levels are good overall and balanced with the other tracks and I'm not going around chasing dialogue that's all over the place because it was never balanced in the first place so it's worth taking the time and now that you know how to do it feel free to try that and we're going to move on to another concept here with our balancing of dialogue tracks now I have those in and out points I'm going to clear those by hitting in option X I'm going to resize these tracks make them a little bit smaller and we're going to come down here and look at ADA's track now in this case this character ADA let's make that a little bit bigger it's always about zooming in as you need to and I'm making this a little bit bigger so we could focus on her levels now now this is a different scenario because the ADA care theoretically is a computer voice she's not going to breathe in that case and her volume levels should be much more consistent because it's not produced by human so in that case what we need to do is make sure their levels are much more even and so when I check these levels we can make them almost exactly the same so let's go ahead and make sure we have not so load any of our other tracks let's check we still have Philips track his so load so let's unsolo that and come over here now one nice trick is if you accidentally have something so load instead of chasing your tracks you can always look at your mixer and if you notice here in the mixer it's also going to show you when a track is so load so I can unsolo Philips track here and I can solo a toes right here in the mixer which is useful let's check out a this track now I'm going to just play this first let's do the first two clips I'll mark an endpoint and an outpoint so we can listen to them and let's just start playback okay so the levels aren't bad I'm going to check this one again okay those are hitting right in where I want them to go right there in that yellow zone and those seem to be consistent so I'm going to hit shift Z so I can see the rest of the clips and I'm going to show you another useful trick that we have I'm going to clear off my in and out points and remember when you want to zoom wherever your playhead is that's what you're going to zoom to so I'm going to move my playhead over this clip right here we have the set of five clips from Aida I'm going to move over one of those and then zoom in and notice that it's gonna put that right front and center where I need it to go and what I want to show you is some of these levels I can tell are lower or higher but we're going to use a different method here since these are very consistent is we're going to try normalization now if you're an audio editor you know normalization may be a little bit of a cheat but it's like having an auto white balance only instead you're using it for your volume levels let's try it on the third clip for ADA we'll just try it right here now by the way if I double click on her volume you'll notice that resets it so these are these the these are the levels that we started with if I right-click on the clip and choose normalize audio levels what that's going to give me is the window right here let me zoom in on that and this is where we can normalize and what it's going to do is it's gonna allow me to set where I want the peak to go not the average but the peak and so if I know where I want her volume level to go all we need to do is let's lower this as you know we want our volume levels to biebe again between minus 10 and minus 15 her other clips were closer to minus 10 so let's go ahead and set our Peaks to that level as well so I'll set my peak to minus 10 just drag on that fader to get it there and what will happen in theory is if the peak is at minus 10 then the average should fall just below that within the minus 12 range so let's try that I'm just going to click normalize jump out and now when I play that look at the meters yeah it looks like I nailed it right on the -12 exactly where we wanted it to go so now let's do the rest of our clips all at once I'm going to hit shift Z and we can select all the clips just drag across them there we go I've selected multiple clips now and when you select multiple Clips you can right click and you can actually normalize them all at once again I wouldn't recommend this for complicated dialogue scenes but in this case if you have very similar sounding voice or something that's more monotone you can make those adjustments let's try it I'm just going to right click and now choose normalize and this time if you look at the interface this now gives us a choice because it's multiple Clips we can do it relative to each other or independent let's choose independent and that way if you're doing it independent it's going to look at the levels for each one individually so let's do that again let's set it to minus 10 which is right where we want it to go and click normalize and that's it now we should have all of those Clips balanced for a test track let's try a randomly try this one right here I can't yep her levels are right where we need them so perfect so we now have in theory these clips are balanced now if you want to take up the challenge and go in and try to balance some more of these dialogue clips feel free if not we're going to move on to the next timeline where these are already finished and we can move on to the next thing so let's come up here to our different timelines and go down to D s and now we're going to focus on de-esser and if you're wondering what is a de-esser what that does is it helps remove the sibilance inside of our shots because as we do as we speak in dialogue and like right now i'm speaking into a microphone there's that with sley sound that can happen the sibilance that can be picked up by the microphone sometimes by proximity or just depends on the mic and what we want to do is we just want to dial that back because the louder the voice is the more wattage we have behind it the more you're going to hear those and they begin to get irritating to listen to and you definitely don't want to irritate people while they're trying to watch a dramatic scene so in order to adjust that let's go in and we're going to look at one of the clips on a distract I'm going to go down to just navigate yourself down to this clip right here that's around 40 422 and your time code it's the 4th in that series and I'm gonna play just this shot I'd also like to mark that clip I'm going to use my range selection tool to mark it within and out points so that I can easily loop the playback and let's listen to that clip I'll solo it okay I don't know if you hear that whistle es at the end in there but I definitely hear it and again when that's in the middle of a scene or beer in a theater listening to it that's really going to stand out so we want to adjust that now before I add my D s or plug in I'm gonna go ahead and show you on the EQ for that clip where that siblings is so you can start targeting it yourself and understanding a little bit more about where that siblings lives on the clip so let's go ahead to the inspector and select the clip and when you select the clip screw it over a little bit when I select a clip and I look over at the inspector here we have