[flow_default] Transcription: 018_-_Fairlight_Pt1_-_Basic_Audio_Mixing_and_Filters.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "018_-_Fairlight_Pt1_-_Basic_Audio_Mixing_and_Filters.wav",
+  "text": "Now let's take a look at the Fairlight page and how we can use it to mix our audio, make everything sound nice. Let's open the 5a Fairlight project and towards the bottom of the screen, just going to click on Fairlight. That's going to bring our whole timeline into Fairlight, just like it does with the other pages. And let's take a look at the interface. Fairlight is pretty much where you do all of your audio mixing. It's like all the advanced controls and everything for actually working with audio. Now, a lot of the stuff that you could do in Fairlight, you could actually do in the edit or cut pages. In fact, what I like to do is get my audio pretty well laid out and timed out and edited as far as, you know, left and right, like moving things around in time, you know, get things like 80% there in the edit page and then move to the Fairlight page to do just kind of some tweaks and make things a little bit nicer. So let's take a look around the interface. pan, change volume levels. A lot of stuff happens here in the mixer. To the left of the mixer, we have our timeline. And this works a lot like the timeline in the edit and cut pages. You can hit shift Z to zoom out and see everything. This is where all of our tracks will go. Now here we have the audio tracks, but we can actually bring up the video tracks too. And all we have to do is click on this button that's timeline view options. And that has a few different icons. This is really similar to the one in the edit page, but up here in the upper left hand side, we have the video tracks. If you click that, that brings up kind of a preview of all of our video tracks from the edit page. But why would you need video tracks if you're not really editing video? Well, video tracks are really nice to be able to see specific parts in your movie. You can kind of use it as more of a visual reference for the timeline. You know, it's easy to pick out where my graphics are by just going to my fusion compositions. It's just a nice way to work. And if, you know, you're freaked out by just a big, huge audio timeline, this'll look a little bit more familiar. Above the timeline, we have our toolbar, just like the other pages. And above this, we have our meters. This is a really big, scary-looking panel that looks really complicated, but all it really is, is really just a bunch of different meters for each track. So when I play this back, we can see the meters bouncing for the dialogue on channel one and the music on channel two. Here at M1, we have our main mix. That's just what the program is actually gonna sound like. You will hear it. to the We also have an edit index, which can bring up some quick information about your project if you need it, as well as a list of markers. If you have that, the fourth button over is our sound library. Now this is super cool. This is a panel that will let you search for sound effects that are on your system and preview them without importing them into your project. It's pretty much just optimized to find sound effects really quickly. So like if I need a whoosh, I can type WOSH. And now we have all of these different sound effects. That will show up and it's really, really handy. So let's say I like this sound effect. I can grab this and just drag it into the timeline and add it just like that. Super easy. So the sound library is a great way to find sounds on your system and lay them into your timeline really easily. What you might be doing in the Fairlight page. One note though, the sound library is actually also available on the edit page. If you go here, the sound library, you can do basically the same thing. It kind of depends on just what you feel like doing. If you're more comfortable adding stuff in the edit page, that works fine. Fairlight is just more kind of focused towards audio. So let's take a look at doing a couple things here. We have this sort of roughly mixed, which means that we can actually hear the VO over the music. Now we might decide that this needs to change a little bit later, but it's okay for now. Let's add a few things to just make this a little bit sweeter. And we're going to use our sound library to do that. Let's go to about 29 seconds. And I'm going to zoom in just by holding Alt and rolling on my mouse wheel to shot 102 here. We'll see this is a close up of her footsteps on this wood. Now we're not going to go through at this level through this entire project during this training. You're welcome to do that yourself, but I'll show you basically how you would do something like lay in Foley just to make things a little bit more immersive. Foley is basically just sound effects that are added in later, which is great for the sound library. The first thing that you're going to need to do is actually load sounds into your sound library because you won't have all the sounds that I have on my system on your system. The way that you do that is in the upper left hand corner, here in our sound library panel, in the top right corner, there's three dots. Go ahead and click on add library. That's going to ask you, hey, where do your sounds live? And in the files that you downloaded for this training, there should be a folder called SFX. Go ahead and just select that folder and hit select folder. Now it's going to scan all those clips and it's going to think about them and it's going to add them to your sound library so that you can quickly access them and that's what we're going to use to do some Foley here. All right. When it's done, it'll say it's successful hit OK. And now you should be able to search for the sounds that I'm going to search for. First thing I'm going to search for is step and you should have some stuff come up. I added a couple more words just to make it easier for me to see what you're seeing. You should pretty much have all of these WB steps, wood boots. That's what we're going to use. And this sound library is really cool because you can just double click any of these to hear them. And once you find one you like, you can just drag it into the timeline. We'll just drag it into this new track and I can make the track bigger or smaller just by dragging this little line up and down. There we can see the waveform and you know, we could see the waveform for the other ones, but we don't really need to right now. And now I can play through this and I'll try and find the exact moment. I'll just move back and forth with my left and right arrows. I'm gonna find the exact moment that she steps. Let's maybe not worry about this first step first and I want this right shoe right there. That's where that step starts. I'm just gonna zoom in and I'm gonna move this to start right about at the same time. I'll also hit the S on this track. That's for solo. That's going to mute the other tracks so that I can just hear this track. There we go. So that works pretty well. Let's add a couple more steps just to make this complete. There we go. And we're going to do that the same way. Let's do this left foot somewhere in there and the right foot somewhere in there. Let's use different ones. And the left foot starts right about there. I'll use 106 this time. And there we have some basic steps laid in. Maybe I'll add one more. And you can trim these just like you would in the edit page. And it looks like she's already kind of walked here. And now we have our basic footsteps fully. This obviously works really well because we have the same kind of chute on the same kind of surface. So it's not always this easy. Sometimes you might have to go record them yourself. These are actually recorded for a library of sounds that we have available. So that works well. And now I'm going to rename this track so that I can keep track of it and we'll rename this footsteps and might as well rename these while we're at it. Music. All I'm doing is just double clicking on them. Go this video. So you have video music and footsteps. Make sure to save. Now let's add just another layer of fun to this sound design is all about layering sounds. So let's go back to our sound library and I'm going to type C-R-E-A-K, Creeke, and that should bring up the Rustic Creek's floor sounds. These again are recorded for one of our libraries and they're just kind of a nice little subtle creaky kind of sound. It's kind of a rule in movies that if there's anything made out of wood it's always creaky, doors always squeak, everything just is freaking loud all the time. So let's grab this and drag that in here and I'll just put this kind of starting at one of the footsteps and I'll make sure to solo this new track as well. And it's a little much. Maybe we'll start at the second one. What you usually try and do is lay sounds down so they're a little bit much but they're at least timed right and somewhat believable and then you just dial them back, right? So I'll grab number two here. And maybe we'll start that right around this time. And let's add one more in between. I'm gonna lay that in there. There we go. So now we have a really creaky floor. Again, this sounds crazy. It's like way over the top, but we're gonna dial it in in a second. And now let's add one more layer. I want to add some ambience. Ambience is like the glue that holds everything together. It's the sound that happens when there aren't any other sounds going on. We happen to have some really cool ambience. If we type forest, we have some nice kind of forest ambience here. I have two on my system, but you should just have one. And again, I can just grab this and drag it down to a new track and it'll make a stereo track for us. Now I'll actually just close my sound library to give us a little bit more room. And now we have this ambience that we can lay under everything. I'll make sure that's soloed as well. And it's obviously way too loud. But again, we're going to mix that in a second. But it's cool because we can add this ambience under whatever shots might be making that ambient sound. So anything that's in the forest probably is safe to say that would probably be that ambient forest sound. The only thing that might be different is right here when we're at the water. So till we get to the water, we can probably use this ambience and I'll just kind of cut it here. And it's nice. It kind of just makes it feel a little bit more full. Again, I'll double click on this name and I'll call it AMB for ambience. Let's go back to our sound library and this time I'm gonna type forest water. These actually might have come up for you as well, but these are ambience that have a little bit more water in them. So maybe that can go around this part when she's down by the water. Let's grab that and just throw that in here in the same track. Maybe just trim that a little bit and see how that goes. And that works. Again, that needs some mixing. We could use some more sound effects here. We could use some more sound effects when she's swishing in the water. That's all stuff you can add if you like. That's the general workflow. Now let's talk about the ambience for the waterfall. We have another water. This is water 120. It sounds a little bit more waterfall-ish here. Let's take a look at that. There. It's not super strong, but we're just going to have that under our music and everything just to make everything feel a little bit more cohesive. Again, I'm just using the same shortcuts that I would in the edit page, just selecting that, hitting control, backslash to delete it. And maybe I'll hold down alt and grab this other forest spaces and just put that in there too. Same thing, cut it right there. And you know what? What the heck? Maybe I'll right click on this and change the color to teal for water, change this one to maybe like more navy for different water and the green will be the forest. So it's just a nice little visual way to see what our ambience is doing. There's another advantage of having the video tracks here and I'll hold down Alt and zoom in and I can adjust this edit to be right at the same time that that edit happens in our video. So now we have everything pretty much laid in. Now it's time to actually make it sound good because it's kind of a mess right now. Again, ideally you, you know, you could go through and put footsteps throughout the entire project. You'd add all kinds of different Foley and everything. If you want to go to that extreme, you have all of the tools to be able to do that here in Fairlight. This might be a project that doesn't need so much treatment. It kind of depends on what you want to do and what the client wants to do if you're getting paid to make something like this. So let's start with a basic audio mix. The first thing that we want to do when you're mixing your audio is actually adjust the levels of the tracks. That's before you get into filters, before you do anything really. So I'm going to close our sound library and I'm going to take the edge of our mixer and just drag it to the left. And now we have all of our different tracks here with our faders and each of these faders is for each track. So it doesn't change each clip. It changes everything that happens in that track. And so they're kind of grouped that way. And what I like to do, especially with ambience is turn it all the way down, but you can really just kind of turn everything down to start out with except for maybe the voiceover. Just start with one track and play it back and see how it goes. We are gonna add some filters to the voiceover, so this is gonna be just pretty rough, but let's try it. I'm gonna make sure everything is unsolid, unmuted, and I'm gonna hold down shift and roll with my mouse so that I can size all my tracks all at once, and I'll just size them up so I can see them, and I'll hit trees. You can walk on a bridge that also used to be trees. You can look at other trees and mountains. Alright. So that sounds pretty good. Like I said, we are going to put some filters over this in a second, but let's get a general, just kind of a rough mix.. So now we're gonna take our footsteps and I to be trees. Just so you barely notice it. Same thing with the creeks. Creeks are gonna be really noticeable. I'll just start them at like negative 12. Let's keep going. Yeah, so that's really subtle. There we go. And then let's take a look at our ambience. There we go. And so this ambience is just......barely loud enough. And this is the loudest part. This forest space is 105. It is the loudest one. And mountains. So we want to make sure that the other ones are kind of a similar loudness. So I'm going to just solo that track. I can select this space's water. I'll go up to the inspector and I can just push the volume up a little bit here in the inspector. Let's push it up like six. See how it sounds. Maybe a little more. 16. Yeah, maybe not quite that much. Maybe 10. All right, so you are gonna hear a difference, which is fine. We just want it to be a similar level. And let's go to forest, the second one, and we'll do the same thing. And the inspector, I'll try and boost that up by like 10 or 11 or so. See how it sounds. I actually probably boosted up because it's supposed to be a big waterfall. Something like that. That's good. And now I want these to just kind of transition because even if it is cutting to a different clip, it's a little bit less jarring if we crossfade it. So I'm going to right click just on the edge in between a couple of these and say add 24 frame crossfade. That's just going to give us a nice little transition there. Yeah, and maybe we'll even do it a little bit longer here. Yeah, really, if it's hard to notice when it's soloed, there's no way you're going to notice it when it's not soloed. And let's like same thing here. We'll just do a quick crossfade. We'll just adjust this so that it comes in when it's supposed to. Yeah, that works. Same thing, big ol' crossfade here. Yeah, that's nice, especially with that zoom out. That works really well. You will fade it out before the music fades out so you don't notice it. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna un-solo this. Forgot about that part. All right. All right, so that's pretty much how you would do a mix for your project. Now really an important part for voiceover, anytime that you have dialogue that you really want people to hear, that you don't want people to, you know, have to turn the volume up and down, it's a really good idea to put a compressor on it. And a compressor is a kind of audio filter that basically makes the louder parts of your audio quieter to kind of be on the same level as the quieter parts. And then you can take that whole thing and make it louder. So basically it just kind of normalizes everything. So we can do this on our track. So let's select our voice over track and this first strip here in our mixer, we could add an effect for this, but we actually have a built in compressor here in the dynamics. So I'm going to double click on this just blank square right by dynamics. And that brings up this really nice dynamics panel. This thing is the bomb. It makes it really easy to add a compressor and a bunch of different kind of dynamics controls to your audio dynamics is just basically the differences between the loud and quiet parts So you can do stuff like a noise gate. You can make sure things don't go over a certain level It's just a really nice way to work So what we're gonna do is add a compressor and all we have to do since we added this to our first track is just click on compressor and that's gonna make a little green line right here and really what that is doing is the loudest parts anything that's over this threshold negative 15 is getting squished down it's pretty much just getting half as loud as it normally would what I like to do is just grab this ratio and boost it up to somewhere like seven or eight something like that and let's play that back and see what's happening so it's great forests and hiking trails you see what happens is anything that's over that 15 right here this little blue mark that's things that are getting turned down. So we don't want this whole thing turned down. What we're really doing is just limiting the loud parts and now we gotta boost it up. We're gonna do that with makeup. So I'm gonna go back a little bit and I'm gonna boost makeup so that it comes in kind of at the same level. It's just a really quick way to do some mixing without going through and leveling every single part, right? So something like that. The other thing I'm going to do is turn on this limiter and I'm going to boost this threshold to like negative three or so. All that's doing is just anything that comes over negative three, it's just going now to make a lot of sense with our music. I want to boost her... would use a little more actually. And actually, you can see in our main right here that things are actually a little bit too loud. When those little red lights come on, it means it's too loud, right? And so what we could do, we could do a few things. I think what I'll probably do is just go back to our dynamics and just push this makeup down a little bit. Because we're just boosting it too much. We don't need to boost it so much. There we go. I'll close this window, see how it sounds. And let's just take some of this down forests and hiking trails and really what I'm doing is just listening through this a few times just to make sure that I can hear the VO over the music the music isn't too distracting But it still feels full right another way that you can kind of make your music a little bit louder without it Drowning out the words is to use an EQ. This is a really simple trick something that I've been using forever really on the second track Which is our music track you can double click on this little blue line and that'll bring up our track equalizer. If you're not familiar with an equalizer, it's basically just a graph of the frequencies in a sound and it's just turning up certain frequencies or turning down certain frequencies. So the human voice is usually somewhere around one K or two K somewhere in here. And so what we can actually do is take this number four and I can just turn it down a little bit right there. So it's not going to change the sound of our music a whole lot, but it is going to make those frequencies where I'm speaking just a little bit less muddy in our music track. And you'll find that when you do this, you can can look at other trees and mountains. There is even a place where you can walk down from all the trees to the water. Dip your hand in that water and feel the cool and coolness of the water. And there we have it. So those are some of the major tools that you'd use to just kind of get a basic mix. One other quick trick I'll show you when it comes to mixing VO and music. I'll just solo both of these real quick. With this dynamics panel, if I double click on it for our second track, our music track, I can actually turn on a compressor and kind of turn up this ratio. And what's going to happen is anytime that our music is over negative 15 it's gonna turn it down pretty pretty hard which we don't really need to do if we did that it's just basically gonna make our music quieter so the more we turn up that turn down that ratio turn up that ratio it's gonna make that music quieter maybe I'll set my threshold to like negative 17 something like that and other trees But the cool thing is that we can actually use a different signal to control how loud this music goes So we could use our signal from our VO so in my dynamics for my music I'm just gonna click listen what that's gonna do is listen to whatever sound that we kind of pump into it using a compressor and it's gonna turn down our music whenever that sound gets allowed So that's a great way to kind of dip your music under your audio. If you go on an event... No one for its own Now you can see that this moves a lot slower. It's turning down. And we'll just push up that hole a little bit. Hmm, maybe not quite that much. And this is another one of those things that... This is another one of those things that is good to make really strong and then dial back. So right now you can really hear that sound moving. And so what I could do is push up my threshold and that won't turn it down sound natural. But that's still a lot less work than going through and making your music quieter every single time that you stop talking of course you could do that if you wanted to water and feel the cool embrace of the mountain stream On your hike You may so that's a way that you could do it. I'm actually gonna turn that off for this project just so we don't have kind of that that changing dip You'll just keep it really water and really steady embrace of the mountain stream On your hike, you may see many wonderful things, but the real beauty is the sheer sense of awe. Alright, so now we have this basically mixed and it's pretty good, but now that we have the levels kind of where we're going to have them. But the real beauty. We can start to hear some of the little things that are kind of coming out in the video. Things like lip smacking and breaths and stuff like that, which happens anytime that you have a voiceover. Sometimes it's noticeable, sometimes it's not. But if we zoom in here and make our track really big, we can move around, we can see things like this little click right here. And if we wanted to, we could grab the edge of this and just roll it this way. That's a way to do it. But one of the advantages to working in Fairlight is with the range selection tool. So the second tool right here is range selection and this is a great way to just select parts of your audio just with a box and delete them. So it's just a super quick way to get rid of you know silence or noise or stuff that you just want to quickly trim out. But the real beauty is the sheer sense of awe. It's generally a good idea especially if you have a really noisy mic to kind of trim out these parts in your audio and then fade the edges out like this I'll hit alt X to get rid of my in and out. That's just kind of a nice way to do that You may see many wonderful things But the real beauty and so that's just a really nice way to get really granular when it comes to Editing your audio can take out breaths things like that just goes really quick and just page through and get rid of all those things that are obviously making a little bit more noise than they need to be. And a lot of people will say that you have to fade every single clip. And I'd say that's certainly a good idea. I won't pretend like I always fade every single clip. It just doesn't happen all the time. But I think that is generally a best practice. can walk down from all the trees. the range mode. And really what it does is it's in range mode if you click towards the top of the track, but if you mouse over the bottom of the track, it's just kind of normal selection mode. So you can easily grab stuff and move them around, that kind of thing where you can't really do that as easily with the range selection mode. You kind of have to make selections first. So definitely play with those kind of things. Again, if you want to split a clip, you could either use a keyboard shortcut, you'd also hit these scissors, which for some reason is called razor, which more reds, waterfalls. on there. And this is where you can kind of stack different effects and put them on each track. And to get rid of them, you can just click on the effect in the mixer and hit delete plugin. There are a ton of things to go over here in this page. We're not going to spend a whole lot more time on it just because that really gets into the minutia of audio editing. A couple more things I do want to show you though is a way to add a bus and a way to record to the timeline.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 1967.73
+}