Fairlight Audio Editor: Essential Tools | Articles | Photo, video, optics

There is such a pro­gram for edit­ing Davin­ci Resolve — here you can not only edit your videos, but also pro­fes­sion­al­ly work with col­or cor­rec­tion and, of course, with sound.

Fairlight Audio is the same Davin­ci audio sec­tion, one of the most pop­u­lar and well-known on the soft­ware mar­ket. Today we are going to take a look at some of its main tools and fea­tures.

Popular Fairlight Features:

• bass­ing;
  - audio edi­tor;
  - edit­ing audio on the time­line;
  — adjust­ment of the sound lev­el;
  - mul­ti-track mix­ing;
  - com­pres­sor, reverb, equal­iz­er, noise reduc­tion;
  - chan­nel mix­er;
  - library of sound effects;
  — dub­bing and dub­bing (ADR);
  - hun­dreds of pro­fes­sion­al tools and much more.

The Davin­ci Resolve win­dow is open and you have fin­ished edit­ing your video and col­or grad­ing. Now you’re ready to dive into audio post-pro­duc­tion and mas­ter­ing — just click the music icon on the bot­tom bar to launch Fairlight.

Now that you’re in the Fairlight pan­el, you can access all of the mix­ers and effects found in a typ­i­cal dig­i­tal audio sta­tion. It’s a fast and effi­cient audio tool because you have access to all the faders.

All your audio tracks are dis­played here. They take up most of the screen area. The video being edit­ed still appears in the upper right cor­ner of the win­dow, but the focus is on the audio.

Even if you’re new to Fairlight or audio post-pro­duc­tion in gen­er­al, most of the fea­tures can be found intu­itive­ly.

The parts in the pho­to cir­cled in red are some of the most impor­tant sec­tions to under­stand and which you will be main­ly work­ing on. While there are many fea­tures, we will focus on the most use­ful ones.

The mix­er pan­el is locat­ed in the upper right cor­ner. You can use the mix­er to bal­ance audio lev­els, apply effects, EQ, com­pres­sors, lim­iters, pan­ning, and more. There is also an Order option that allows you to choose the pro­cess­ing method, whether it be dia­logue, atmos­phere, sound effects, etc.

You’ll also find Meters here, where you can track lev­els and LUF (loud­ness scale) val­ues ​​through­out the time­line.

The Meta­da­ta sec­tion dis­plays all the infor­ma­tion asso­ci­at­ed with each audio file in your project.

The Inspec­tor Pan­el pro­vides quick access to sev­er­al of the most com­mon­ly used effects and tools.

There are two slid­ers direct­ly below the video win­dow. One adjusts the height of your audio tracks in the time­line and the oth­er adjusts their scale. If you need to work on a spe­cif­ic sec­tion of the audio track, these are very handy tools to get close to it.

When you mas­ter the basic func­tions, you can cus­tomize the hotkeys for your­self.

In the mid­dle you’ll see a time­line and icons like the Selec­tion tool and the Range selec­tion tool that let you select a spe­cif­ic part of your clip.

You also have a Razor tool for split­ting a clip, and a Snap tool for match­ing audio on oth­er tracks.

You’ll also find Mark­ers for mark­ing areas that need work. They will help you be more orga­nized and effi­cient in a short amount of time.

The first thing you need to do is tag your tracks accord­ing­ly. Your tracks will be named as Audio 1, Audio 2 and so on. Dou­ble-click a title and then right-click a track to change the col­or, title, and col­or code of each track. You can also group track types by col­or for eas­i­er brows­ing and group them into cat­e­gories.

Each track has a num­ber of let­ter des­ig­na­tions list­ed under the track name.

R — record, that is, a record. If you need to record your voice, press R on a new track and make sure you have a micro­phone or appro­pri­ate device con­nect­ed to your lap­top or com­put­er.

The let­ter S means that only the track that you marked with this let­ter will play.

M — mute, turn off an indi­vid­ual track / tracks. Every­thing will play, except for tracks marked with the let­ter M.

When you’re ready to start trim­ming the audio, hov­er over the end of the clip and drag left/right to short­en or length­en.

Each audio clip has a small icon on the side that points down. Here you adjust the atten­u­a­tion of the sound, as well as the atten­u­a­tion angle.

A tiny white line run­ning hor­i­zon­tal­ly across each audio chan­nel is used to change the vol­ume and also allows you to set key points for more detailed atten­u­a­tion, lev­els, etc.

If you need to go even deep­er into clean­ing or restor­ing audio, you can con­nect an exter­nal edi­tor such as Izo­tope RX to Fairlight and right-click on a track to select it.

The same can be done with any oth­er exter­nal plu­g­ins. When you con­nect them, you can use them with the built-in set of Fairlight plu­g­ins.

This is just a sum­ma­ry of some of the Fairlight fea­tures. There are many tools at your dis­pos­al that allow you to do almost any­thing with your audio.

If you’re cur­rent­ly using Resolve only for video edit­ing and col­or grad­ing, and now you’re think­ing about work­ing in more detail with audio, just stay in one pro­gram. Take full advan­tage of what Fairlight Audio has to offer.