our clip EQ let's go and turn on the q now the equalizer we have for every single clip and you'll see it anytime you select a clip it's going to appear for that particular clip in this case I just want to work on that one right here on a tiss track and we're going to focus just in the sibilants area so I'm going to turn off all the different bands for this equalizer so we're only looking at band number three zoom in a little bit here for you now when you're looking at the equalizer right here is my band three as you can see I can sweep that band right here and we actually call this in when you're working with audio anytime you move back and forth and we call it sweeping because what I'm doing is I'm listening as I'm dragging the frequencies to try to find where something sounds either good or where it sounds really bad so let's go ahead and we're gonna start loop playback on that clip I cannot explain and like I said I'm gonna first make it sound really bad and then I'll make it sound a little bit better so let's go ahead and make sure that let me punch out for a second make sure that I'm doing my loop playback on that particular clip so option four slash and what you're gonna do is you're gonna sweep back and forth and listen to really where it sounds the worst okay because when that really stands out you'll know exactly where that is and on this clip as I listened to my frequency it's gonna be right around seven kilohertz you're really gonna hear a lot of whistling s's so you never keep that you're only doing this so you can really find where the issue is and then target it so I can I'm gonna start to play back there I can't explain and that's that's where it's really the worst so now what I'm going to do is we're gonna go the other direction and move down and just see what it sounds like when we remove a little bit of that sound so again Janell so by taking it down just a little bit I've really removed that issue first I had to find it and then I can pull it down so I'm gonna turn off the EQ right now I was just using that as an example so you could see it and hear it for yourself and now we're gonna go and gonna get the de-esser where we have a plug-in that will do some of this work for us you understand what it's doing then you can go in there and change it so let's go ahead and hide our inspector we're going to go over to our effects library and we want to apply our de-esser which is this effect right here near the top now the thing about the de-esser is if somebody has siblings chances are it's not on one clip it's on all of their clips so one of the reasons that you break up dialogue and do a checkerboard edit and move all the dialogue to its own track so you can treat each person's voice accordingly and so in this case instead of putting the DSR on the clip let's put it on the entire track for ADA and that's going to do nothing but improve all of ADA's clips so we have added the de-esser to a dis track I'm going to hide the effects library now and I'm just going to move this plug-in out of the way a little bit so I can still see the plug-in interface and I can see the clip and I can even see my mixer so adjust as I need to and what you're going to see is the sibilance sibilance is going to be between 4 and 8 k generally that's where it lives and so the idea is first you figure out where it is which we did when we were using the EQ and then we just reduce it now this particular plug-in is a also a compressor so not only is this going to be reducing our sibilants but it's also going to be compressing the sound around it so you have to be a little careful if you take out too much you're going to give your character a lisp so let's go ahead and start to play back and we'll listen so this is without having so that's what out I can't see if I pull out too much you can start to hear a little bit of lisp in the voice which you definitely don't want to do but sometimes finding that gives you the exact place where you need to lower your sibilants and so once i have that and it's right around 7k just like I had before I'm gonna now bring this up just a little bit another thing to think about whenever you're working with these plugins or especially when you're affecting somebody's voice is you try to do it in small increments maybe 3 decibel increments something small you don't want to overdo it because it's cumulative and eventually it's going to start becoming too much it'll be more noticeable so in this case we just brought it down a little bit notice on the left it shows you how many decibels you're adjusting and this shows you the frequency that you're working with so this ought to take take off the edge and now we can close up this plugin and we have actually adjusted the esses on her entire track which is great let's go ahead and unsolo that track and we can now move on to the next element that we're going to work with let's come over and go ahead to timeline number nine if you go to nine the de-essing has already been done and you can see what we're going to focus on is the dynamics okay and in fact this is timelines called dynamics for a very specific reason if you happen to look at this timeline you'll see that there's a lot of keyframes on Philips timeline on his different track and his different clips and that's because it took a lot of keyframes to really get those levels good so once we have those we're now going to take it to the next step so what is dynamics dynamic range if you're working with video or color correction you're dealing with your black and whites and the difference in between when you're talking about dynamic range for audio you're talking about the difference between no sound and the loudest Peaks so it's it's basically changing the range of your signal in this case the dialogue is between minus 10 and minus 15 that's a 5 decibel range and that's it and you're really trying to keep your dialogue within that range and if you can do that then it's all going to have a similar loudness and it's all going to stand out above all of those other tracks if you have dialogue levels that are all over the place then they're going to get buried in some of the other sound effects or the music and you're not going to hear the most well so this helps give it that professional edge so in order to adjust that we have on every single track let's go to our arrow tool we're going to focus on Philips track for this and we have dynamics controls right here inside of the mixer and in the mixer you have controls for every single track including EQ to adjust the entire track instead of the clip and here we have dynamics it's this section right here I want to do it for Philips track so I just have to look down here and find Philips track there it is open up the dynamics window for that and this is where you can control the dynamics and this is where we can take the loudest peak and we can reduce them and bring them closer to the shortest peaks just within his track and so let's look at what's in here in our dynamics window we have an expander and what the expander does is if you have a just like if you had a flat image and you wanted to kind of expand the blacks and whites in that image in this case if you use the expander