Guide to EVERY Audio Effect in DaVinci Resolve 17 Fairlight

hello everybody chris here and in this video i want to go through every single audio effect built into davinci resolve 17 with all of you and so what you can expect from this tutorial is that i will try to briefly explain what each of the effects do i'll show you the interface try to show you how it sounds and possibly explain a couple of the controls for what each can do before the sake of time i'll try to keep it short and simple so that we can get to the end of this video without it taking an hour now when it comes to audio effects inside of resolve you can find them over in the effects library on audio effects and then when you want to add one to a clip you can simply left click on it hold it and then drag it onto your audio clip where you want that effect to apply now one really important thing to know about audio effects is that if you go over to the fairlight page and resolve you'll notice in the mixer there's also the ability to add effects here so if you click on the plus for one of your audio track mixers so a1 is audio one a2 is audio two then you can see that all of the audio effects that you have available over on the effects library can also be added in here the advantage of adding it into the audio track rather than the audio clip is that it will automatically apply the audio effect to every single clip that is in that track so you only need to add it once you don't need to keep adding it again and again for each audio clip on the fairlight tab you can also see the effects library has audio effects here so fairly if you don't already know is specifically meant for audio editing so this is the page we're going to stick on for the remainder of this video so i'll just go top to bottom and we'll try to briefly explain what each one does now so first we have the chorus effect i'm going to left click on my audio clip and for each of these clips i've already set up of the effects once again i'm going down the top in order so the second one is going to be the esser and when you have your audio effects on your audio clips you can go over to the effects page on the inspector and you'll be able to see all of your settings for the effects that are applied to that so you can see i actually have two copies of the chorus effect i'm going to delete the one that's currently disabled so clicking on the trash bin gets rid of it if i want to open up the graphical interface for these effects then i can click on the settings icon on the top right so before we talk about the chorus effect let me go ahead and play this intentionally poorly recorded audio clip with no effects added on so i'm going to disable the chorus temporarily and let's go ahead and hit play let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so you can hear that there's a lot of background noise i pause at random intervals it's just pretty terrible but we'll see how we can affect that audio clip using some of the effects in the audio library today okay so let's go ahead and turn chorus back on the idea of the chorus effect is that you create duplicated copies of the original sound but it's not a simple echo effect because you can also throw on some modifications to the original sounds such as changing the pitch adjusting the frequency or using the modulation tools in order to warp the sound further there's also defaults that you can use for course so i think it would be a good idea if we just go to the top here and let's try choosing wide dialog i suppose so let's see how it sounds with these presets let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. i think the effect was a little bit light there so one setting that we could choose to change would be the dry wet if we shift this over towards wet you can see that the amplitude or the height of the modulation goes way up if we increase the dry wet so that's going to make the sounds a lot more obvious so let's go back to the start and hit play let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. we can try one more so let's go for the dramatic so this is going to be very intense i think so let's go back to the start and hit play let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so that preset emphasizes it pretty well it allows you to repeat the sounds in your audio clip but also allowing you to modify how the repeated sounds are going to appear so that if you have spoken audio and it sounds normal the first time the second time it's going to go through that modulation and it's going to change the output of the sound so the next audio effect the de-esser is meant to be there to remove sounds that are like hissing s's so if you were to go into your microphone and make a sound like and then you wanted to get rid of some of the strength of that then you would use the de-esser so i'll go ahead and play it with the dsr sound effect and then we'll choose to listen to s only so that we can hear what it's actually removing let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so one thing you can look at when you're using tools like the ds or in the d hummer is that if it's actually working if it's actually removing some of the volume at the specific frequency so this would be roughly the frequency of the s sounds and if it's actually removing anything then you'll see this reduction bar jump up another way to check of course is to use listen to s only so let's go ahead and do that you'll notice that this is inverting so that we can hear what's being removed as opposed to what sticks around after the effect applies so let's go ahead and listen let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so you can hear what's being removed and in this case since you can hear all the spoken audio and not specifically the s sound you probably want to make some adjustments so because you can hear all of the spoken audio pass through they listen to s only then that