Hey there good people, my name is Scott and you are watching Sword & Shield Studio.
Right now we are going to learn how to keyframe your audio in the DaVinci Resolve Fairlight page.
Doing this you can even out the general loudness of your dialogue clips, cut out unwanted sounds
between sentences and generally clean things up and make it ready for equalization, dynamics,
and other effects too. This process will take care of anything that
normalization may have missed in terms of loudness. So let's see how we can do it.
Okay, so I am on the Fairlight page in DaVinci resolve now where I have a take of the
introduction for another video that I shot. Before we make any modifications, let's listen
back to this clip and identify what we should modify if anything with keyframes. [Introduction
Playing] Okay, so it's a pretty good sounding recording without any modifications. However,
there are just a few things we can do to improve it. The first thing I notice is there is a point
where the audio is louder than the surrounding recording and rises into the red levels.
We can identify this without playing the entire clip back by just looking at the waveforms.
You see right here where the playhead is the waveform extends beyond the surrounding area
and even beyond some of the louder points in the rest of the recording.
So in order to correct this we will bring down the peak of this waveform with a couple keyframes.
There are two ways you can set keyframes in your audio, you can set them in the inspector
at the top right of Resolve here. Go to a point where you want to set a keyframe, say, right here
and left click the diamond icon to the right of 'Volume'. Alternatively, you can hold 'Alt'
and left click the point on the timeline where you want to set a keyframe in your audio.
I will set one right at the peak here. This is the method I prefer as it tends to be quicker.
So what we want to do here is set three keyframes around this point here to create
a gradual audio adjustment that's unnoticeable. Every audio waveform in existence has a peak,
or its loudest, highest point, and troughs, the lowest, quietest, surrounding points.
You want to identify these three points and set keyframes at them to get the most
natural sounding volume adjustment. In my case I believe those are at these three points. The
first keyframe I set with the inspector, the middle one I set with alt, and I will hold alt
and left click right here which I believe is the other trough. Next I will hold left click over the
center keyframe at that loud peak and just drag it down a bit
and if we play this back let's see how it sounds and looks. Great, it does not go into the red and
it sounds much more even with the surrounding loudness and the volume adjustment we made is
unnoticeable since it's so gradual. Another adjustment I would like to make in this recording
is removing an audible breath towards the end of the intro here. I will play that back for you now,
it may be difficult to hear. Right here where I take a breath.
I don't want to completely remove it and introduce complete silence because that doesn't exist in any
recording. I just want to reduce it to make it less noticeable. So in order to do that,
go to the beginning of the pause, zoom in, hold alt and left click twice to create two keyframes
at the beginning of that pause. And do the same thing at the end of the pause and then hold left
click until you get the two arrows here at the center of that pause and drag it down
between -8 and -10 dB typically works. And if we play this back, you see that breath is no longer
there, it's no longer noticeable but it's not unnaturally quiet as though there's pure silence
there either. That does it for this tutorial. I hope that by watching this video you learn how to
make fine adjustments to your audio by keyframing it and can imagine a couple different scenarios
where you'd use these techniques. If you did, please consider subscribing to the channel where
I upload a video just like this one every week. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.