STORYTELLING with Audio AUTOMATION 🎛️ in DaVinci Resolve 18 | Intro to Automation

guys what is happening welcome to the video and I am super excited for today's video because we are talking about audio automation audio automation can really help convey a story with just your audio and I've got an example here you're going to see in a second our final product of how the audio really tells the story of the clip and then I'm going to show you how we started with something that you would listen to it and you'd be like well that doesn't make any sense and how we can automate our audio to make changes over time and really convey the story of what's going on in a scene so I wanted to get into this for a long time but I was a little confused by it and you may be too so let's just talk about what is audio automation real quick just so you have an understanding of what it is and kind of how it works so when it comes to audio automation essentially it's like key frames for audio now you might be thinking well hey I can key frame some audio right if we look in the inspector in denture resolve in the edit tab or even in Fair light we can key frame things like volume or panning but there's not a whole lot of other things that we can key frame right and that is where audio automation comes in to play automation allows you to essentially key frame it's not called key frames but it's like key frames key frame anything that has to do with your audio you can key frame panning you can key frame volume just like we can with regular key frames right but then we can automate key frame automate things like the EQ we can automate effects we can automate Dynamics pretty much any parameter that has to do with audio you can automate or make changes to over time so the whole automation thing can go really deep really quick I'm going to try and keep it fairly basic I'm not going to go in-depth on any of the tools too much but I want to give you guys a little taste of what you can do with automation of your audio to really help convey a story so let me go ahead and roll the tape of our final product if you've got some good headphones maybe you got some good cans like these guys right here put those on if you've got good speakers put those on and listen to the audio and listen to all the different things that are happening in our audio in this clip and then we're going to talk about how do we get there right because I certainly didn't start with what you're going to hear in the final product here check out this video and then we're going to jump and resolve and I'm going to show you how to create the entire thing using audio automation [Music] dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right [Music] up see you later so what did you guys think of that could you hear everything that was happening with our audio could you hear it coming from the right to the left the volume changing the thumping of the bass and then the music opening up we hear the whole thing and then putting in the headphones a lot of stuff happened in there and I did it all using audio automation but that's not where it started right here's where it started looking in resolve I had my video track and when I filmed the video I just had a little bit of dialogue alls we heard if I solo my audio track alls I heard was this there was no music no anything happening in the car I created all of that right in Dent resolve so I just had the vocal of this Dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad just put in my headphones here fix that right up okay so that's all there was there was no music and then I added a music track in another track below that right now when I added the music track in it was just your standard music track that was already mixed and mastered and everything it it was just full volume right so looking at the whole clip together let me play for play it for you and you can just hear what it sounds like and then we're going to get into Crea creating all of this spatial kind of sound and changing the way the sound is to really help tell the story of this clip so here's what it sounded like when I got [Music] started dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right up [Music] see you [Music] later okay so that's the whole clip right it was just one normal music clip and now what we want to do is just create that whole story right with our audio so in order to do it we are going to jump into Fair light musical notes at the bottom here so now that we're in Fair light here the first thing you probably want to do is go up to workspace and reset your UI layout now I've already done this but this will ensure that you're looking at the same screen and the same things on your screen that I'm looking at let's talk about Automation and how can we get started here using it in Fair life so first we need to turn on our automation tools so if we come in our toolbar right here we have toggle automation you can turn that on and now we're going to be able to at least enable our automation next we have the automation controls we're going to want to go ahead and turn that on now I'm not going to go in detail on all these controls here I'm going to save that for another video but I just want to give you guys an overview of how you can get started here and how we create these awesome changes using automation we are going to just leave it on right for the first icon under touch we're going to leave that on off on stop you want to change this to hold if it's on uh anything different there so that when we stop our changes hold where where we sto and then on enables here we're going to want to turn on the EQ because we only want to affect the EQ settings