probably means you are picking up more than you actually want to remove so if you want to save some time in adjusting the options down here at the bottom to get it just right you can actually go into this top left menu and once again there's some presets so if you're trying to target s sounds then you choose male s there's also male and female sh which i would assume is for sounds as well so let's try it with uh male s and give it another shot let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. and now let's listen to the actual audio output let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so it's probably not a very good clip to use for this effect but i think i do notice that with listen to s only if i listen to this bit let's go that the s sound on let's gets picked up a little bit more than the rest of the audio so then kind of the general idea there so i believe it is working properly it's just that there's not a really harsh s sound being picked up by the audio but anyway if you're trying to remove s or sh sounds then the de-esser is for that so uh next we have the d hummer so for the d hummer effect i grabbed a clip of a electrical hum at 50 hertz so the d hummer effect specifically can target 50 hertz or 60 hertz frequencies and then try to remove background hums that you would get from electrical interference so let's go ahead and turn off the hummer and then you can just listen to the hum with no effects added on okay so it's a really low background hum it's a low frequency right if we turn on the d hummer and then we set the frequency to 50 hertz here let's go ahead and see how it sounds and then we'll listen to the hum only so most of that home just got removed let's listen to the hum only and we can see what it's actually picking up on so that bit right now that you just heard that was all being removed by the hummer effect so in addition to targeting 50 and 60 hertz you can also set the frequency to variable mode and then you can change the frequency if you need to target other frequencies so if i change the frequency here let's shift it to something way off then obviously all the audio comes back because we're hitting the wrong frequency but the point is there if for any reason you needed something that's not 50 or 60 hertz you do have the ability to change it uh so that's the hammer in a nutshell let's go to the next effect so this is going to be delay so let's open up the interface for delay so the delay effect allows you to replay audio after a certain delay or set period of time and with the delay effect that's indicated on a left channel and right channel basis so you can actually have it play back differently depending on if you're talking about your left speaker or your right speaker also for the delay effect when it replays that audio you can use a high cut and a low cut to cut away certain frequencies from the outer edges so the really low frequencies in the really high frequencies and if you cut that enough then the replayed audio is going to only have a portion of the audio information of the original audio clip let's go ahead and play it now with the delay let's go ahead okay so you can hear it's very echoey so with a really high low cut a lot of that background noise just gets cut away from the replay because those are low frequency sounds so let's go ahead and hit play and test out some but if i lower the low cut back down to 20 let's go ahead and hit play audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. let's go ahead then you can hear more of that background noise comes back so the high cut and low cut their filters they remove part of the audio from the playback delay so it's a lot like having an echo where you can control the left and right channels individually okay so next effect is the dialog processor so let's go ahead and open this up what you'll see in the dialog processor is actually six effects built into one so we have the d rumble and the de-esser we've already talked about those the d-rumble tries to remove low frequencies that shouldn't be in the audio recording the de-esser removes s sounds and this sounds so the d-pop filter is there to remove popping sounds so if i was to go up to the microphone and do something like i do have a pop filter maybe some of that still came through so the d-pop there is to remove those really strong popping noises that would make your audio sound bad also the reason why you have a physical pop filter to begin with the compressor will take the loudest sounds in your audio clip and level them off a little bit so that you won't have really loud overly spiky uh sound effects like for instance if someone was to yell into the microphone uh and that was way louder than the other audio the compressor would kind of try to bring that more in line with your other audio if it goes above the threshold so you see the threshold is set to negative 23 decibels right here so the expander is kind of the opposite of the compressor for the audio that is too quiet it'll try to bring it up more in line with the rest of your audio so sounds that are too quiet will be made a little bit louder so for the exciter effect i have to look this one up myself sageaudio.com says that an exciter adds saturation to the signal frequencies and the higher ranges 3k and up so i guess for the frequencies where spoken dialogue is at it tries to enhance and saturate those frequencies so that your spoken dialogue sounds crisper and you'll notice that in the dialogue processor there's both a female and a male option at the bottom here as well if you go to the top left female and male voice over so depending on if your dialogue is being spoken by a male or female you'll want to go in here and choose one of the presets so for male you'll see the excite amount is at 0.21 and then for female it's set to 0.11 so currently that's about my level of understanding for this particular effect uh but if you