you're taking your sound if it's very narrow in its dynamic range and expanding that a little bit is what you're doing the gate on the other hand that's to the gate is going to put a floor it's going to basically say I'm not gonna hear any sound that's below a certain threshold so that's good for removing low-level noise for example that's what your gate is on the far right we have a limiter and that limiter notice it looks like a hard ceiling that's exactly what it is your limiter is a hard ceiling it says no sound is going to go above this threshold so if your delivery requirements say it cannot get above a certain amount you can set that right here with your limiter and then the final is our compressor and the compressor is the most commonly used dynamics it's again it's on every single track and what that's doing is it's taking a threshold particular sound level and it's taking anything that goes above that and bringing them closer together so reducing the louder parts and bringing them closer which will reduce your dynamic range and that's the goal here keep it nice and tight so let's look at the dynamics for Philips track and I'm just going to show you on this particular section right here I'm gonna zoom in let's look at the clip that starts at 1 1412 right here ok so he's saying it also sustained some Hall damage I'm just gonna give you an idea of how this works now obviously we've already keyframe this and brought these pretty close together already but in doing using the compressor we're looking at the entire track not just this particular clip now with the compressor on this threshold is going to say zoom in on that a little bit if you look at the threshold this is where the lowest level is that we're working like that's our threshold now if his volume level for something quieter is closer to minus 20 on something we could actually set this to 20 the ratio is saying anything that goes above my threshold I'm only going to hear if it's 2 to 1 for every 2 decibels over my threshold we're only going to hear one of those if it's a 5 to 1 ratio then for every 5 decibels that are over or louder than my threshold we're only going to hear one or only one of those and so what that does is it really helps reduce the levels and bring them closer so in this case let's see where his levels are I'm going to mark his clip with my range selection tool right here I guess out of that zoomed playback and I'm just going to start this and look he also sustained okay so right here you can see this is our input level and the input level is what we're starting with before we go into compression and I can see that some of his words are actually falling way down here below where I really want them to go so I'm going to change my threshold that's a 2 minus 20 to catch some of those words that are a little bit lower or those syllables that are even lower and then we're going to have a ratio let's say 3 to 1 and just to kind of narrow that range a bit so what let's start to playback okay and then what we want to look at is over here our output meter because that's going to show us the change that we applied and if we've reduced our levels too much we can bring them back up with what's called the make up and that's basically going to make up the sound that we've reduced to if we've reduced it too much we then need to make it up and we can do that right here so let's look at our meters let's look at that clip ok so now his levels seemed a little bit too low so we could just make those up right here let's do it again he also stood so there you go and so we've just adjusted his levels a little bit and so again by just adding a bit of compression on your tracks that's going to help make up for anything you may not have caught when you were adding your keyframes and balancing out those tracks so that is your compression you notice once you've added compression to a track you can see a graph for right here on your dynamics now one thing we could do is because ADA is a computer if you ever listen to a voice that's recorded on a computer or a phone or something like that you'll know that they have a lot of compression they really squash that sound and so we can do that - ADA's track if we wanted to let's just bring up her dynamics and let's put a really heavy compression on that one we'll lower the threshold lower the threshold - maybe - 25 is fine somewhere look and they'll catch the lowest end of anything she happens to say and then let's really crank up that compression this is not going to sound great by the way but it'll work for a computer and we're gonna bring her up to maybe a twelve to one so it's really gonna squash that sound and let's see how that works on ADA's track - electro track and let's move over so we're actually at some of her clips and let's just see them are you sure yes I'm bringing up the makeup game you don't identify the person I'm speaking with Phillip made uh identify the person on the side left Philip Maeda and so you notice how her voice really now sounds compress it really sounds like it's lost some of its human nature which is exactly what we wanted to do then we can adjust that makeup gain and the nice thing is this has just been applied to the entire track so now we have added some excessive compression to her track let's do one other thing let's go in there and let's monkey a little bit with her EQ as well so let's move up to the equaliser for the Aida track and when you bring that up you'll notice we also have a seven band EQ on every single track that's already there and this is great for improving sound but it's also good in this case for degrading it or making it sound a little bit different so in this case notice I have my EQ 4 it tells you right here which track it is and I want to set an end point right here at the beginning of a dissection and an out point just so I can get these as two clips are fine so if I Mark those that way we can just play that one section really here what we're doing to the sound instead of waiting and then when I start playback I'll just listen to that emiliana Newton are you sure yes okay so now that we have that set what I'm going to show you is if I turn on my band one this is my high-pass filter which means only the higher frequencies are going to pass through there and this is great for eliminating any extra sound low-end stuff that no one's going to actually need in their voice to improve their voice it's just the low Rumble and the ball in the room or something like that you can get rid of that right here with band one what we really want to focus on is band six because this is where we're really going to eliminate the high frequencies because this is a low a low-pass filter which means only the lower frequencies are going to get through so you can see this shaded area are the things that we're getting rid of and so what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're gonna Lymon eight this I'm going to show you as during playback how much I can diminish your voice so much so that if you've ever listened to been in a hotel room or you've been in a room where you can hear sound from the other side of the wall that's because high frequencies don't make it through the wall what