Overview of the Fairlight page - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- Fairlight is a fully functional, digital audio workstation, and it's completely integrated into DaVinci Resolve. What I've done is create a new project that I've shipped with the exercise files for this training. I've imported it here into the project manager. Let's double-click and open it. And I'm on the Fairlight page, and you can see that my media is offline. And I haven't relinked it on purpose, because I wanted to show you something. I just press shift + z to frame up the entire timeline. I can open up the media pool within the Fairlight page, right-click on the master bin, and choose relink clips for selected bin. And that'll be all the bins listed here in the master bin category. And now I'm going to come down and navigate to my desktop, dig into my exercise files, projects media, DRA, that's where all of our footage exists that I shipped with this training. Click OK, and now it's going to find the matching media. And when it's done, everything comes back online. I'll close the media pool. You can see that Fairlight really is integrated into the rest of this pipeline, even with the media pool, even with relinking. By the way, if you have external resources that you want to drop into your mix, you can do that directly through the edit page tool here on the Fairlight page. What I've done is I've broken down all of the different soundtracks onto their own individual track here. So I've got the VO on one, husband, wife, nat sound, and music. And I've put some nat sound in here, so that if you want to practice mixing on a fully conformed spot, you can do that with the exercise files that I've presented to you. Now one of the things I want to do is make these tracks a little bit wider, so I can see their wave forms. I'm going to open up our view options. And one of the really neat things I like here in Fairlight is this scroller. And there's audio scroller one, you can have audio scroller two, and a video scroller that goes along with that. I don't particularly care for the video scroller, so I hide it, but I can imagine it could be useful if you're doing foley type of work. I'm going to close this down, and you can see that I can assign each of these scrollers to a different track. So I've got five different tracks on here, but what I want to focus on for now is the wife track. So I'm going to select the wife track to display on auto scroller one, and I'm going to go with the music track on auto scroller two. Hit play. Clearly this is not mixed, that's okay. I just want to show you that this feature is here. And when you're done with it, to close it and get rid of it, just turn these off and you don't have to have them anymore. Another aspect of the Fairlight page that I want to point out, especially when it comes to integration with the edit page, is that if we click on the inspector and we click on a clip, let's say this VO track here, I've got this four band equalizer. This is the same four band equalizer as back on the edit page. So if I click on my VO track here, I'm going to take this first line of VO in this last batch here. I'll open up the inspector, expand it out. I'll turn on the clip equalizer, and just take bands two and three, just pull them up, not even going to listen to it. The point here is when I click into the Fairlight page, in the inspector, the four band equalizer is activated with those precise settings. I can just turn it off here in the inspector on the Fairlight page. I go back into the edit page and there it is. Again, the point being complete integration between the two pages. But of course, the Fairlight page has its own equalizer. I can double click. There's a six band equalizer, but this equalizer is for the entire track, not for the individual clips like it is here in the inspector. I'm going to close that out. Another tool that's very useful here is this range selection mode. So if I just want to focus in on a small part of my timeline, yeah I could zoom in and out, and then I could try to scroll to the right place, or I could just take this selector and just say 'yeah this is what I want to focus on'. Now when I press alt + / it's only going to play through to this little section in here. I'll pause. And then to clear that out, I'll just click and it clears out that range selection. That allows me to play down a very particular piece of section that I'm focusing on at this moment. As we come up here into the Fairlight menu, you're going to find a lot of options you might find interesting. One that I like is test tone settings. So you can go up here and create test tones for your purposes. Another thing I find very interesting is the immersive controls. So you can do Atmos style audio mixing here in Fairlight. And you've got a 3D space that if I had seven or ten speakers set up, I could replicate that here and then control each of these audio tracks in 3D space. Two other things I want to point out before we really start digging into the mix. One is loudness metering. For those of you who are delivering to broadcast, this is going to be important to you. I'm going to hit play, we haven't mixed down, but you can see that it's measuring loudness over time and giving you your average over that time. You can choose your different loudness standards that you want to optimize this tool for. Before this had appeared in Fairlight, I had never seen a loudness tool integrated into any of these platforms that didn't cost you extra money. I was really quite astonished to see that black magic had delivered this as part of the Fairlight page. And then finally, if you're working on a dual screen set up, you can pop out this viewer and then go ahead and put it on a secondary screen on an extended desktop. And those are some of the additional features that we haven't talked about previously here on the Fairlight page.