throw on the dialogue processor and you put it in male voice over and female voice over you'll notice how when you combine all these six effects it's going to obviously change how your dialogue sounds so what i do notice sometimes when i throw on the dialog processor to my speech is that some of these effects may actually pull away from your spoken audio so for instance uh the du rumble when i leave that on the defaults of 75 hertz and then i run that through the audio i record with my microphone down here for videos like these and then having the frequency set to 75 can actually take away from the overall quality of the output audio so in some cases you may want to disable some of these effects you may want to change the frequencies and adjust it until it actually sounds just right for your microphone so if you wanted to try to improve your audio a little bit i would throw it on to the clip see how it sounds with the defaults and then adjust some of the settings a little bit to try to tweak it so at the end of the timeline here i have audio recorded with this hyperx quadcast microphone much clearer than the intentionally bad clip i was using and what i want to demonstrate with this here is that in some cases you may not actually want to use every single one of these effects on your audio since a lot of these effects like d rumble or de-esser pull away from certain frequencies lowering the audio volume on them and then in those frequencies there might be a little bit of the audio you actually wanted to keep frequencies where you can actually hear yourself speaking so if you pull away from those frequencies it may actually make the audio sound a little less crisp at the end so if i play this and then i turn the dialog processor on hopefully you'll kind of see what i mean let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. okay so that's the normal recording and then with the dialog processor let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. and now when that was playing with the dialogue processor on you can see with the ds effect that certain sounds were lowering a bit here the d rumble also for the low frequencies like hums there's not really that i don't really pick up on any of that in the recording with the original so it may be unnecessary i'm not sure if it's harming anything right here with the ds or off it may actually sound a little bit better so i'll toggle that off let's go ahead and listen one more time let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17 okay and turning it back on let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. i would say it's a pretty tough call let's hit play and i'll keep toggling it on and off try to listen to it let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. okay so with de-esser on let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17 and then de-esser off let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. i would say it's a tough call it definitely doesn't require the de-esser in this case to sound good i would say uh maybe you had a bad recording and you just have a s sound that just sounds way overkill and then you do need the de-esser for that because it sounds terrible but with the dialogue processor i would say this is really the kind of tool where you just need to go in here uh try turning some on and off see if it makes it sound better or worse a lot of times especially lately i just don't even use the dialog processor when i was recording with this headset microphone i used it a lot more because the audio from the headset microphone was less quality i would say so i found that i got better results when i turned on the dialog processor but in any case it's a really handy tool for using voiceovers and i definitely would recommend giving it a shot and seeing how it affects your dialogue if you're doing any kind of voiceover recording hopefully you guys are still keeping up with me in all of this i i know this is going to be a long video one thing i will know is that i'm going to put time stamps in the description for this video and if you're watching on youtube then you can also navigate from time stamp to timestamp so if you want to look at a specific effect go ahead and look at the timestamps and see where that effect might be or if you're still in it for the long haul then just you know keep watching to the end but just thought i'd throw that in there okay so the next effect is distortion so how you best describe the distortion effect would be to take your audio and to simulate running it through really old audio technology like a old phone a loud speaker one of the ones that people talk into when they want to get attention of like 100 people in a crowd i don't know out at some festival or something or really old military communication systems uh stuff like that so the basic idea there is that with older technology the audio that you would put into the microphone doesn't come out the same as it was spoken it's not a perfect recording or a translation of that audio so it ends up sounding a little bit distorted so that's the idea of the distortion effect and uh you have a bunch of options here at the top to change how your audio is going to sound so if you want it to be distorted you can make it sound like a megaphone you can go to the drop down menu and choose megaphone so let's play how it sounds without audio distortion again let's go ahead okay so you probably know that sound at this point let's put it through the megaphone defaults let's go ahead and test out some audio effects instead of davinci resolve 17. it's pretty cool it makes it sound totally different it's not crisp clean audio anymore not that that original clip was very clean to begin with but you can see how it gets warped in this case a lot of the high frequencies get cut the low frequencies get cut as well so the sounds get condensed down to very specific frequencies so with the