to get started here we want to be able to create the sound that we want from the thumping base to the full sound of the music to the tiny metallic headphone sound we want to create that and we're going to use the EQ to do that so this is where you just select which things will be recorded as you make changes in real time so you can select as many of these as you want but in my case here I only want to start with the EQ the next thing we want to do is actually open up the EQ for our music track right so I'm going to go ahead and double click the EQ in the mixer here and again if you don't have your mixer open mixer at the top EQ you can scroll up and down with your middle Mouse wheel if you need to double click open the EQ now the other thing you want to have open is your video because the automation changes happen in real time over time right so you're going to play back your video you're going to make the changes in real time while your video is playing back those changes will be recorded and saved so that way when you stop then go back and play through your video again you're going to hear the changes that we make to the EQ in this case over time so it's important that we see our video looking back and resolve I'm just going to pop out the little floating window for my video here and we're just going to organize our our window here a little bit so now we want to start by creating that thumping Basse sound how do we do that in our EQ the easiest way to do that is turn on band six and we're just going to bring this back to around 350 HZ or C so now when I play through the music if I just show you in the timeline here it's just going to sound like thumping Bass okay you hear a little bit of the other sound in there but it's mostly That low-end Bass kind of sound now as the car pulls up and is directly in front of camera and I open the window I want to hear the full music as it originally sounded then as I put in the headphones we want that music to go to that high-pitched metallicy kind of sound how do we do that well we're going to watch the video back and as our automation is recording what we're doing with the EQ I'm going to take this point 6 and just drag it back as the video is playing when I start to to put the window down then once the window's down and I go to put in my headphones I'm going to go ahead and turn on band one and I'm just going to bring this up like this until it sounds the way I want it to sound and by cutting out the lower end frequencies it's going to give us that high-pitched headphone kind of sound or at least what I think headphones sound like when somebody puts them in their ears so that's how we're going to make the changes on the EQ and we're going to do it in real time while the video is playing back and those changes are going to be recorded so in order to turn on our automation so that it's record first I'm going to set my playhead back to the beginning of my clip I'm going to go ahead and click on this little icon right here which turns on the recording so the next time I hit the space bar and start to play through my video any change I make on the EQ is going to be recorded and if we look in the EQ here you can also see that it's got little red icons right below each one of the dials and that's because that is what will be recorded as I make the changes over time so I'm going to take my band Six drag it back to round around 350 HZ or so and that's where we want to start with it so I'm just going to play through my video now I'm going to watch the video up here and then I am going to watch for the point in time when I want to take my band six and I want that sound to code back to the full sound of the music as it was originally created and I'm going to do that as I lower the window in the van and then once it's I start to put in the headphones like I showed you I'm going to put turn on band one and we're going to drag that up so let's just go ahead and play it back and all the changes I make on the EQ will be recorded and then we can hear it afterwards dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right [Music] up see you later okay and that's it once I stop the playback the changes are saved and now it's no longer recording and if we look at my EQ you can see now we've got green lines underneath all of our controls and that's because it's not currently recording I can play back the video and I'm not going to accidentally change anything or overwrite anything so let's just play back the video here make our viewer a little bit bigger here so we can see it a little bit better and we're going to see if it's doing what we want it to do [Music] dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right [Music] up see you later okay so we have accomplished the effect of the music that we want right it kind of sounds the way we want it to it starts to help tell that story of what's happening and why and if you may have noticed in the background of D Venture resolve here the EQ automated automatically we saw it animated as the video was playing back because those changes are recorded and it's making those changes over time key frames not called key frames called automation but key framing right are changes over time the next thing we want to do is think about the volume right how do we want to change the volume of our clip so that it makes sense and helps continue to tell the story a little bit more so I'm going to go ahead and close my EQ because I think that sounds good I'm happy with that so under my enable section here in my toolbar I want to change that and I want it to be fader because I'm going to work with the volume now I don't need to work with the EQ anymore