you're only hearing is the low end of the basin so if we eliminate it too much it's like creating a barrier in this case we just want to eliminate enough so it doesn't sound natural and it kind of feels like it's coming out of a speaker so let's try that we're gonna start playback okay and I'm just on a new tune and I'm just gonna take out all that high-end yeah okay not too much Julianna Newton are you sure yeah okay so we've just eliminated enough that sounds pretty good I'm going to tighten it up on both sides and just for fun I'm going to raise a little bit of the band for right there in the middle just to kind of give it a little bit of punch in there for some of those mid-level frequencies for her so now she's gonna sound a little more like a computer let's close up the EQ and you notice the graph is showing right here so not only can EQ be used to improve different sounds but also can be used like I said to degrade them so now that we've done that let's look at one more thing we can do for our sound design because she still sounds emiliana Newton she still she's she's starting to sound more like a computer like she's coming out of a speaker but I'd like to take it one more step and use another one of our different plugins now if you've been following along and you'd like to get to this section just go into your timeline and open up the EQ and chorus if you want to in this case I'm just going to stay right where I am and finish this one off so let's go ahead and go to the effects library and we're going to go down here and look for the chorus right there our chorus plug-in now chorus plug-in is used a lot in music but it also will be useful for ADA's tracks so let's go ahead and drag the chorus onto the entire track close up your effects library if you're wondering what does chorus mean it means exactly what it sounds like it takes one voice or one sound and it's going to duplicate it and add a little bit of delay and a little bit of modulation just like what would happen in a real world if you had a lot of people singing at the same time no matter how much rehearsal there's always going to be a slight delay between the voices slight pitch discrepancies between the different voices and this emulates that and you can also use it to extremes to really make it sound like a robot voice or something else so in this case let's just take this and we're going to go to one of the presets and then the top left of any our plugins you can find your presets part right here and we're going to choose the dramatic plug-in preset right there so now we've added the dramatic plug-in preset for our chorus and if I start playback let's listen to that section so let's just listen to our voice emiliana new tune ok you notice how she really does sound much more computer not too much but just enough now one thing I want to point out two on this plug-in is on all of the plugins you have the ability to adjust your wet-dry signal and just you know wet if it's wet that means it's fully affected if it's dry that means there's no effect whatsoever applied to it and you can choose anything in between whenever you need to in this case we'll go with it almost full so that we would get a really interesting sound to it go and close it up and now we have our full scene with all of our characters and everything is balanced and we're now ready to move on to the next section so very cool I think our dialogue is done now we can get into sound design let's move on to the next timeline which is going to be 11 sound design okay if you open up this sound design timeline and hit shift C you'll see all the work that we've done so far has already been applied and now what we're going to do is we're going to create that sound effect we were talking about a few minutes ago remember if you were if you happen to be doing the first part of this section if you did the first part of the tutorial that you created a marker to make a heart monitor sound effect well it's time for us to actually create the heart monitor sound effect that's this marker right here we're gonna make a sound effect now to do this I don't need to use my mixer all I want to do is an effect at this moment I don't even need my meters all I want to do is create a track for this so let's create a new track and in fact yeah let's make a new track and let's put it with the respirator sound effect so add tracks this one will be stereo and let's go ahead and put it underneath our let's put it let's see underneath the drone so that it's going to be right here that's just fine it could be our respiratory can sit right there above the respirator and let's go ahead and name it heart monitor so we know what it's going to be yeah so we have our heart monitor right here and then we're ready to start recording now you can do this one of two ways you can create your sound effects right in the timeline or if you're building sound effects from scratch it's sometimes nice to work with them in a separate timeline because this is an art form and sound design it can get messy and it's nice to be able to get in there and make a mess create something awesome and then bring it back into your main timeline so let's do that let's go over to the media page and let's just create our new timeline you can do it right here in your tutorial timelines if you want to just select the bin and just say anywhere in that empty bin in that space right click timelines and say create new timeline or just press command n to create your timeline let's call it heart monitor and you can even put your initials next to it if you want to create something special and there it is I have my new timeline for nothing but creating our sound effects the other thing I want to do is I'm going to make an extra track in here let's make one more stereo track because we're going to record two different things here the first one at the top we're going to make noise go ahead and name it as noise and the second one we will make our tone okay for our heart monitor now where do we get these sound effects if we're going to make them well we're going to use our built in oscillator so and that's going to live right here under the Fairlight menu so if you go to the Fairlight menu you can find right here is our oscillator it lives inside of the test tone settings so just click test tone settings and it's going to open up right here and this gives you access to your oscillator this is where we can make noise we can make different noises if we want to test our output levels and we can also record different sounds or tones that we can use for special effects or sound effects so in this case let's start with the first track and we're going to click this options menu and by doing that it brings up our patch input output automatically for our oscillators so go ahead and click on and now you can see here's my test tones over here on the left is the source and now we're going to choose noise for this first one we have noise and we also need to choose the track and we'd like to go ahead and patch this to the noise track you notice that we named the track noise to make it a little bit easier here if those are both selected which they are then we can come down here and patch and so now