distortion effect you have two settings down here for distortion you have destroy on the right which is considered the stronger effect so i guess visually you can see how it has an immediate sharp drop off of the signal level but when you put it on the left mode uh distortion then there's actually a ramp between these two signal levels so let's put the megaphone into the distortion mode let's go ahead and then back in destroy mode so hopefully you can hear there how the destroy mode is just a stronger effect and then the uh distortion mode on the left still sounds a little bit more like the original so i suppose that's about my level of understanding there for the distortion effect uh let's move on to echo so the echo effect is pretty simple to understand you're repeating the original audio in a sense on a loop until it completely fades out so every time it plays it's going to be quieter and quieter until you can't hear anymore so let's go ahead and play this back with the echo effect let's go let's go ahead and test out audio hopefully you could hear there how each time it plays back the spoken audio that it gets quieter and quieter over time so with echo we also have some presets so let's try a large hall here and we'll go back to the start and hit play let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so with these settings on echo it actually ends up turning out to be a lot like reverb which we'll talk about later simulating being in a large room let's try one of the other presets so swirling close sure let's go ahead and test out some um audio effects inside of the vintage resolve i suppose one thing to note about the echo effect here is that you can customize the feedback delay for the left and right channels to be different so if you want it to play back at slightly different times on the left ear or the right ear if you're wearing a headset like this then you could do that with the feedback delay but yeah in general just repeating the audio over time and you also have the ability to filter out the repeated values if you want it to only replay specific frequencies so let's close that and move on so next we're looking at the flanger effect and when we actually hit play what you'll notice is that the frequencies are going to bounce around from left to right so it'll be alternating between high frequencies and low frequencies and the repeated process of doing that basically creating like a spring is going to give you a very specific kind of sound so let's go ahead and hit play let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve so you can see how with that spring effect on the frequency it causes the audio to kind of wobble and how it sounds and that gives you that flanger effect sound there's also some presets for this effect as well so we could use the flanger effect drop down to vocal voice and then if we play that through our audio let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci 017 then i suppose we end up with something like a robo voice effect so um the idea of the flanger is basically if you want the frequency to keep bouncing from low to high frequencies and rapid succession and then kind of giving your voice a little bit of echo then that is one tool you can use so next up the folly sampler so i've never really touched the folly sampler but according to the da vinci resolve documentation uh that would be like the davinci resolve 16 reference manual but what the idea of the folly sampler is is that while you're playing back your video you can put the folly sampler into record mode and then you have sound effects mapped to certain keys and i suppose those key mappings could be linked to an external device but while you're playing back your video and you want to add some sound effects to it you would listen to the right moments that you want to add in specific sound effects you would press the key and then it would add that sound effect to the recorded track so the folly simpler track and so it basically becomes a way that you can add sound effects into your video and then play back the sound effects you need at the right audio cues so i suppose the idea is that rather than having to manually drop every single audio effect into the timeline where you need it on an audio track you just click on the you just click on the keys to play the sound effect where you want it to be and then it will all be on this recorded track for the folly sampler at precisely the right moment and one of the downsides of having to manually drop in sound effects to a timeline is that you can only have one audio clip playing at a specific audio timeline at once so if you needed three or four sound effects to overlap each other at the same time then you'd have to put them all on separate audio tracks which might mean that you have to also duplicate the audio effects to multiple audio tracks at the same time but if you were recording it with the folly sampler then i suppose all of those pressed audio buttons that correspond to audio effects would all go on the same audio track and the same recording and you'd only need to apply your effects once so once again i've never used the follow sampler so that's just kind of what i got out of the documentation for what this is all about by the way if you are interested in using the folly sampler the guide does seem to have some steps for how to set it up so you could check that out okay so next we have an easy one the frequency analyzer so when you open up the frequency analyzer you'll notice there's no controls here really you can set it to full spectrum mode uh which is the default and that will show all of the frequencies from 20 hertz to 24 000 hertz you can also show specifically low frequencies mid-range frequencies and high frequencies so the same stuff you would see on the full spectrum just only showing you a bit of it at once now you won't actually see anything on this graph until you hit