Skip to main content

Fairlight: Examples

Lesson 30 from: DaVinci Resolve: How to Use Every Page

Casey Faris

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

30. Fairlight: Examples

Lesson Info

Fairlight: Examples

Let's take a look at an example of how I would mix a video in the Fairlight page. Here, I have my finished video in the edit page, and to bring this into Fairlight, I'm just gonna click on the Fairlight page and that's gonna open up here. One thing that I wanna mention is that especially if you have a bigger video, it can be a little bit confusing to just look at the audio tracks. And so if you go to the upper left hand corner of the timeline here, there's this little button. And if you click on that, that gives you all these kind of different options kind of view options for your timeline. And this upper left one here is called show video tracks. If you click on that, then you'll have a reference of all of your video tracks from the edit page. So it might be a little bit easier to tell kind of where you're at in your edit. So now that I have this all open inside of Fairlight, I can go through and make sure everything kind of sounds the way I want it to, and I'll make sure to enable my...

audio here in the upper right hand corner under my viewer. And let's see how this sounds so far. (upbeat music) When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. (upbeat music) Right, so this already sounds pretty good because we did a lot of mixing in the edit page which again there's nothing wrong with that. You can totally do a mix in the edit page. The Fairlight page is just if you wanna get it a little bit more detailed. So one thing that I can do is zoom in here, and I'll grab this and move it around. I feel like this is getting a little bit too loud too quickly so I can move this over and really get detailed with my automation here. Heart and soul into her food. Yeah, that sounds a little better. And once I feel like everything is all leveled out, it's actually a really nice thing to put some dynamics on here. So what I'll do is look at what track my dialogue is in, and that's audio one and go over to the mixer. And here under audio one, let's double click on dynamics. This is kind of a big intimidating panel that pops up but really it's just kind of split up into a bunch of little parts. The most important parts are the compressor and the makeup at least for what we're doing. A compressor, what that does is it takes things that are kind of peeking, and a little bit too loud like the little loud parts and it kind of squishes them down to be not quite as loud. So if I click on the compressor to turn it on, what that's going to do is start to turn down anything that's over a certain level. And the level right here is negative so let's listen to this. I'll just listen to this soloed so that we can hear what's going on. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was a passion. All right, so what this is doing is once anything goes above negative 15, it's turning it down. So it kind of makes the louder parts quieter to kind of level it out even more. So what we really wanna do is set this threshold to be at just the right place to where this compressor is just grabbing the loudest parts of our audio. So let's play this back. And what I'm gonna do is look right here, under gain reduction, this middle bar, and see if there's a little blue bar that's coming down. And what that blue bar means is that it's turning down our audio. So let's take a look. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was a passion. She put her heart and soul into... All right, so that's actually at a pretty good state because it's only turning down the things that are really loud, it's not always turning everything down. If you're always turning everything down, it's just gonna make everything quieter. So now we have this kind of working the way that we want, we can decide how loud we want everything to be overall which is the makeup. So it's basically turning the louder parts down, and then the makeup brings everything back up. So this might actually be a little bit easier to see if I get rid of some of this automation here. So I'm gonna just grab these and delete them. So I'll just select this little dot and get rid of those and just turn this back down here just to show us what's actually gonna be happening. Move this around so we can see a little bit. So now if we listen to this. She put her heart and soul into her food. It's way too quiet, right? But if we set this compressor to be just right, She put her-- To where it's gonna turn down the louder parts here. She put her heart and soul... Let's take this threshold down a little more. She put her heart and soul into her food. Then it's gonna turn down those loud parts and then we boost the whole signal here with makeup. She put her heart and soul into her food. And now what it's done is turn those loud parts down and we boosted everything up so that the quiet parts are loud enough and the loud parts aren't too loud. She put her heart and soul into her food. And so that's a really great way to be able to kind of level out all of your audio without having to go through and draw in all of those curves. And you can do that on the track level and just level everything out. So I can probably just get rid of this work here that we did earlier and it's probably gonna sound just fine. I'll just select each of these and reset the volume two zero real quick. And now, without all that work. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And now without all of that work, everything is balanced out and we can hear it over the music. I was the boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. Let's also get rid of this EQ that I kinda messed up. Was more than food. There we go. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. All right, so there's really a lot of control that we have over our audio in the Fairlight page. And again, this is the tip of the iceberg. This is just a little bit. But this is, I think some of the most essential things that I use the Fairlight page for. And when you're making a video, you want your audio to sound great. And the Fairlight page is a great way to get detailed with your audio and make sure it sounds the best that it possibly can.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

DaVinci Resolve - 17 Shortcuts.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

user 714f13
 

I'm glad to see the DaVinci Resolve courses have been added to Creative Live. Casey Faris does a great job with his teaching. In this course he clearly explains the layout of each page and shares example workflows for each. It's really good as an intro to Resolve.

a Creativelive Student
 

Helpful class if you are interested in DaVinci Resolve. Casey Faris presents the information clearly and doesn't waste time. Looking forward to his Color Correction and Fusion classes.

DEJEAN BROWN
 

Made navigating through Davinci an exciting thing to do! Great work!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES