Hi Zooliners,

Let's go! As we edit our projects in DaVinci Resolve, we prefer to stay in one software for greater flexibility. This is made possible by the implementation of Fairlight, a digital audio workstation (DAW).

A note on Fairlight

In 2016, Blackmagic acquired Fairlight and began implementing it with the release of DaVinci Resolve 14. It should be noted that Fairlight is not as stable or polished as Pro Tools, the industry standard DAW for mixing, but Blackmagic is improving it a lot by adding more features with each update. So be warned - it is still a bit experimental in its approach.

THE ELEMENTS OF A MIX

To understand what goes into creating a mix, let's break it down in reverse.

Your final mix is called a printmaster. This is what the audience will hear when they watch a film. Depending on your deliverables, this can be in a variety of formats, such as stereo or 5.1 surround. In our example, we are mixing in stereo.

The core elements for your printmaster will be dialogue, music and sound effects. These are what we call DME stems.

What are stems?

Audio stems are individual or grouped audio tracks that can form a final mix when mixed together. For example, a dialogue stem might contain all of the dialogue from a scene, a music stem might contain all of the music and effects stems contain all the sound effects, foleys and ambiences.

Stems can also be used for dubbing or cutdowns. Dubbing is the process of adding new dialogue in other languages to an existing film. Cutdowns are shorter versions of a film. Finally, stems are also for preservation and archival purposes.

If you are mixing for broadcast or video on demand, you will also be asked for M&E-Stems. Most of the time, a distinction is made between dipped and undipped M&E-Stems. Depending on what you have to deliver, the mixing process will vary. We create our template to cater for both scenarios.

Dipped vs. undipped M&E

Dipped M&E stems group together music and effects stems that have been mixed with dialogue so that the dialogue is always audible. This is done by automating the volume of the music and effects so that they duck down when dialogue is present.

Undipped M&E stems group together music and effects stems that have not been mixed with dialogue. This is used for dubbing in other countries, allowing the re-recording mixer to duck the music with the new dialogue.

Last but not least, we have all the sounds that make up our stems. These will live on dedicated tracks. For dialogue it can be various types like dialogue, ADR or voice-overs. For music it can be various instruments and for effects it can be sound effects, foleys and ambiences.

What is ADR?

Automated dialogue replacement (ADR) is the process of re-recording dialogue in a studio after filming. It allows for the replacement of unusable recordings or the addition of new dialogue to a scene during post-production.

In order to create these stems, we use something called a bus.

What is a bus?

A bus combines individual audio signals and can be used to group audio tracks together so that they can be manipulated as a single signal. This is achieved by sending a signal from a track to a bus, also known as routing.

A bus can be used for a variety of purposes. We often use it to create submixes, e.g. a dialogue submix.

What is a submix?

A submix is a bus used to process a group of audio signals. The result can be sent to another bus or printed as a stem.

Another method is to use a bus for reverb or effects in general. Typically, you would send a signal from a track to a reverb bus and then back to a submix.

Sounds complicated? Here is an example of a dialogue track that is supposed to have some reverb:

Let's say you have a dry studio recording of dialogue and you want to place it in an environment like a bathroom. The signal would be sent in parallel to the dialogue submix and a second bus with a reverb plugin on it set to 100% wet. The reverb bus then gets sent back to the dialogue submix too.

What is Dry/Wet?

A Dry/Wet control is a common feature in plug-ins. It controls how much of the effect is applied, with “full dry” meaning no effect and “full wet” meaning full effect. For a reverb bus, you would normally use 100% wet, as the amount of reverb is controlled by the bus-send volume of a track.

Now that we have enough information, we can start building our template.

The TEMPLATE

Let's start by creating a new timeline in Resolve. This will be your template for future projects, which you can update and customize to suit your needs. For example, you could create templates for different types of film, such as features, documentaries or social media assets.

To make things easier, we've created a little cheat sheet with all the bus and routing information you'll need for this tutorial. Feel free to make a copy to adjust it.

DaVinci Resolve - Fairlight Configuration Preset

All of our next steps will take place in the Fairlight tab, so make sure you head over there.

STEP 1 - HOW TO CREATE A BUS

We'll start by creating all the busses we'll need for our deliverables.

To create a bus, go to Fairlight > Bus-Format...

This will open a pop-up window where you can add up to 256 busses.In the image below you can see the busses we need to create:

Here's a bit of background on what we have here:

PM is our Printmaster for broadcast (e.g. EBU R128) and PM Web is a boosted Printmaster for web purposes, such as YouTube.

MnE and MnE Dip are our music and effects submixes. The former is not dipped to dialogue.

DX Sub, MX Sub and FX Sub are the separate submixes for all our dialogue, music and effects and will be used for our DME Stems.

The effects are also split into smaller submixes such as PFX Sub (production sound effects), SFX Sub (sound effects), FOL Sub (foleys) and AMB Sub (ambiences).

This gives us a lot of control in the mixing process and makes it super easy to create our final deliverables.

If we press OK and look at our mixer, we can see that our bus outputs are all set to PM. If you only see the PM bus, make sure you expand the mixer panel by dragging the left edge of the panel. We prefer to work in the Single Mixer View, which can be found in the hidden menu with the three dots. Next we set up the routing.

Step 2 - BUS-ROUTING

You can change the routing by clicking the little arrow on an existing output or you can add a new one with the plus icon. If you have read this far, you should have an understanding of why we route the busses the way it’s shown in the graphic.

But there is one bus that works a little differently and that is the MnE dip. Instead of sending it via a bus output, we choose to send it via Bus-Sends. This allows us to send this signal before any fader adjustments.