play what it's going to be showing you is the frequencies at which your audio is playing at what it's going to show you is the volume for each of the frequencies that your audio is playing at so basically which frequencies and your audio are very loud and which ones are quiet or have no noise at all in them so let's go ahead and hit play on our audio clip and we can see which frequencies have loud volume and which ones are quiet let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so this tool is purely for analysis but i could see it being useful if you need to lower down some frequencies because there's a lot of background noise or something like that so you could see what frequencies are loud and which ones like way up here don't really have any noise at all okay so the next one lfe filter another one i've never really touched so my understanding here is that if you are setting up your audio for your video you may have a surround sound setup and in that case part of the audio the really low frequencies would be dedicated to a low frequency channel so that's what it's talking about here lfe channels you can see it peaks out here a little after 240 hertz e channel because you were so if you had an lfe channel you were trying to set up surround sound for a video or a movie then you can use the lfe filter in here to target a certain frequency cut off and then you can trim some of the audio information from the final audio output for that low frequency channel so once again though i'm basically getting that kind of information off google so i've never really had to use that one so the next effect we have is the limiter so with the limiter you have this line and everything that sits above it is going to show blue on this graph so what it's going to do is that any audio that is too loud basically whatever shown in the blue zone is going to be brought back down it's going to have a reduction in its audio volume so in a sense it's a cap on the maximum volume of your audio for the attached clip or track so let's go ahead and show it with the limiter and this zone and then i'll decrease the threshold for the limiter so that more of the audio gets reduced let's go ahead and test okay so right there most of the audio is still there there's not a lot of reduction but if we lower the threshold down here something like negative 15 decibels let's go ahead and test out some then you can see how more of the audio is going to rise above that threshold line and as such more audio is going to be reduced and it's going to be reduced further to bring it in line with that limiter so that's the limiter effect now we can move on to the meter so the meter isn't so much an effect as it is another tool for analyzing your audio so you might notice in the mixer in the bottom right hand corner for both the edit page but also in this section for the fairlight page that there is a meter right here so when you're playing your audio it's going to show you the volume level that's playing on each audio track or the main output so if i hit play here then you'll see how the audio levels rise here showing the volume in that audio track and it'll show you how high it rises how loud the audio is that is base that is basically what the meter does except this meter you can move around on the screen you could put it on a second monitor if you wanted to there's also a couple options here so you can increase or decrease the width and height of that meter and one of the main differences is that you can attach it to a specific clip so if you attach it to a single audio clip that meter will only ever read anything if that audio clip is playing but if you look at the meter for the track then any audio clip on the track is going to make the meter register um some audio so for any reason you needed a floating meter to put somewhere um in order to watch the audio on a clip or a track then that would be how you can do it with the meter effect okay the next effect we have is modulation uh one of the things you'll note about it is that with modulation you're basically taking the original audio and then you're putting it through a new wave that's going to modify how it sound for so for instance sine triangle saw waves so with the modulator wave shapes it's going to cause the sound on your audio clip to bounce around going up and down and then there's a few properties that those waves can affect including frequency and filter for uh when you want to shave off the low and high frequencies of what gets put in the audio output so you can see right here in the top left menu right now i have it selected at doppler effect so it's meant to simulate the sound of an object moving past you such as a car driving by but there's many other modulation based sound effects you can get from this so we can go ahead and play this one real quick let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside so you could hear how the sound kind of phased out and then came back in really strongly let's switch to something else like exterminate so you can see here that the pattern for this preset is completely different uh let's go ahead and play it let's go ahead it's a kind of a robotic sound there so the wawa effect here it's going to be bouncing up and down like wow wow wow let's go ahead and hit play and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so in a nutshell it would be a pretty handy tool if you're trying to warp how your audio sounds and it doesn't necessarily need to be spoken vocal audio it can really be any audio effect that you just want to modify by adding on a modulation um so let's close that out and we'll jump to our next one now so the multi-band compressor so let's go ahead and open this one up when we're talking about bands here we're talking about frequency bands so the multi-band compressor here has four bands so you can see the low frequency the low to mid frequency mid to high and then