so I'm going to go ahead and turn that off so now what's going to happen is when I enable the automation recording on my track I'm going to go ahead and click that you'll notice over in the mixer now it's enabled right here and and now the fader is red and the fader's red because it says hey I'm ready to record as soon as you hit play I'm recording so again we're going to watch our video we're going to have the music be a little bit quieter as the van's farther away get louder when the van is in front of us and quieter as the van drives on down the driveway let's go ahead and bring our playhead back to the beginning our button is on here to record and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with my fader a little lower and I actually may make it a little louder Just so you can hear the bass a little bit better in the beginning but but then we're going to we're going to change it over time and we're going to just have it automate or change over time the volume of our clip so let's go ahead and play through it and as soon as I hit play it's going to start recording and we're just going to grab our fader here and make the changes that we want and make it sound the way that we want it to sound so let's do that Dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right [Music] up see you later okay so there we go we changed the volume over time now one thing to be careful of when you're doing something like this and I noticed I might have done it on accident there is you don't want to be peeking you want to make sure when you're watching your meters right here that you're not peeking and you're not getting too loud with your audio levels there I think I may have peaked just a little bit just a little bit so be careful of that so now when we play back our video we should hear the volume change over time let's take a quick listen to it and you can see the fader moving over here Dad the music's too loud turn it down my bad put in my headphones here fix that right up all right so you kind of hear what's happening here now I'm going to redo that real quick because it was peaking and I don't want it to be peeking so I'm going to come back to the beginning and if I wanted to do something again I can just simply come back to the beginning of my clip click the record button and just start over and it's going to over write whatever I already put on there now we can go and edit it you know based on what we already did I'm going to show you how you can see what you already did uh in the end of the video here once we do the panning automation um but in this case I'm just going to re-record it it's no big deal and then uh then we're going to move on to the next phase so I'm going to do that don't go anywhere and we'll be back in okay I already did it so now we're going to get into panning right we're trying to tell the story of what's happening in the scene with all this automation with the audio moving around changing volume sounding different right we're building out the scene with just one basic music track so again I'm going to come back to the beginning of my clip here and now we want to automate the pan because the van comes in from the right I'm watching the video comes in from the Right comes to the center and then goes off to the left so I want the audio to sound like it's coming from that way right I wanted to hear from the right to the center to the left so you could use your uh in your inspector here you could actually key frame so if I just select my clip here and not the track select the clip we could key frame the pan right here you could do it like that but I'm going to use automation because that's what we're focusing on here and remember you can automate anything whether it's effects parameters in effects uh Dynamics volume panning anything you can automate anything that has to do with audio I'm not going to do it in the inspector we're going to use our automation tools to do it under the enable section right here I'm going to turn off fader and now I want to come to the pan section I'm going to turn on pan and in my mixer here on my track 2 my music track we have the pan section right here so I'm going to open that up I'm going to go ahead and enable our track to record and now in the pan tool you can see we've got all these these different uh red lines under all of our parameters because it will get recorded as we make the changes over time when I'm watching the video I want to start with the pan all the way to the right because the van is coming from the right in the video then as the van comes to the right in front of the camera we're going to go Center Channel there and and both equal right and left channels and then as the van drives away we're going to pan it to the left because we want to build out that story of what's happening with the audio so again I'm just going to hit playback here by using my space bar I'm going to watch the video and make the changes over time now I could just grab this point here and drag it but just to make sure I I stay you know right at the top in the front I'm just going to use my my slider here and just fade it like that so let's play through the video and do that Dad the music's too loud turn it down put in my headphones here fix that right [Music] up see you later okay so there we go now we have the audio sounding like it's coming from one side coming to the middle and then going out the left so all this automation just helps build the story of what's actually happening in our clip right if we just left the music flat it doesn't sound like anything you don't know what's going on you don't know why you can't tell the difference between the thump and bass