Getting Started with Dolby Atmos Music in DaVinci Resolve Fairlight

hello everybody my name is michael wagner i teach at the westfall college of media arts and design at drexel university in philadelphia and on this channel i talk about digital media game design and spatial audio now the video today is a follow-up on a video that i did previously on how to get started with dolby atmos music in nuendo and some of you have pointed out that you can also do dolby atmos music with fairlight which is the audio part of davinci resolve and some have asked if we could have a look into that and that's what i want to do today now before i get started a couple of things i i need to point out first of all i'm not an expert in davinci resolve at davinci resolve is an incredibly powerful piece of software that has many different aspects and many different features i do use it for my for editing my videos but uh you know kind of i tried to keep the editing of my videos as simple as possible for reasons that i might explain in a different re in a different video so i'm not really familiar with all the ins and outs of that piece of software so if you're a professional and davinci resolver out there and you see that and you find certain things funny the way i do that please let me know i'm always eager to learn the second thing i need to point out is that in the videos that i did before i i said that davinci resolve is free and that's the way we usually look at it and uh that you can use dolby atmos in a free piece of software this unfortunately this unfortunately is not completely correct um the dolby atmos part of davinci resolve is part of the paid version of davinci resolve so you cannot really do the things that we're going to do today with the free version you need the paid version however the paid version is something that comes with the uh davinci resolve speed editor the blackmagic speed editor which is an incredibly nice controller so if you have anything uh if you have any work that that you that you need to do in terms of video editing i highly recommend getting that controller it i used a lot of different controllers in the past and this was actually really the first one that i found comfortable to use and that i use almost daily uh and if you buy that controller which is 299 us then you then should get the studio version of davinci resolve along with it or you could also say that you if you buy during resolve studio which is also 299 us you get the the speed editor for free so uh the the final part uh i need to i need to point out is that davinci resolves is is a video editing software and via light as part of this video editing software follows a video editing workflow so the workflow that you will use in fairlight is slightly different to the workflows that you normally have in a digital audio workstation and one thing in particular is that in davinci resolve we do not have media support so if you want to use fearless as your main door which some people i i know do then you have to find a solution how to work with midi and now if you search on the internet you will find that people are using vsd plugins to bring in media functionality into davinci resolve studio but my recommendation would be to have a secondary doorway do all your music production and once you have the basic mixing done you bring in the individual stems or tracks into into the winch resolve into the fair light pitch and then do the final there will be utmost painting and rendering with invalid and that's usually the better way to go so with that out of the way let's go get right into it now i've already started up an empty uh davinci resolve project i loaded up two audio clips uh one is going to serve as the dolby atmos bed and the other one is going to serve as an object that we're going to move around the dolby atmos pad is actually a track of mine that i just published a couple of days ago in a youtube shot it's about a minute long unfortunately i don't really don't have enough time to do longer tracks anymore uh but uh it's it's sort of a a little piece that i'm going to use i don't in i'm not assuming that this is of professional quality so so um i'm not a professional music producer i'm more of a technical person so uh but i think it works so so uh let's have a brief listen to how that how that sounds and actually let me turn on my headphones [Music] so that it that is the track in case you're wondering uh gerhard gerhart is my middle name and when i do things for fun i like to publish that under my pen name mike gerhardt so that people understand what is my fun stuff uh that doesn't have any um you know kind of assumption that is of professional quality and what do it what do i do for a professional at a professional level so so if you if you see something with my gearhead then you know kind of it's something i did for fun uh and the uh the uh drone or these audio effect that we're going to use as a bed comes from the sunnis game developer conference bundle that they put out for the 2020 game developers conference now if you're following my game audio videos then you're familiar with that that's that's essentially also the bundle that you use there for those that have not seen that video yet just just a brief background so this is a company that distributes uh sound effects and every year during the game developers conference they put a bundle where they make a selection of their sound effects available to everybody and you can download that for free and use that and that's what we're going to use here so if you want to use exactly the same stance just go to the link that i'm going to put into the description below and download that but once again it doesn't really make any difference we're just going to use two sounds here that's uh or two audios to audio sources here and that's all what we're going to do so um so what how do we go about that well first of all let's move right into the fairlight page with this once again is the audio production part of of davinci resolve and we're going to spend most of our time in this page you know kind of he could also do certain things in the edit page um not so much in the cut page quite frankly but most of the things that we that we are going to do and i think there are there's probably not a single reason why you actually have to leave the fairlight page so we're going to spend our time in here a couple of things that we need to prepare the first thing that we need to prepare is we need to go into the file into the project settings and in the project settings we need to enable dolby atmos it's it's not enabled by default so um in order to make the the menus and everything not as convoluted as it would be if you would enable all options that davinci resolve had so we need to manually enable that so let's go into the