the high frequencies so these bands you can adjust where their starting and ending points are so if i want to take this 80 line i can shift this over to the left so now our low frequency band is smaller and the band 2 the low to mid frequency band has been expanded so the reason we might have bands is that we can adjust those different sections of the frequency graph individually so you can see that we have threshold and gain so once again tools for adjusting the volume up or down depending on if the audio has met a certain threshold or not so in this case with this setup basically we're taking the gain way down for the loud sounds on the left on the very low frequencies and the very high frequencies since the spoken dialogue usually ends up somewhere around here it is one tool that you could try out for some noise reduction let's go ahead and show how this is going to sound let's go ahead all right and now i'll disable the multi-band compressor and you can hear the difference as uh the audio and the low and high frequencies comes back in and test out some okay yeah so hopefully you can hear massive difference in the volume there yeah so the ability to move the bands really easily is probably the most flexible part of this tool so if you need to target specific frequencies and raise and lower the volume there then this would be a really cool tool for doing that kind of thing so next up noise reduction i know i just mentioned how you could use the multi-band compressor for noise reduction but there's technically a specific noise reduction tool as well so the way that this tool works though is quite different you in essence try to teach the tool uh what frequencies you want to try to reduce and you do that by toggling on learn mode and then playing back the portion of your audio clip where you think has bad background noise and then that's going to generate a frequency graph and then for that graph it'll try to remove it when you have the noise reduction enabled so in this case you can see that the graph's picking up a lot of low frequency sounds so that's in general what it's going to try to target and remove from the audio so right now i have it in learn mode i will go ahead and replay the first half second of this audio so that we can regenerate this graph so you can see there like while the audio was playing it shifted around the graph to kind of match whatever sounds it hurt so if i disable learn mode now then i can go to the start here i can hit play and it will remove sounds that are similar to what it heard before uh based on the frequency so let's go ahead and hit play here let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17 okay and once again playing it with no noise reduction on let's go ahead so this can be a useful tool one of the things you might have heard though is that um because some of the sounds that were around the first half second did kind of fall into that vocal speech area it does detract a little bit from the spoken dialogue as well so using this can remove background noise but if there's a lot of background noise and you try to remove too much of it using tools like this then it can cause the dialogue to sound worse as well as part of the audio gets taken out from the speech so that's why it's always better if you can get a clean recording from the beginning so that you need a minimal use of tools like this and your audio can still sound good while keeping most of the background audio out okay so next up phase meter so this is another analysis tool the idea here is that if the phase meter is to the right when you're playing back your audio clip then it is in sync if it's around zero then it is not receiving a signal and if it's to the left then it's out of sync so this tool is just for checking if it's in sync so i'll go ahead and hit play here and we'll be able to see that the audio clip is roughly speaking in sync because it's going to be over here on the right let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. next up we have the pitch tool so i would imagine half of all of you watching if not more have played around with pitch at some point in time you record something and then you just make someone into a chipmunk so that is basically the idea of the pitch tool you can increase or lower the pitch on a sound or someone's voice so if you have a really low pitch you lower the semi-tones here it's going to make the sound or someone's voice sound a lot deeper like let's go this and if you raise the semi-tones it's going to make someone's voice a lot more high-pitched a little bit more squeaky so let's go ahead and hit play with a plus six semitones and test out some and as you can see it also affects the background noise of course too so you do have to keep that in mind it's not just going to be for the spoken audio next we have the reverb effect so as you might be able to guess looking at this length height and width shape basically a box indicating a gigantic room you can see this room the concert hall has a room size of 393 meters squared quite large the idea here is that you're trying to simulate uh whatever was being spoken a speech you know whatever being in a very large room because when you have a large room you tend to get a lot of this reverb sound bouncing off the walls and flowing back through the air since in large open rooms when you speak audio out uh it tends to not get absorbed very well so it could bounce around in an auditorium and kind of have a little bit of an echoey effect so let's try this out with the concert hall here let's go ahead and test out and there's of course other options here as well we could try a bathroom some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so if you were just speaking a voiceover into a mic and you wanted to fake that being recorded in a very large room then trying one of these presets here could be a good way to do that okay next up the soft clipper so a lot of the other tools we've talked about so far are similar to this basically if the audio is above a certain threshold we want to bring that back down have a reduction in the audio volume for those loud sounds the difference with the soft clipper is that we can add a soft curve shape to it so if we have this shape all the way on hard then what that means is that anything above that threshold is going to be brought in line with this even if it's very close to the threshold or far away from the threshold it's basically going to get that same reduction to this hard line but if we turn the shape towards soft you can see how it's a gradual curve now so the very loud sounds are going to be brought back towards this line but the stuff that is close to the threshold is going to be reduced in a more smooth pattern rather than just a harsh drop off to that line okay so let's lower the threshold down here quite a lot so that the noise reduction is very obvious we'll try it with a soft shape and then we'll do it with the hard shape let's go ahead and test out okay and now on the hardship with that sharp point let's go ahead and test out some audio effects so that's basically the idea there if you wanted noise reduction to be more gradual rather than a sharp drop off then the soft clipper is a tool you can use for that next we have the stereo fixer so if you're recording audio your left and right channels may not match up perfectly so if that is the case then you might want to take your original audio input and increase or decrease the gain on the left and right channels until the two match up so that you have roughly the same volume on your left speaker and your right speaker or your left and right ear muffs on you and then increase or decrease the volume on your left and right audio channels until they roughly match up obviously of course if you can record it and it was correct initially before you actually need to fix it then that's ideal but the stereo fixer is there just in case it happens so let's go ahead and play this here so right now i have the right channel at negative 13.3 decibels that's going to put them very far apart in terms of their volume but you can get the idea here let's go ahead and test out so you can see how the original audio was roughly the same on the left and right audio channels though not perfect so now i uh put them further apart by lowering the right one by negative 13.3 but if you wanted them to match up probably more likely what we want to do is to possibly push the right channel up by about one decibel we could try that so let's hit space let's go ahead and test out some and we can see that that's even too much there so in this case even though the audio sounds pretty bad uh because it was recorded with a laptop built-in microphone the left and right audio volume are more or less the same because the microphones are roughly in the same spot right by the webcam let's go to the start here and play it one more time with 0.4 let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so that is pretty close i suppose i really probably use this tool more if there was a 5 or 10 decibel difference on one of the channels if it was really obvious that there was a difference so we can move on so next up stereo width so when you record your audio and there's not one single audio channel which would be mono audio then you can have a spread a left right channel spread for basically where your audio is going to play back so stereo here is referring to two channel audio so that means left and right and then in the middle here i presume the m is for mono as in it's just going to output the same on both sides of your speakers even if you have two of them so what you can do here with your audio is to increase the spread between your left and right audio channels or to shift them back down towards mono so if you make it zero width or pure mono it's going to play all of the sound back equally on both your left and your right speakers so let's go ahead and hit play here let's go ahead and test out some and what you might notice is that the audio volume on the output is the same because it's playing the same audio back on both sides of your speaker it's mono audio so let's increase the width here and then this is going to take the recorded audio which normally would have a spread here something like this kind of like a pizza slice and it's going to shift whatever's on the left further to the left and whatever's on the right further to the right so that that part of the audio becomes much more focused on the left channel and less on the right channel and then the right channel audio becomes more focused on the right and plays less on the left so let's go ahead and try that now let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. so with this audio clip it's a little hard to tell the laptop when i was recording this audio clip has a microphone array but the microphones are literally about this far from each other so the left right audio is almost the same to begin with there's only a little bit of difference between the left and right so you can kind of see that indicated here because even when i double the spread the audio output is roughly the same okay so let's go to the next tool surround analyzer so the surround analyzer here we can use for a couple purposes uh one would be to figure out the microphone pattern so there's different ways that microphones can pick up on sounds uh one of the common ways uh for doing stuff like videos like these using a standard plug and play microphone would be to put it in cardioid pattern and that's also the pattern that this laptop microphones i keep talking about are using i'll go ahead and hit play here let's so this is basically a cardioid pattern where everything is focused in front and the sounds that would be behind the microphone are very de-emphasized back here so if you see ls and rs down