DaVinci Resolve for Busy People: Audio Editing Course

1. Course Introduction: Welcome back to our Davinci Resolve for busy people, video editing series. So in this course, I'm going to show you how to harness the power of Da Vinci Resolves simple audio editing tools, seamlessly navigate around the audio timeline and execute professional, great techniques to elevate your sound quality with precision and most importantly, speed. My name is Jason Georgiads. I'm a professional filmmaker producer and video editor. I have a master's degree in film directing from Cal Arts and worked in Hollywood as a professional editor for Vice Warner Brothers and The Hollywood Reporter. That time I've also produced, directed and edited two feature films with commercial distribution from 1091 and Gravitas Ventures. My most recent feature, beneath the green, was edited and color corrected using Davinci resolve. However, you don't need to be professional editor to elevate your audio skills. Our course breaks down the process into simple, actionable steps. Making audio editing easy and efficient without using sometimes overcomplicated audio interfaces or fair light. I'll be using a simple step by step guide that requires you to follow along with each demo using audio and video files I'll provide to you, so you don't need to use your own files, but you can if you like. The class project will be to create your own audio it from start to finish using the course materials provided to you. Or again, feel free to upload your own edit in the course materials page. By the end of this course, you will learn how to import, edit, and mix sound effects, voiceover, and music. We will also trim clips, adjust levels, and create transitions to make sure everything sounds nice and balanced. Before we export, just keep in mind this is an intermediate level course and is intended to be used in tandem with our Davinci resolve video editing course on skill share. So I strongly recommend you take that course before jumping into this one. Although if you have some experience using Da Vinci, it's absolutely not required. All you need to get started is a laptop or desktop computer with a working version of Davinci Resolve for Mac or Windows. Follow the link in the course description for a free trial version of Davinci resolve that works perfectly with this course. If you're ready to begin, let's get started. 2. Class Project: Okay, so let's have a quick look at our class project that we're going to build together throughout this course. I'll just hit the Space Bar to begin playback tree, and once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. Well, one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm is all about. Seasons change still while I'm okay. This audio project is composed of three main audio elements that you can see down here and we'll get into them a little bit later in the course. The first is voice over. You won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. The second are sound effects. The third is of course our music. Please there. What we will do is import all these audio assets, put them on our timeline, and edit them all together using some basic editing mechanics and simple transitions. Make sure to download all of our sound and video elements before starting this class, or feel free to use your own. The downloads can be found in the Project Resources section on the main course page below this video. In the next lesson, we will learn some basic audio vocabulary that we will use throughout the course. 3. Key Vocabulary: There's going to be a few key words you're going to hear me use a lot throughout this course. The first one is called balancing Audio Balancing involves adjusting volume levels of various sound elements like voice over music and sound effects to achieve a harmonious mix. It ensures each component is audible without overpowering others. The goal here is to create a well blended, clear, and engaging, final audio mix that maintains a balanced presence of all the elements. I'll also use the term stereo and mono a lot as we start to work. Stereo is like using two ears, hearing different things on left and right, making it sound more real. Mono is hearing the same thing on both sides, like using one big ear instead of two sound effects. And voiceover files are mono, and almost all music files are stereo. Finally, audio level refers to how loud or soft a sound is. It's like when you turn up or down the volume on your radio to make it either louder or quieter. In the next lesson, we will look at the essential audio elements of the timeline in Davinci resolve. 