fairlight settings and under fearless settings if you have the studio version and that's once again that that is the main difference here you have a couple of different immersive audio options and what we want to do is we want to enable dolby atmos and this uh essentially makes sure that davinci resolve understands we are now doing something with dolby atmos and we're going to save that now if you have uh different uh monitoring setups that's for say for example you have a 5.1 or 7.1 system that you also use for monitoring and uh davinci resolve has something that is similar to the control room setup in no end actually it's also called control room uh so you could also set that up and in order to do that you would go into davinci resolve into the preferences and under video and audio on the speaker setup you could could go into manual and then essentially change different um settings you can kind of have multiple uh output settings multiple monitor settings uh and and do it that way if you have an external dolby atmos renderer you would also enable the external render here that's not what we're going to have now for us uh we're just going to go with the system settings so so that that is perfectly fine for us you know i'm only having my headphones that's all i have so i'm so so so so this will be perfectly fine for me so uh now with that out of the way um we need to start everything and since this is a video editing software the first thing we need to do is we need to um add a timeline so let's go into uh right right click on the um on on that window and say create new timeline and once we have created the new timeline uh and an empty auto track is going to pop up uh and that empty audio track is going to serve as the um where we're going to put in the track that's going to serve as the dolby atmos pad we also have a bus which is our main bus really everything that we route into the main bus is currently routed into the stereo out so if we if we take the uh the clip and dropped it in here and let me just open it up a little so that we can see the waveform then this is routed from audio one into the bus and the bus then routed into this theory out so everything's working fine by the way if you have the speed editor the speeder that also works on there on the fair light page so i can use the chalk wheel to kind of move around and that's actually fairly convenient now i'm not completely sure which parts of the speed editor work on the affiliate page um i haven't looked at that yet but at least the joke will that's a nice thing um so uh one more thing we want to have an object and for the object we're using the haunted drone here now that there are many ways how we can go about creating an additional other track we could simply say it's track right click and add track but what we're going to do is we're simply going to drop it in here and that's going to add a second audio track and the second audio track is holding the the drone now currently they're playing both together which sounds awful [Music] and let me just turn up the music a little uh now we're going to automate the um the audio part a little bit uh just to get some sense on how automation works later on but first let's uh set up the the the dolby atmos renderer and let's set up all the routing in the dolby atmos renderer now um the first thing we need to do is we the um the audio the first audio track is going to be the bed and the bed is supposed to be a 7.1.2 now we could keep it as the area track but let's turn that into a 7.1.2 and the way we're going to do that is by turning the bus that it is routed into into a 7.1.2 bus and that 7.1.2 bus plus one will then not be routed into stereo but will actually instead be routed into the dolby atmos render now in order to do that we are going to go to the fairlight menu and in the fairlet menu we are just going to spend a fair amount of time in the menu we can change the format of the individual buses so let's click on the bus format and in the bus format it's currently this is current list area so let's change that to 7.1.2 and once again these options are only available to you if you enable dolby atmos in the project settings so if you don't enable those you won't see that so let's let's click that here so that now has changed 10 channels and as soon as we did that we also noticed that the panning and by the way if your panning is not visible in your case please click on the three dots here and enable the panning i think it's not set but by default but the panna is now a in a full three-dimensional panna so if i'm clicking on the on the double clicking on the panna i'm essentially getting a three-dimensional view of the object so the the green spheres indicate the two speakers positions of this theory object you know this is a stereotrack position in three-dimensional space and i can certainly if i'm and let me just mute the the second one so that they get a better sense [Music] and we can certainly move the object around but let's just leave it the way it was and uh and uh essentially kind of kind of just just automate the let's just automate the object um so the second the second thing is we need to make sure that the routing is correct now the way we're going to do that is we're going to route the bus into the dolby atmos renderer as the bed currently the second uh channel or the second track the audio 2 is also routed into the same bus so if you would do that we would around both audio tracks into the ambisonics and sorry into the adobe utmost bad uh now we don't want to do that so the first thing we need to make sure is that the the routing the the connection between the tracks and the buses that we're using is correct in particular we want to disconnect the second audio track from that bus because once again that bus is that is supposed to be the atmosphere and the second audio track is supposed to become the one of the dolby atmos objects so the assignments uh the bus assignments are managed through the menu item bus assign and that is actually one of the things which is a little uh the user let's put it that way the user interface could could use some improvements uh then we have to think about that is a little bit like if you would patch hardware right so so uh the the available tracks are audio one and audio two and we see the destinations here and that is sort of the output of bus bus one and uh we want to keep uh the audio track one routed to bus one but we want to disconnect uh the audio two because that's going to be routed directly into the dolby atmos renderer as a adobe atmos object so what we need to do is we need to click on the bus one out and then we can deselect the audio 2 and now it is it is disconnected so currently only audio one is routed into the bus the bus is the only thing that's routed currently