those are set and one thing I'm going to do just because this might be a little bit noisy is I'm going to hit my dim button just on my system so that it's not too loud and then we can arm the track and when we do that you're going to hear the noise that we have selected for our oscillator I'm actually going to mute this just for the video you can listen to it on yours if you'd like but we are ready to record that noise let's go back up and get our test tones settings again and let's listen to the two different types of noise that we can record I'm going to unmute this for a second we have white noise which is all frequencies full on that's why it sounds the way it does and then we have paint noise okay I'd like to record some pink noise you can actually mute the track and I could still record it even though the track is muted so I'm going to just record a little bit all I need to do is hit record and there is my pink noise okay now something interesting about this pink noise and I'm going to stop my recording just hit stop and now we have a nice set of pink noise like to bring up the meters for a moment because some of you may be familiar with this if you've ever calibrated a system or listened to your different system and you're wondering well what levels am i actually listening to let's go back and look at this I just recorded that pink noise and it's at the default of minus 15 decibels let's see where that sits I'm going to unmute the track what does that sit on my meters over here and this starts to get a little bit interesting you need that stop playback because we can actually use this noise and we can actually start looking at our loudness meters and see a correlation between some of these different levels as we get towards our mixing so for example let's change this instead of -15 let's change the level to minus 23 and if any of you work with finishing or mixing you know that those are the targets for our loudness meters so by lowering that I can now listen to it or rerecord it and you notice the levels are now dead on Center zero at minus 23 for my loudness meters well you know something else that's very interesting about those loudness meters let's also look here at our main out point and if you look at your main output you're gonna notice that it's right there at minus 15 so this is actually very valuable because it also means I can set up my levels let me mute that but it means you can set up your levels for dialogue I can use this test tone sound level by setting it to minus 3 which is my loud in this output level and it actually is going to match with minus 15 so if your dialogue levels are good you're already mixing for your loudness for your output so just pointing that out because it's very useful and some people use that noise for setting up their system another choice we have we've already recorded that noise is let's come down to the next track down here we need to also patch our tone and you can either patch noise or you can patch your tone one or the other at a time so now let's go in and patch the second track patch our input output and now instead of noise we're gonna deselect the noise and unpatch it and we're going to go to just the oscillator and if you click oscillator that's going to give you your different tones you can work with for creating a sound effect and we're going to now select the tone track and patch and as soon as we patch that now we're going to be listening to this tone let's arm the track you probably recognize that one kilohertz tone that's what we use to also calibrate systems and work with those and you notice that this oughta also is set up for there's my zero on I allow this meter as well so depending on what your work it used to working with that's our tone now in this case I'm gonna mute that track you don't really have to listen to it while I'm playing that back but now we're going to use this tone and record a little bit to make our heart monitor and literally we can now that you know how to patch and you know how to access that we can create our own sound effect in just a matter of a minute or two so first thing I want to do is record a little bit of that tone so I'll start recording I can mute it or not it's still going to record so I'm just going to lay off a little bit of that and then stop playback and once I've done that let me unmute at the track let's see if I have it okay so we have our sound effects so now we're ready to create our heart monitor so you don't need a lot just enough to work with and I'm gonna undo my sound and then make this track a little bit bigger and let's look at what we have there's my signal for my heart monitor I've recorded just a little bit and this is going to be really easy to do we have the sound right now all we have to do is create a piece that's about five seconds long and we're just going to copy and paste it into a pattern and then we're gonna bounce that into a single clip which is rendering it into a clip and bring it back into our other project just a matter of seconds so let's start at the beginning actually let's go to the end of this clip and once we're there I'm going to zoom in a little bit more so you can really see what I'm doing if I want to move one frame left or right I can just use my left or right arrows so let's move one frame to left and if you ever noticed a heart monitor it's not actually a frame it's gonna be a little bit longer beep so let's make it five frames to the left so okay let's make it about five frames wide select this clip and if you remember all we have to do to split this is come up here to the razor tool and click now I have that single piece of audio that I can use now to create my pattern next thing I'm going to do is select that clip and you can copy and paste these clips just like you would like I said a word processor so I'm going to just copy the clip and if I want to move instead of a single frame at a time if I want to move five frames at a time I'm gonna use shift and the right arrow and that moves five frames over and I'm gonna paste it I'm going to do that again and paste it and you see what I'm doing I'm just pasting this in here very simple and you can do it as often as you need to to create a nice pattern for our heart monitor now you can just continue doing that as all as long as you want to you can also copy and paste them if you want in a group but I'm just making some of these so we have the idea of a monitor okay so make it as long as you need to and then if I play this there's my heart monitor but we could take it to the next step I've just created this pattern but guess what we can also change the pitch as well so select any one of these clips and if you come up here to the inspector you can see that we have the ability to change the pitch on these individual clips or I could bounce them first to make them one single clip with the pattern and then change the pitch to that and I think that's what I like to do here so I'm going to hide my inspector and I've created this pattern let's mark the ins and outs on this mark an endpoint I for in let's mark an out point now I'm going to make my out point at the beginning of the last clip instead of the end so that way there'll be enough