4. The Audio Timeline: Individual resolve. I'm working in the edit tab below, I'm running version 18.6 so be sure to use the most updated version of Vinci before we get started, I've included those links below this video in the resources section. I'll begin by creating a new timeline by going to file new timeline Above, I'll name this time line Audio, Edit, Uncheck. Use Project settings to customize your timeline. I'll then go to Format. Make sure the frame rate is set to 23.97 and the resolution to 1920 by 1080. And click Create. With the time line created, you can see now that we have a working timeline to start adding elements to the top track is of course video and below audio, right off the bat. If you're having trouble seeing the elements of the audio track, just go ahead and pull down on this horizontal line to see the track elements a little better. The only elements we really need to concern ourselves with here are the lock, track solo and mute elements. Locking the track simply disables the track, so we cannot edit any elements there. It keeps it safe so we don't make any mistakes while working. Solo allows us to hear only what is present on that track. In order to isolate from other tracks, M is to mute the whole channel, like the mute button on your TV remote. This number here, 2.0 means that the track has two distinct audio tracks or channels otherwise known as stereo. If this were a 1.0 what would that mean? It would mean that the channel is mono, or one channel. We can create an infinite number of stereo or mono tracks to accommodate the needs of our project. We'll do that a little later, but for now, let's have a look at the audio meter, an essential reference tool for balancing our audio and for final mixing. 5. The Audio Meter: To the immediate right of your time line, you'll see these strange audio monitors. This is the mixer, so if you don't see, make sure to activate them by heading to the top of the Davinci main page here and making sure mixer is highlighted and toggled or checked on like so. This audio meter in Davinci helps check out how loud or quiet sounds are in a video. It's like a ruler for sound showing if it's too loud like someone yelling or too quiet like someone whispering so that it sounds just right. Like when you adjust the volume on your TV to make sure it's not too loud or too soft. For most projects, you'll always want this meter to never rise above or peak beyond negative five here, or be too low under negative 20. This is the range where we can hear that audio is nice and balanced throughout our edit. So keep things in that range. Let's have a look at the audio meters as we play back our edit. Yu yu tree. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through. So you'll notice on the right hand side where it says bus one. That is our final volume mix. No single piece of audio rises above negative five, or below negative 15 or negative 20. That's right where we want our audio levels to be to ensure that our project audio levels sound nice and balanced when we deliver it for export. That's what we want to aim for at the end of our project. So be sure to stay tuned for that. It's where the majority of errors I see occur when I see student work. In the next lesson, we will import our clips and create new audio channels to accommodate the new media. 6. Import Media: Project dia pool window. Here I'll simply right click to import files. By selecting import media, I'll navigate to where I've saved my audio and video files. Here four files will populate nicely in our window. One is our video, and three are the remaining audio files. The three audio files are composed of one sound effects file, one voice over file, storm is over one music file. I've included a video file to use in conjunction with this demo here in the media pool, simply double click this to activate it in the viewer. And one quick note about my viewer here. I'm working from a laptop, so if you want your set up to look like mine, have a look here in the corner. If you toggle this small rectangular icon here, it will trigger the viewer and canvas windows to be on or off at the same time. I recommend turning them both on for this demo. And keep in mind, in order to see that happening, the inspector tab must be deactivated. 7. Create Audio Tracks: In the timeline. Here we want to create three tracks, one for voice over, one for sound effects, and one for music. We do this to keep things nice and tidy. By doing so, we can switch each element on and off as we do our balancing volume adjustments and final mixing. Let's go ahead and right click below the first audio track and create a mono track for voiceover. I'll select a track mono. To do so, let's create an additional track by right clicking once again, below here, and creating a stereo track for music. I'll select Ad Track Stereo. And there we go. You'll notice now these numbers on each track. Our first audio track is 2.0 stereo. The second 1.0 mono, and the third is 2.0 stereo. I like to keep music last track three is okay for stereo as it matches our track. For music, which is stereo, I'm going to change track one to be Mano, because we will place our Mano voice over track here. I'll simply right click the track name and change track type two Mano. Now you can see track one listed as 1.0 otherwise known as Mano. We're all set up now to put some sound clips on their proper channels. In the next lesson, we will import the video to give us a place to begin our audio project. 