into the stereo out so if we if we leave it like that i'm going to and let me just make that unmuted again i'm still not going to hear audio 2 because audio 2 currently is not routed anywhere so it's going to show a signal here but essentially the signal isn't really going anywhere because it's not routed into the into the bus that is currently routed into the stereo out so now we have prepared everything uh so the final thing we need to do is we need to connect these two drags the the bed and the object to the dolby atmos renderer and the way to do that in fearlet is by going to the patch input output and that's really like a patchbay so we are really patching one thing to the other that's the way to think about it so we open that up and what we want to do is we want to first take the bus outs which are the 10 channels that come out of bus one and we want to route that into the dolby atmos renderer so as a destination we're going to select the dolby atmos send and that will open up all the individual channels that i have in the dolby atmos environment and if you remember those are 128 in total and the first 10 i used for the bed and from 11 on essentially they are used as objects so what we want to do is we want to patch these 10 channels to the 10 channels of the dolby atmos renderer and you know kind of we could select one here and here and then essentially patch or we can also simply select all of them at once and then patch them to the corresponding uh bad channels in the dolby atmos renderer so so now we have the the bed connected to the dolby atmos renderer and if i am playing the sound [Music] i'm essentially not hearing that through the building atmosphere so next thing we need to do is we need to patch the uh the audio q into an object uh and for that once again we're going to go back to the to the the patch input output and we want to do is we want to take the track direct and we want to patch that into the adobe atmos end and the two channels we want to each patch are the left and right channel of the second audio track so let's say the left channel goes to send 11 and the right channel goes to send 12 which are the first two objects in the dolby atmos renderer let's patch those and as soon as i patched those um i should hear both the uh the the bed as well as the object all right so you hear the drone in the background [Music] now we can now go back to the to the panning function so this is this is the panel that we used for the drone [Music] alright so let's let's make the mono source so now you can you essentially can use different objects you can route them into the dolby atmos renderer and automate panning now how do we go about automation let's just briefly look into into how automation works let me just reset that here and the way automation works and fail it is you first have to have to enable the automation but yeah essentially what you want to automate so let's click on the automation button here and that opens up the the automation options here and we want to automate the panning function and then let's go into the audio we want to automate the panna in the second audio track so in the panning function let's say we just want to automate left right and and just move the object from left to right and then let's let's uh enable the uh the automation in that lane and then finally let's uh change the tool so that we can actually draw some enemy automation let's say we want to maybe draw from oops so let's yeah i'm just doing something i don't know right and uh and then let's let's go to preview uh so that we actually hear what we're doing and let's see if i'm actually let me mute the [Music] so i'm not having the the automation in the of the of this object and obviously you can and i can automate all parameters here that's essentially how automation works let's unmute the object track again once again this is just an example so so uh probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it's sort of a drone that is moving around and that is really it uh the last thing we need to talk about is what do i do if i want to actually uh save that or put output that now that they're two different ways obviously if you would do that as part of a video production you would go into the um the deliver page and you would render it but because we are only doing dolby atmos music actually all we really want is the dolby atmos part of it uh and we can simply get that by going into fairlight under the into the immersive audio uh we can simply say export the master file and then that will then allow me to export that file i have different options dolby atmos has actually different types of formats but the common one is the adm bwf that's the one we used last time i can give it a name and and then simply export it and that would export the whole thing as a dolby atmos dolby atmos file and one final thing if you also go into fair light into into the immersive audio part there is a space view scope and that space view scope will give you a full view of all the objects that you have in uh in the dolby atmos file now if you remember in the dolby atmos renderer that came with nuendo which is essentially the the standard dolby atmos rendered we had this top down view where we could see the objects move around in in the way we patched the the individual tracks to the individual sense of the of the dolby atmos renderer in davinci resolve we didn't really see that there but we can open up the space view and that will allow us to see how these sounds move around in three-dimensional space and you can also see how they how they play and everything so you currently see for example that with left and right chain of error essentially um essentially zoomed together so it's one and that is really everything i wanted to say so as you see this is actually fairly convenient um so um i invite everybody to check out how that works uh once again you need the studio version of the vintage resolve in order to be able to do that but it i think it's a good investment honestly um so especially if you're doing any any video editing work and especially if you go with the speed editor and other than that if you have any questions if you if there's anything you want me to look into into more detail let me know in the comments i'm probably going to do a q and a very soon because there are a couple of things i want to answer that were in some of the previous comments that i found interesting but in any way um you know kind of leave your comments if you like the video please press the like button apparently that's important subscribe to this channel and other than that see you at the next video

Channel: Michael G Wagner

Views: 3,096

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Id: zv0TcLS06V0

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021