space I can duplicate this and loop it together if I want to and once I have that set let's listen okay there's my heart monitor now the next thing I want to do is actually want to bounce this and turn it into its own individual clip to do that select the track make sure you're in and outs are set and just come up here to the timeline menu and you're going to see two choices for bouncing and if you're not familiar with bouncing an audio bounce means render you're going to render it into a brand new clip so in this case we're going to bounce this to a new track layer I just click bounce and it's now created that track layer let's zoom out you can see here's my clip right here I just made this sound effect I can pull it out I now have a standalone sound effect clear my in and out points and I can use this and copy it and paste it into my other timeline if I'd like to so let me zoom out and there's my clip and again I can make this longer if I want to but I've created my first one I'd like to do one other version of this let's let's play it again let's play it from here and see I'm not sure why it's doing that but this is my bounce clip by the way I did bounce this let's go up to the View menu and just show you if you do audio track layers you can see that that was actually bounced to a separate layer right there so it's very cool so if we like the sound we can keep this one or we can create a brand new one or a different pattern right here all you have to do I'm going to hide my track layers is if I want to change my pattern I could just let's say I want to deselect some of these or let's say I want to disable them let's do that let's select every other clip and I'm going to hit D to disable them and that way my pattern is a little more a little longer so I either have the fast heartbeat pattern or I have the slower heartbeat pattern but it gives me a choice two totally different sound effects that take just a few seconds to make so I'm gonna come over here and mark my in I'll mark an out point and I'll bounce this one also and we can bounce it again go to the timeline bounce it and make sure your track is selected when you go to bounce to a new layer and that way that will actually work for you in doubt and a layer selected so now I have two different heart monitor sound effects that I can work with let's take both of those and we're gonna copy and paste them into our other timeline so to select a clip just drag across it to select and you can just do a command C to copy or right click to copy and let's go to our other timeline we were just working in we're gonna go to the sound design timeline that we had already created we can select the track and any time you're pasting into a new track just make sure that you select the track you want to paste into and it's going to look at your playhead position as well so wherever your playhead was before so anywhere I am in this track if I command the I can just paste it so that way we can bring things from one track to another and there you have your clips so I can bring a heart monitor in so we actually made our own heart monitor right here which is pretty cool now let's go ahead and jump ahead to the next timeline heart monitor pasted and in this example I did the exact same thing I just made a longer version of the heart monitor and here it is at the bottom it's the same one we just did I just happen to have it in a time line here and we also added a little I added some keyframes to match this respirator so they follow the same amount of volume levels so and you notice it's also sounds a little bit lower because the other thing that I can do is I went into the inspector and I actually adjusted the pitch to make it sound a little bit different so feel free to select your heart monitor and change that pitch to make it sound a little bit different for whatever it is you think works for that particular scene luckily since no one's actually probably been in space listened to a heart monitor you can pretty much set it to whatever you want to for this particular example so now we have this scene with our own little sound design we've fixed the dialogue we've added the tracks we have our sound effects we've even added our own original sound effect let's look at the last couple of things we need to do here to really finish off this scene let's go over to see the timeline 13 this has got our busses and this is basically a finished version of this timeline where all of the dialogue and everything has been balanced just like we did the sound effects are all in place and I've even added the score from the soundtrack and some of the sound effects from the finished soundtrack as well so we have moved further along and what we're going to do is to show you how to take this to the next level to get to your mix and that is we have all these individual tracks that we're using for our mix we had all of these different tracks that were required for our dialogue in fact they even added a third fourth track here called room which was a piece of room tone that we extended to make sure we filled in all those gaps with a dialogue now what I want to do is these have all been balanced and are ready to go I just want to now bounce them into their own stem and what a stem is is it's the final elements for your mix whether you have 25 tracks a dialogue or six or three in this case you want to bounce this all into one single track so that it makes it much easier for mixing obviously for your mixer they have the access to the other tracks but this makes it much easier to work with so in order to bounce your entire tracks we what we can do is we're going to separate these into groups and we're going to separate these into sub mixes and I'll show you how that works right now now sub mix let's go up to the Fairlight menu buss format and what the bus format does is allows you to create sub mix buses or different buses that you can use for like clips so for dialogue for example let's make a sub mix for our dialogue let's also make a sub mix for our sound effects just so you can see how that works and while we're here in addition to our sub mixes let's also create another main and this main we're going to make it for 5.1 surround sound why not we might need that and let's also do a main or a main output for just music and effects with no dialogue in case this is going to go to another language and it needs to be dubbed so we just created all these different things let's see if they're the right formats our main two I need to change the name of that to 5.1 for surround sound and obviously I need to actually make it 5.1 and I could do that right here in the format popup menu then let's look at main three this was going to be my music and effects so I'm going to go ahead and change this to M and E for music and effects and make sure that that is in stereo and I might change the color of this just to make it unique and then our sub mix is this first one is going to be dialog so it should be mono and I'll call it dial so I know what it is and change the color and then we also have our final sub mix which was for our effects or let's say for our background effects we could do that as well for background effects and those would