8. Audio Rough Cut: Right, So let's get into the carrots and sticks of the audio edit. Of course, we have our four media assets here, audio and video. We're going to start with video. I'm just going to double click the rain MP four video file here to activate it in the viewer. And remember once again, I've had this issue in the past before. Some students weren't able to see the windows as clearly as mine. So be sure to make sure this little rectangular window is selected to see both the viewer and the canvas at the same time and that inspector is turned off. So I'm going to head into the rain dot Mpeg four clip, double click that to activate it. And you'll see the video icon here appear. And the icon, I just want the video, so I'm just going to pull that right down. I'm clicking and dragging on that icon to pull it down onto V one or V two. Doesn't matter. There's a little gap here. So I'm just going to select our rain clip and shift it, click, drag, and pull it to the left. I love the command shift Z. If you've taken my other Da Vinci editing course, you know this is my favorite shortcut command. And what that does allows us to see the timeline in full, so nothing is clipped here. So if I just hit shift, hold down shift and hit Z, I can see the entire timeline. Pretty cool. I love working like that. Okay, so what we're doing here is placing our video as you can see. There is no audio. There is no audio yet. So let's put in our first piece of audio which is going to be our VO from Rosita. So we're going to double click up here into our voice over asset. This is quite common. A lot of people do use voiceover, including yours truly here. So let's have a look at this. I will double click this file to activate it. And right here you can see the preview of the audio file. And you can also see larger sort of global view of the clip. This is the audio asset from start to finish, and as you can see, if I play it through, Mm hmm. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it. There's a bunch of junk in the beginning that we don't need. So I will actually revs know, drag my playhead up here in this global view to the beginning of where Rosita starts speaking here. I'll press for in to set an end point, press play. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through. We'll keep playing. You managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm is all about. I hit Spacebar to stop playback and I want to set my outpoint. So I'm going to hit out, There we go. Now I'm just going to drag the split right onto one. So click, hold, and drag anywhere here, anywhere here, pull it down, just like so. Okay, there you have it. So now we've pulled down Rosita's voice over onto one. I'll do a quick playback and once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through. A little soft, right? It's not that loud. Don't worry about that right now. Because remember we want those audio levels to peak or rise or never go above negative ten or negative five. So if I actually play this back, how you managed to survive super quiet, you won't even negative 20. We don't want that really, but don't adjust that right now. This is just getting things roughly placed in. Okay, let's move on to our sound effects. Let's say sound effects, thunder rain, storm, rain here. Double click on that press plate. Very cool. And I'll just pull that right down onto 82. Okay, click, drag, and pull that asset. I'll do a quick playback. You can hear it stuttering a little bit, and that's because of my processor. It should clear up. Okay, there we go. As you can see, it's super crazy. Too loud with the thunder store brain and sina. We can't even hear her. Don't even worry about that. We'll trim that up later and adjust those audio levels later. Okay. And last but not least, probably the trickiest part of this is the music. You can use any part of Chet's song that you want. And by the way, I highly recommend you check out his album. Chet Vincent is a local talent based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has a great album out, and we've pulled a song from his album. He's been kind enough to let us use that. So let's double click. Music Here it's called Young Leaves and there's different parts of the song. So let's see which part I like. You can use any part of the song that you like for the demo. I'm going to get it to match the one that I had in the demo that I showed you in the beginning. So let's see if I can find it again. This global setting, this global view up here allows me to see the whole song. Kind of like a bird's eye view. Check out all the different parts of the song that I might want to scan to. So and I can actually click in any part of that song in the global view area to get to that point. Super handy. So let's see what we got here. I like that part I like when he starts singing. So let's see if we can pinpoint our point by I'm going to hit space bar. I like that first snare hit, which is this moment here. And I'll actually use the left and right arrow keys to precisely pinpoint my point. Check this out. Left arrow key. I'm just hitting it one after the other here. Okay, I went a little bit too far. Let me go to the right now and I'll put my endpoint there. Perfect for, So that's my endpoint. That's where I want my music to begin. Let's hit Space Bar Play. Back on. Perfect. Okay, let's just pull all of that down onto the click anywhere here, click and drag to three. If you mess up, let's say you pull it onto two or one. Just go ahead and click Edit, Undo and try again. Okay, so once again, here's the music track activated in the viewer. Want to click hold and drag onto three. Alright, that's all I want to do. I just wanted to get all my assets in place. If I play it back, it's an absolute mess in terms of the mix. But that's totally normal in this process. 