Doing It All In DaVinci – PART 6: Overview of Audio in Fairlight

Doing It All in DaVinci is a series of editing tutorials instructed by editor Dale Campbell that demonstrates exactly what the title suggests.

Dale and his team have given away one of the best editing courses online in their Doing It All In Davinci pack. Dale focuses on editing, color grading, and a little bit on sound design using a video that his team filmed for the launch of Aston Martin’s latest car.

Doing It All in DaVinci Tutorials

• Part 1: Introduction to Editing
• Part 2: Adjusting Color Temperature
• Part 3: Patch Replacer and Tracking FX
• Part 4: Power Windows & Tracking
• Part 5: Lighting Effects
• Part 6: Overview of Audio in Fairlight

Part 6: Overview of Audio in Fairlight

In this final part, we will be looking at how we deal with audio in the Blackmagic Davinci Resolve Fairlight panel.

For this project, Dale and his team finished all of the audio in Fairlight. Now, for the most part, that’s just balancing and you can do that in the timeline. Even though I made rough adjustments, being able to jump into the Fairlight panel is pretty cool. Especially because it gives access to all of the mixing and effects that are in there in a digital audio workstation.

It’s a much more suitable way of working when you’re working with audio and then you’ve got access to the faders to help balance off levels. We had the voiceover which has to balance with the background music. Then, I added insight and sound effects.

We’re trying to get across the idea of the power of these two machines, Concord and the Aston Martin. So the noise that they make is critically important.

And that’s what I was doing within this panel, just adding in those little engine roars and the sound of Concorde coming into land.

A lot of the time this marries with what’s happened visually on screen. So, for example, the car will be traveling from left to right across screen. I will add a subtle pan from left to right on the sound of the car passing. That way, it helps to knit it in with what people are seeing.

In Conclusion

Coming from an audio background, I really do like to get a little bit more involved and can add in a bit of multi-band compression. I find it really knits it all together and tightens up all of the different frequency bands that you’re working with. Essentially it’s like an equalizer combined with a compressor and it focuses on certain frequency bands. That way, you can control a little bit more what’s happening at the low-end compression versus the higher compression.

The biggest takeaway is that now we’re able to cover the entire project within DaVinci Resolve from the editing to the color correction to the audio mixing.