the window open the headphones in so automation allows us to create this really cool effect a really cool story with our audio here to help the viewer understand what's actually happening in our scene so back in resolve here it looks pretty good for the pan I'm happy with that going ahead and close that we're going to pop our viewer back in I'm just going to go ahead and turn off my automation controls here because we're done automating all the things that we want to automate now real quick I want to show you how you can see the changes that we made so in order to see what we already did the key frames automation we're going to want to make sure that this is still toggled on the toggle automation you need that still turned on and if we come over to our music track we can click on this little drop down and this will show us a graphical representation of all the changes that we made now you can only view one at a time so for example with uh the EQ here if I come down to band six and what I was changing was the frequency right you can see different parameters of of everything you can record here in D Vin resolve but in this case it was frequency so if I click on frequency now you're going to see what the graph looks like when I was changing the frequencies now I think because uh we see this drop here right I think it's just because it can't keep going up but in reality it would just keep going up I'm not sure why it appears this way but we can also look at things like the pan right so if we come to pan and we did right left pan we can see here's where my pan changed over time right we can see in the beginning then it starts to pan to you know the center channel and then it'll pan to the left and if we zoom in on these right I put my playhead for example right here and I zoom in we can actually see these points make it a little bit bigger there and we can actually come in and change these points we can click on them we can delete them we can move them we can change them you've got a lot of options on how you can modify your automation after you've already done it maybe you don't want to record it again so you've got options on how you can change it and work with it once you've already recorded it too you can even draw new Automation in and maybe have it be a straight point you know from if I zoom out maybe from you know this point to that point I want it to be a straight you know Fade up fade line up if I use this guy right here the focus mode and let's say I just select this part right there I hit delete it gets rid of all those extra little points because maybe I wasn't so smooth when I was dragging that slider back and forth and now we can see that our line is smooth it's just point to point boom and done so if you wanted to get in and delete any kind of automation this way you could come in use your focus tool and we could just select all these things on our clip and then just hit delete and boom now it's deleted all of our automation for us so let's say maybe you automate something and then you decide I don't know if I really want that you can just go in there and delete it like this if you want instead of re-recording it and overwriting what you already did so were you one of those people that thought hey you can't change anything with your audio or make key frames for things but now you can because you know about audio automation here and it can just really help tell the story for your videos help you do a lot of really awesome stuff with your audio I get jazzed up about this because as an audio Guy this is just something that's so cool that you can work with to really create all kinds of different stuff and I mean it opens up a whole another door for your audio and the things that you can do with it I want to know are you guys is going to try out some automation if you do link your video down below I want to see how you guys use it and what kind of creative things that you guys come up with when it comes to your audio Automation and a quick side note it would be a whole lot easier if you had like a black magic panel maybe and you could turn buttons and Sliders and things versus using a mouse you'll get a lot smoother results and stuff and uh I may be trying out one of those uh resolve panels soon the audio one uh it looks pretty cool I think I'm going to have to give it a try but it's going to work a little bit better with something like that where you actually have physical knobs and dials and buttons to use versus just using a mouse so keep that in mind but you can get in there play with it and you can still get great results and tell a story by using audio automation guys thank you so much for watching and I'm going to go play with some more automation stuff here you should too and with that said guys thanks so much for watching I will see you in the next video you liked it give me a little thumbs up would you maybe subscribe if you want to learn a little more about audio and uh just taking your videos to the next level with some awesome a all right guys we'll see you peace

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 9,083

Keywords: audio automation, audio automation davinci resolve, fairlight, fairlight audio automation, storytelling with audio, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve 18 fairlight, fairlight mixing, davinci resolve audio editing, fairlight audio mixer automation, Jason Yadlovski, DaVinci REsolve Audio Editing, Automation, davinci resolve audio editing tutorial, davinci resolve audio editing for youtube, davinci resolve 18 fairlight tutorial, davinci resolve 18 audio editing beginner

Id: TmS6s9tBANs

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023