here that would be referring to the sound behind the microphone and then l is left channel r r is right channel and then c is the center right and the middle so it's very forward focused and it's sound and you can see that here another thing to understand about this could be that if you're using a surround sound system which speakers are going to be playing uh the sound basically so if you have the surround sound speakers that are towards the back those aren't going to be getting too much of the volume here because of the cardioid pattern for this recorded sound mostly it's going to be focused on the left front the right front and the center speakers okay so that brings us to the last effect and that is the vocal channel so i have been liking this tool a lot lately because it gives you three useful tools for adjusting the audio levels of your clips uh so you may notice that this is focused on vocals because your spoken audio is mostly going to fall into this kind of range here so the high pass is going to allow you to cut away low frequencies anything that falls below the high pass cutoff point is going to be drastically reduced here so you can see this area of the graph is being brought down from its base decibel line down to very low volumes and we can adjust where the high pass cut-off line is here you'll notice it's a soft cut-off line it does not immediately go to zero but it gradually does as the curve goes towards the bottom so with the equalizer you can adjust the left sides of the curve and the right sides as well by changing the frequencies here so once again it's kind of a soft cut off point the gain dials can be used for controlling how much audio is going to be removed over here but basically it just kind of comes down to adjusting your frequencies and the amount of gain you want to remove until you get the audio to sound nicely and then of course you would listen back and make sure it doesn't hurt your vocals too much you can also boost the middle if you want to but be careful don't push your audio past that zero decibel maximum that audio can play back at or it's going to distort your sound make it sound really bad you're gonna lose a lot of audio information in fact i wouldn't say i know the perfect volume level but i would not put my own volume close to zero i'd probably keep it more at about uh negative 10 decibels for when it's playing back in the timeline you can boost it if for some reason you need to maybe it was too quiet when you recorded it and then the compressor here is going to reduce audio that goes above a certain threshold so we can see with the compressor we have this original grade outline for where if the audio was above the threshold where it would have been originally and then the light blue line here is where it gets brought down to so anything below the threshold is left alone but anything above it is going to be compressed down to be more in line with the rest of our audio so using these in conjunction you can improve the sound of your audio possibly remove a little of the background noise bringing your loudest vocals down a little more in line with your clip and if you need to you can boost the vocal frequencies so that it sounds louder compared to the background noise and of course you can remove both the low and high frequencies so just going to like play around with that a little bit so let's go ahead and play it with the vocal channel on and then we'll play it with it off let's go ahead and test out some audio effects inside of davinci resolve 17. of course as you saw there you could always adjust basically any of the properties for effects while you're playing it back and that might not be a bad idea because then you can hear things back in real time anyway let's play it back without the vocal channel on let's go ahead and test out some audio effects and then i turned it on and you can see how it makes a drastic difference a lot of the background noise gets cut off from this high pass so yeah vocal channel is another tool you can use for improving your audio and removing some of the noise that is undesirable and focusing in on what you want to keep which is that spoken audio at a consistent level so that brings us to the end of the video things i want to point out once again is that having audio effects can be helpful but uh first off if you can record your audio as crisply and as well spoken as possible first time before you actually put it in a video editor or audio editor program like this uh the better it's gonna be in the end audio effects can help a little bit but they can't really fix terribly recorded audio and that's why i kept using this bad test clip and this video to illustrate that although you can remove some of the background noise a badly recorded audio clip is still going to sound pretty bad in the end so use audio effects where appropriate but try not to rely on them if possible if you can record your audio nicely the first time that is going to be ideal and probably worth investing in a decent microphone i would say so that's gonna be it for this video if you stuck around to the end thank you very much for watching i know this has been a really long video i hope all of you learned a lot i've been chris thanks for watching and i'll see you in my future video content

Channel: Chris' Tutorials

Views: 17,114

Keywords: davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, introducing davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 new features, resolve audio, davinci resolve audio editing, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve, resolve fairlight, davinci resolve fairlight, fairlight, resolve effects, davinci resolve effects, davinci resolve 2021, resolve 2021, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, resolve 2020, davinci resolve 2021 tutorial

Id: jd6tlw6GK3Q

Length: 46min 54sec (2814 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021