9. Audio Trimming: One of the main issues I see when people start audio editing is they go into this Fair Light tab. And I think that that's totally overkill for most of the projects that I work on personally. And to be quite honest with you, I almost never even touch it. So let me show you some of the quick tricks, tips and hacks that I use to cut and balance audio from this point forward. So this is really the heart of the lesson here. And let me show you how I go about basic audio mixing transitions without automation or using fair light. Let's have a go here. So again, if you're too zoomed in or you can't see all the assets clearly, just punch shift, hold down shift, and Z. It's my absolute favorite. As you can see, the edit itself needs to be trimmed a little bit. So I'll actually just cut and trim and accommodate everything to the video file that we have here. So I'm going to just make this video around 1 minute at this stage. It's as you can see here, I'm just clicking in the ruler bar here. Okay, this is about right. So 1 minute I will just head to the end of this video file. Track here, the tail. I will click hold and drag to my scrubber bar. I'm going to zoom in a little bit by pressing command. Plus if you took my editing course, you know all these shortcuts by now. So if you haven't taken that, I strongly recommend you do so right now, snapping is turned off. I'm going to turn that on. I'm going to hit for snapping, and that makes it magnetic, and we'll snap our playhead to our video file. So it's about 57 seconds. That's good. You don't have to make it exactly 1 minute if you don't want to shift Z to see where we're at. Okay, so let's trim down our sound effects to our video. I'll just come to the end of our sound effects. Thunder, storm, rain, track here, grab the end of it, hold down on the end of it. Click and drag to the left, and it should snap to our playhead. Same thing with Chet Song here. I'm going to click, hold, and drag this third piece, drag it all the way. Click, hold, and drag. That's why that little snapping element in Da Vinci is so critical. Let's hit shift Z and see what we're working with here much better. As you can see, we've got a 1 minute long video, three assets that we're going to manipulate here in a little bit. And it looks like we have a little gap there. So I'm just going to nudge our music file to the left to accommodate for this little tiny gap here. So let me just click hold on that asset and drag to the left. It'll snap to the beginning. And I'll fix this right handed tail. That has a little gap too. So all right, now everything's in place, We need to work on our timing. So let's check that out. I'm going to go to the beginning of our video here and do a quick playback to see where we're Yu, Yu tree. Okay? I want Rosita's voice over to come in after Chet stops singing that first line. So I need to get a sense where that is. And I'm going to do that by again, just pulling down on these little rows here to see a little bit more of what I've got to work with with audio. If you're having trouble seeing a little bit more, just pull up on this main separation bar between the video and the audio. Click hold and drag this little bar here. You see that it's a little hard to see, but your cursor should turn into that bar with the two arrows and you can do this for all of the tracks to get a sense. Now if you're not seeing these, what we call waveforms, these little mountains, these white mountains that tell us what the audio looks like. Go ahead and go into this timeline view options here. And you'll see a little selection, a little item here that allows us to see, to toggle on the wave form. So make sure that that is turned on or else you won't see what I'm seeing here. So just click away to get back to where we are. And I just like to see my audio waveforms to let me know what I'm doing with my audio. And this is a kind of a graphical representation of the highs and lows of a sound effects or music file. So let's have a look again. Do you remember how loud music is supposed to be? 10. Adjusting Volume: It's kind of a trick question, so nothing should exceed negative five DB. So let's have a look. I'm cross referencing my master audio mixer as I do this. So let's check this out. Way too high? Way too high. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in here command on the music. There is a thin white line running across each of these audio files. This is your volume bar. If I raise or lower this bar, it will raise or lower the volume of that clip. Check it out. Let's click hold and drag on the line for Music. And drag it all the way down. Look at what happened to the waveform. It's decreasing and as I do that, you can barely hear it. Let me raise it, click, hold, and drag on the white line. It will turn into this double white arrow. I have raised the bar here. Yeah, so let's just get it to negative ten. Still too loud. Click, drag, and lower it tree. Pretty good. It doesn't peak above negative five because as I play back, it doesn't go above negative five. Perfect. What about the thunderstorm? It's a little high to me so I'm going to turn that one too. So I'll just turn the whole thing down by clicking and dragging on that line and turning it down. Yue, Perfect one. That's pretty good to me. And use your ears too, right? Whatever sounds good to you, should the sound effects of the rain be super high? Super low. It's a taste thing as well. This is just how I like it. There are no right or wrong answers, but there definitely is too loud