be in stereo so it's very easy to set up your mains and your sub mixes and once you've set those up all you have to do is assign them so let's say ok and then we go up to the Fairlight menu again to the bus assign area and this is where you're going to be able to assign these are the tracks these are the mains and it's very easy to work with these so let's start with our dialog sub mix and our dialog sub mix is only going to play the dialog tracks right now you'll notice the available tracks all of these say m1 and what the m1 means they're going to the main one okay and instead of going to the main I only want them to go now to the sub mix so I will unassign those and to unassign them i can go to main one and then unassign each of those dialogue tracks if i'd like and i could instead make sure that those are going to my sub mix as you can see it always shows you the initials of whatever it is that you've assigned so my dialogue will now only go to the dialogue sub mix and let's look what else we have we have AP FX for production effects those can go to main one we have our drone sound we have our respirators I don't want the respirators going to my sub mix obviously I so I'm going to turn that off and so on so you can just go through and assign things where they belong let's go back to our mains I want to make sure that the main is playing my dialogue sub mix which it is and it's also playing my background effects and that's good now let's go to my 5.1 main and what do we want to go to that we want basically everything goes to the 5.1 so we'll assign all ok so in theory you could set it up that way and for my music and effects main out for that one I don't want to have any of these dialog clips so I'm going to select that and make sure that if I assign all which I just did I'm going to deselect the dialog to make sure everything's playing in there except the dialog so as you can see you just kind of have to think through which tracks need to go to which elements and once I have those set let's see our background effects is the last one that we need to and we want to make sure that our background effects go to that's going to be these effects and whichever ones go to background that's where we have them and once you're set you click Save and now something really interesting has happened let's look up here at the top and you'll notice that in this upper section our monitoring panel now shows our different mains we have our main one we have our five point one main and we also have our main three and our two sub mixes are both showing here as well our dialog and this is our background effects let's go to our mixer and if you pull up the mixer you're going to see that the mixer also shows that information right here you're going to see my different mains in the mixer as well there they are there's my mains main two main three so whatever adjustments you need to make on your mains or inside of your sub mixes you can do that right here so you also can see the patching which is kind of interesting if you're not sure how to patch your tracks you just go through here and let me just zoom in a little bit to show you you can also patch any track to any of the mains or sub mixes right here by just selecting or deselecting so at any time you can on-the-fly make adjustments to make sure everything's going to the right tracks to be monitored now let's back up I'm gonna hide my mixer over my meters and I'm gonna show you now how to bounce these dialogue tracks as I mentioned before so we've set up our buses and we've got these all set ready to go let's jump down in case you've just been following along and you want to get to the next section let's go to 14 which is for bouncing our stems in this case the sub mixes are all set everything's ready to go and what we want to do is bounce the dialog which is these right here into this dialogue track and to do this we're going to follow along with exactly what we had done before we're gonna mark ins and outs or what we can do is we can actually avoid all of that and just use our sub mix in order to bounce it so let's come over here and go to the timeline menu and look at bounce mix to track if you notice there's a difference between mount bounce selected track to a new layer which we've already done and bounce mix so when I go to bounce mix it gives you the choice of any of your mains or sub mixes and those can be bounced anywhere you want to to a new track or to attract that's already assigned and in this case I want my dialogue sub mix to go to one specific place and that's that track that I named dialogue okay if you only want to bounce a portion of a track you can just mark ends and out points in this case I just want to do that one sub mix to this one track so I'm going to click OK and I'm bouncing and what I should get is a single clip at the top and there it is that's going to be my dialogue and then inside of that it would have all of my dialogue clips ready to play and to work with and it should sound exactly like if I was playing the dialogue by itself so it's very useful to be able to bounce those and create your stems whether it's dialogue or music or effects I can then solo it and play it just like what we have here and this way we're eliminating all of the faders and tracks and using fewer and fewer as we get to our final mix so very useful so that's just bouncing right there in the track now let's fast-forward to the very last step for our mixing because now you know about your levels you know about how to add all the different elements to your tracks let's get to our finishing so in this case we're going to go to our last timeline finishing and here what you're gonna see is our finished stems this is where all of these different tracks have been finished our bouncing has been done and this is where all of the different elements for the timeline have been put together in one single timeline and what we have at the top is we have our stereo mix which if you play any of this I'm going to solo just the stereo mix haida okay so there's my stereo mix now we also have our separate stems here we have different the the naming conventions here are using abbreviations that are very common in mixing so we have VX for voice we have SFX for sound effects and then we have MX for music and so if I solo these and you notice you can just swipe when you want to solo multiple tracks if I solo these I can hear those all together and monitor the levels emiliana okay and then the last thing we have is so there's my stereo so I could check the loudness levels make sure everything's right on those individual stems and then the last one that I'm going to focus on is down here is we have our surrounds our surround stems or we have six mono stems that we need to now make sure they're pan to the right tracks and ready to go for their output so let's look at these five tracks and if I look at any one of these let's bring up our mixer and one thing we haven't looked at is our track panning and so I'm going to point that out right now each one of these separate tracks I'm just going to solo all of these each one of these is panned mono right now I can see that right here in the pan controls if I double click you can