For this to work, you need to set the Send-Level to 0 and enable the Pre button. Pre means that the signal is sent before the fader.

STEP 3 - WE NEED MORE REVERB

We like to have enough reverb busses in our template so that we don't have to create new ones during the mixing process. In general, you will want to have dedicated reverbs for each group of tracks (DX, MX, PFX, SFX, FOL and AMB).

Depending on the format, you can use mono, stereo and surround reverbs.

For our stereo mix, we set up 2 mono and 2 stereo busses for each group. This gives us a total of 24 reverb busses.

We create the reverb busses in the same way as our submixes. Again, you need to make sure that the bus outputs are set correctly. Each reverb goes to its respective submix. There is also a faster way to route signals in Fairlight.

Go to Fairlight > Bus Assign... from the top menu.
This will open another pop-up window.

You can toggle between icon and list view in the top right corner. To send a signal to a bus, simply click on a bus output in the Busses section and select the track you want to send to under Available Tracks. You can also drag the selection to set the output for multiple busses. Repeat this process for all of your reverb busses. You should end up with something like this:

STEP 4 - TRACKS, TRACKS, TRACKS…

So far, we have only created busses that send our potential signals along the right paths, but in order for them to receive anything, we need tracks that actually contain audio.

We also like to categorize our tracks in the same way as our submixes. The total number of tracks per submix is up to you. Generally, we like to have about 8 tracks per submix, but this is not always the case and can change during the mixing process.

Let's start with the dialogue:All our dialogue tracks will be set to mono. Create 8 mono tracks.

We will use 4 tracks for dialogue, 2 tracks for ADR, 1 track for Voice Overs and 1 for Futzing.

What is futzing?

Futzing is used to make something sound like it's coming from a different speaker (e.g. a radio, phone or TV speaker) to match the scene. This can be achieved using equalisation, distortion or other plug-ins.

As you may have guessed, we need to change the Bus Outputs to our DX Sub and also set the Bus Sends to our 4 dedicated reverb busses. When assigning the sends, make sure that their level is set to -∞ and that they are not in Pre mode (this should be default). This way we can automate the reverb later in the mixing stage by sending our signal post-fader to a reverb bus.

Ok, now we need to repeat this process for all our other tracks for the MX Sub, PFX Sub, SFX Sub, FOL Sub and AMB Sub.

Here is a quick overview of the tracks we use in our preset. See our cheat sheet for more details. In case you were wondering, we like to have our PFX section right after our dialogue, as they often go together.

OK, so it's getting more and more complex, which is why we use colour labels to keep track of everything. We can also take this a step further and move our busses around. We like to have our reverb busses right behind the tracks they belong to.

There is a more efficient way to move busses in the Index panel.

Click on the Index icon and scroll down to your reverb busses. Shift-click on the DX Rev busses and drag them below your last DX track. Repeat this process for all other busses.

STEP 5 - VCAS

A VCA, short for Voltage Controlled Amplifier, is an amplifier that adjusts its gain based on a control voltage. Put simply, it allows you to control the volume of multiple tracks with a single fader.

This can be very useful, for example, if you already have a lot of fader automation on your tracks and you want to make some final adjustments by increasing the gain of a group of tracks. A VCA controls the gain after the track adjustments have been made, so it does not change any of the automation.

It is possible to assign up to 128 VCAs. You can do this either in the mixer, or you can go to Fairlight > VCA Assign... and assign them in the same way as your busses.

Here's how we set up our VCAs:

You can rename your VCAs in the Index or Mixer panel. If you move the fader of a VCA, it will magically move the faders of the assigned tracks by the same amount. Try it yourself!

Tip: We like to place the VCAs next to the reverb busses for a cleaner look in the mixer.

STEP 6 - GROUPS

Groups are another way of manipulating your tracks. You can create different groups to set up different controls. This will make more sense when you see it in action.

To set up groups, simply go to your index panel. Make sure Tracks is selected at the top. This will bring up the Groups panel in the bottom half. To create a new group, click on the + icon. This will open a pop-up window.

It's easy to use. Under Controls you can select what you want to control for your group and under Group Members you can select the tracks you want to be a member. Select the tracks on the left and add them using the little arrows.

We like to set up groups with Editing Controls. This allows you, for example, to edit all the clips in a group at the same time. Let's say you want to trim your clips on several tracks. By selecting your group, you will automatically select all the clips below your playhead and perform the same editing task.

To activate a group's controls, make sure it is highlighted in the Group panel.

STEP 7 - DELIVERABLES

This template makes it super easy to create our deliverables.

But before we do that, we need to set up some tracks to bounce out stems to. For this tutorial, we will create stereo tracks for our Printmaster, M&E and DME. We also add a bus for the stems to be able to monitor them. Make sure you only route the stems to this bus.

All you need to do is go to Timeline > Bounce Mix to Track… and select your Destination Tracks. Hit OK to start bouncing.

STEP 8 - SAVING THE TEMPLATE

Congratulations! You've created your own template. It would be a waste to have to repeat all the steps every time you need to create a mix for a new project.This is where the built-in Preset Library comes in handy. You can save your entire session, including all tracks, busses and routings, in your Fairlight Configuration Presets.

Simply go to Fairlight > Preset Library... and select Fairlight Configuration Presets from the drop-down menu. Click Save New and give it an appropriate name. You may wish to create different presets for different types of projects.

The next time you work on a new project, you can simply load it from there and it will set up the session for you.

And that's it. That was very technical and hopefully not too hard to follow.

Greetings on top, from Zoo Kid On The Blog