or too soft. One song tree, okay? So as you can see, Rosita starts talking, but I can't hear a word she's saying. So we need her to start talking after Chet stops singing. So where is that tree? U, after the old tree. That's about right here. Let's click and drag Rosita's vio to the right. After Chet stop singing, please. The old tree. Okay. I'm just going to maybe push it a little bit over to the left. If you're having trouble with the snapping, just turn it off here with the magnetic icon. But I usually leave it on and she's talking really, really low. So I'll just raise her bar up a little bit. I'm just going to drag over to the right to see a little bit more. You can zoom in or out command minus or plus, whatever you like. And I'll drag her global volume bar. I'm not sure what to call it other than that. And I'll just raise that up once the storm is over, remember. Okay, well, at least I can hear her now. But she needs to really stand out. She needs to be foregrounded. I want to be able to hear her and not the thunder storm, rain, or the song as soon as she starts talking. So how do we do that? 11. Check In!: So at this stage we have all the essential elements in place. It's important to remember, not to rush. Want to roughly place our audio clips and we'll refine them as we move along in the final edit. In the next lesson, I'll show you my number one tip for creating fast and seamless audio transitions without complicated Keynote automation or using fair light. 12. Transition Hacking I: The first thing we're going to do is I'll just turn down the volume in certain sections and add cross fades. So check this out. I'm going to hit the B key for blade, because my snapping is on, it's going to snap right to this point where I want it to cut, where Rosita's Vio comes in. Because remember what we're trying to do here is we're trying to make the music dip down softly. We don't want to notice the abrupt dynamic shift in the music or the sound effects. We want it to be nice and smooth and not noticeable. I see a lot of students make a lot of mistakes. You just hear the change and we don't want to hear anything. It should just be smooth and seamless. I'll make two cuts here. I'm going to make a cut on the sound effects right when Rosita's Vio comes in. And I'll make another one here on the music At this stage, I'm going to another cut I just pulled over to the right a little bit again, if you're having trouble, Command minus command plus. And just scroll to the right to see what's going on. I'll make another cut at the end of the VO right here on the sound effects again on the music. I do this all the time. I have no patience and no time to do automation. And this and that. I'm going to hit the A key now A A is for arrow and I'm going to lower each of these volume bars, the global bars here. For volume, I'm going to just drag them down, both of them for sound effects and music. Check this out, I'm going to play back. And once the storm is over, you want to remember how you made it. So what's happening here? What you're hearing is this abrupt shift in volume as you can see. If I just zoom in on this edit point, you can see that there's two distinct line changes here. One, you know the music and the audio for the storm is very high. And then abruptly, because of the cut that we made and the change that we made to volume, it just shifts down dramatically. And once the storm is over, we don't want that, it's too noticeable. So let's add a cross fade into this. So I'm going to go over into my effects panel here on the upper left. If you don't see it activated, just head to the top left, click effects, go do audio transitions, okay. And you can use cross fade zero. I'm going to add one, I'm going to just click drag, and pull it onto my first sound effects edit point here. I'll do the same thing here with the music file. Click do, pull, until it goes to the music. Now let's have a listen. And once the storm is over, that's pretty good, actually. I'm unhappy with that. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through. That's pretty dynamite. I was going to make a little bit of a tiny change here, but it's not bad at all. Now if you want to make minor adjustments, here's how to do that. If you don't like where the fade comes in, you don't like how long the fade is. You can pull this out a little bit to make it a longer fade and once the storm, right, you can make adjustments here to the fate itself, fading into this new change in volume here. What I like to do sometimes, just to fine tune it, this is just a little bit extra info, but super useful. Make sure snapping is off. So hit the key. This is super, super useful actually, now that I think about it. If I turn snapping off and I have the arrow key selected a for arrow, and I head down to that cut point where we just put the cross fade. And I drag it, click hold, and drag. Look what happens. I can kind of like shift and manipulate where this fade comes in, which is pretty neat, let's say I don't exactly like where it fades in. Well, what do I do? Well, I do that. I deactivate snapping. Because if I don't, it'll just snap to this playhead. And I don't want that. You see how it's kind of tricky to do, so I have to turn snapping off, I'll just drag this left and right. Super duper, duper, helpful. So get used to using these shortcut keys and I can just fine