see that this track 5 is panned right there dead center that's going to the center channel which is generally just for dialogue and what we want to do is we want to make sure these are pan to the proper channels for 5.1 surround now I can manually do this and move the left channel to the left or we can use another feature and just link this group of mono tracks and when you link it together it will automatically pan it for us to the proper channels for our output so we're going to come up here to the Fairlight menu we're going to choose right here where it says link group and when you choose link group it's going to look for any mono tracks that you have together in your timeline and show those to you right here in this case I have six I can select the first one then select the last one and then it's going to show us at the bottom there's my five point one that I can choose that's what I've done and by choosing that a couple of things have happened let's look at this a little closer in the timeline as soon as I do that if you notice over here that on each track header it's going to show me here's my left right center that's my LFE for my low-frequency effects I've got my left surround and so on so all my tracks have been labeled already for surround which is great let's also look at a couple other things that it's showing us you see up at the top in the monitoring panel you see a band across all those it shows they're linked you also see a white band right here along the tracks also in the timeline and finally let's go ahead and expand the mixer and you'll notice there's no longer six independent mono tracks instead we have one track with a single fader it's a you can tell if I play any of this you're gonna tell that this is a surround sound because I could see all those different channels moving and I can see that my pan or if I double click shows that each channel is going to the proper it's it's pin pan properly to the right channel so that's perfect that's exactly what I need the only thing that I haven't done is let's turn on our boom here and we're going to bring that up because our boom is going to be our sound for our that's going to be for the LFE so for our low-frequency effects and once you've brought that up you notice it's even showing right here in our pan controls as well so now that we have that all set let's do one other thing I'm going to come up here to my control room and if I look you notice I could go to my 5.1 main and if I listen to this now I'm going to be monitoring my 5.1 surround main and she could see you can see the meters are moving with all those different channels or I can monitor my main output that's my stereo and I can listen to that as well I just have to do is unsolo these tracks and instead solo the others so you have total control of your tracks as you go and explode and you can monitor whichever ones you want so when you get to mixing you now seen how you can bounce level is how you can work your way around and now we're all set the last thing you really need to do is just go to the deliver page and actually deliver your finished mix so in the deliver page you're going to have the same controls that you have as far as here's my timeline I can see all of my different tracks down here and I basically just need to choose which elements I want to output or render out in this case you can choose all different types of outputs and this I want to just do my audio for this example so I'll choose audio only in the upper left and let's look at just the audio only tab you can name your file name if you need to so if I want to name this hyper light mix 5.1 for example I could name it that or I could just name it hyper light mix or whatever name you need to give it you can do that here and we can browse to where it's going to go on the desktop or I can browse anywhere on my computer where I want this to go I'll send it to documents and then we can come down here and you have a couple choices you can output things as individual clips or as a single clip which means the entire rendered file which is exactly what I want to do here and then you come down further and we can choose the type of format we want the bit-depth and this is where it gets really interesting is you can also choose let me zoom in what you're going to output remember I had multiple different mains I have multiple sub mixes and I can choose which one of those I want to include if I only want my output my stereo I will leave it set just like this what if I want to add something else then I'll just add that as well and so now I also have my 5.1 output and I can click this again I can also add one of my mono tracks if I want to and so I can always do that as many times as I need to now I'm going to go back to the Fairlight page for one minute because if you remember I linked to those tracks together right here in the Fairlight page but what if my delivery means I don't doesn't want a linked track it actually wants individual mono channels that's no problem you just come over here to the Fairlight menu and go back to your link group and I can select this and unlink it just fine and as soon as I've done that you notice all the tracks are back to just mono tracks and if I come over here to the timeline to the mixer you're going to see that all of those panel panning is still there so every single channel is still paying exactly where it needed to be so whether it's linked or unlinked I'm still set up for my output and now when I go back to the deliver page it will give me an option for outputting my timeline tracks I can choose mono timeline tracks just say plus and it's going to give me the option of depending on what type of track that I want I can actually choose the individual tracks to select which is very nice so you always have a choice to output whatever you need like I said and you can even choose the tracks right here and whatever those are going to be I choose the track number and see it's going to tell me these are my mono tracks and I can output each one of those as a separate mono track and it's automatically going to do those in order as well so once you have the configuration of what you want to output you can just say I had to render queue set it up you can choose to output as many different mixes as you want to and then when you're ready you just hit start render so hopefully this gave you a nice overview of how you can do some of the finishing with your Fairlight page and some of your own projects if you enjoyed working with this and you'd like to actually get even further into it I've feel free to check out the training page right here on you can access it through the help menu or you can go to Blackmagic Design and you can go to our training page there as well and you can even check out the book fair light introduction to fair light audio post where you can go through full step-by-step lessons from start to finish with audio post-production so hopefully enjoy the tutorial and get in there and try it out for yourself thank you

Channel: Blackmagic Design

Views: 71,689

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Id: fQ3pPhk7azI

Length: 69min 57sec (4197 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018