tune where I want audio to come in and out and once the storm is over, so Rosita starts talking now. And at this point maybe we want to turn her up a little bit. So let's just click, drag, and hold up on that little white bar. And once the storm is over, do you remember how to check to make sure it's loud enough? That's right. You're going to look over here during playback, make sure the mixer is on right, top, right. Hit playback space bar. You won't remember how you made it through. Excellent. How you managed to survive. She's peaking and speaking around negative ten, negative five. You could even turn her up a little bit more if you like, but totally not necessary. I like it right there, so let's do shift Z. Let's see what else. Ah, okay, We have to deal with these points over here. We have to fade out of that. So when Rosita's done talking, music comes in and sound effects come in, right? So let's zoom in command plus, it's all about again. Too much of an abrupt change here. I'm just going to click hold and drag on the cross fade zero, same thing we did with the other edit point. Click hold and drag, but I'm going to do that with music as well. Click hold, drag on cross fade zero and pull it. It's all about season, pretty good. But maybe we do that little trick. Why not? I'm going with the snapping turned off for arrow. I'm going to make sure that my cursor turns into that double bar there. And just drag a little bit to the left here On both. That's what the storm is all about. Seasons change, awesome. Shift Z to pull out. And let's do a quick playback tree. And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. This is super duper Pro looks and sounds really, really great. 13. Transition Hacking II: So at this stage what we can do is tiny adjustments to volume if you don't like it, but I'm constantly, one can't see me right now, but I'm constantly looking over at this bus one and that's where I'm monitoring. When you come out of the store levels, I don't want to drop person below negative 20 and I don't want to rise above negative five. Walk then that's what the storms all about. Seasons change still while and I'm free. Okay, let's end it maybe around 43 seconds. I know we have it at 1 minute, but let's say we want to trim it a little bit more. I will just click and drag to the left and you'll notice it's not snapping to my playhead. Do you know why, if you guess because snapping is not on. You're correct. So hit the key, Nebraska, and now it should snap to my playhead. Okay. I'm going to drag the audio, the music as well, and the video. Now, I'm going to zoom in Another little trick you'll see is, I don't know if you can see this, I'm just going to pull this a little bit here. You can see this little white ball there. If you pull that, if you click and drag that to the left, it creates a natural fade out or fade in, depending on which side you're coming in from. So if I just click and pull these to the left, another quick little hack, see how it fades out. I'm just going to pull those. This is the same exact thing as using a cross fade, this audio element transition that we used previously. It's just a quick little hack that Da Vinci put in, which is really nice so we don't have to click, drag and pull elements in. I don't recommend you use that for the points we did here, these cut points. I use these all the time, but for basic in and outs, you know, for a track like we're doing here for the ending, just go ahead and use these little bars, these little automation bars to quickly generate an outpoint. 14. Mixing and Balancing: So I like to use the audio mixer as a kind of check for my audio levels. In the final mix, what I'm listening for is anything that might feel a bit too abrupt in the mix. A sudden rise or fall of volume is the number one mistake I see people making when doing the audio editing. So the goal is to normalize or make sure everything sounds nice and even throughout playback. Let's have a listen. I'm not hearing anything dramatic happening here with any of the elements. I'm really quite happy with this. My next step would probably be to play this back without headphones. Just to make sure that as it plays through my speakers on my computer, I am hearing it in the way that many people would. You could even try exporting it to a phone to make sure it sounds good there as well. But there you have it. I mean, these are really the basic elements of quick audio editing. So I can get this exported. So in order to export this, I'll just head into our little rocket ship. I'll come in here and you can use the different export settings here, including Youtube or Vimeo, in order to export your file, clicking ad to render, and hitting the Render All button to get this out. Keep in mind that these audio edits that we've done here are perfect for things like Youtube, Vimeo, social media. You're not going to have any trouble at all with the audio and that is how we export the edit there. That's all we need to do here in order to achieve a perfect balance. 15. Final Word: I want to congratulate you on completing our audio course. And if you enjoyed it, please do. Make sure to post your edit in the class project section down below. And please leave us a fair review because it actually helps us develop and design courses down the line for you. Thanks again for joining me and see you in the next one.