Transcription
Do you record directly into DaVinci Resolve? If you do, and you're making voiceovers, there's some settings that you want to make sure you take a look at before you even start recording in Resolve. And today, we are talking about one of those settings that I haven't mentioned on my channel before, but it is super important because we want to make sure that we've got good audio levels coming in to Resolve as we're recording. Because if you don't, and your levels are too high, it's peaking, it's no good. If your levels are too low, then we can't hear it, and we don't have enough to work with once we get it into DaVinci Resolve. So this setting is super important, and it's going to help you set proper levels and see it properly on the meters. That is the big thing. We want to have an accurate reading on our meters while we're recording in DaVinci Resolve, so you know you've got good audio levels.
So before we jump into DaVinci Resolve, there's something we need to talk about, and it's called pre-fader and post-fader metering. So what does that mean if you haven't heard those terms before? It essentially means that the meter can tell us our audio levels pre-fader, so before we adjust any of the faders there in the Fairlight tab, or it can tell us our levels post-fader. Now, generally, you're going to be working with a post-fader meter, so that as you adjust that fader in DaVinci Resolve Fairlight, or even in the Edit tab there, the meter is going to reflect the changes you make with the fader. But when we are recording directly into DaVinci Resolve, we want to know what is our level coming directly from the microphone. We don't want it affected by any changes we may make to the fader on our track that we're recording to. So, it might sound a little confusing, it's really not as hard as it sounds. Let's jump into Resolve, and I'm just going to show you guys how this works and why you want to make sure that you're using pre-fader metering here in DaVinci Resolve when you're trying to make sure you've got good levels to record your voiceovers into DaVinci Resolve. Let's jump into Resolve and check this out.
So, one of the most important things that we need to be aware of when we're recording directly into DaVinci Resolve is that we've got good audio levels. So I broke out my own old Blue Yeti here, trusty Blue Yeti. Used this when I first started my YouTube channel. But we're in DaVinci Resolve here, and I've got everything already patched in. All I have to do is turn on the arm to record button, like this. And now we can see that the meters are moving there. I'm just going to mute this so that you guys can't hear it, but you can see my meters moving, and these are the levels that are coming into DaVinci Resolve from this microphone. Now, we talked about pre-fader and post-fader audio levels, right? So when we're looking at our meter right now, it's set up to give me a reading post-fader. Now, what does post-fader mean or pre-fader? So if we look over in the mixer here, we've got our faders, right, for each of our channels. We are currently going to record into track one right here. Now, we are set up in a post-fader setup here, so our meters are showing what our audio levels are post-fader. So if I take this fader right here and I move it down, look what happens. My audio levels, I'm barely getting anything, right? We're barely getting any kind of audio levels from our microphone. Now, if I bring that up, look at this. I crank it way up, now we're peaking, now it's too much. Well, when we're recording directly into DaVinci Resolve, before we get to actually working with our audio in Resolve, we want to make sure that we've got good audio levels coming into the program, and we want that independent of the fader. So we want to know what is the audio level pre-fader, we're looking in Resolve here, before it gets to this fader right here, what are our audio levels? Are they good enough coming into DaVinci Resolve?
So I'm going to double-click this and just reset it to zero right now. Let me show you how we can set the meters to tell us a pre-fader audio level on our recording into DaVinci Resolve. So what you want to do is come into your project settings, the little gear icon at the bottom right of the screen there, click on that. That's going to bring up your project settings. Now, in project settings, we want to come to the Fairlight section here, and right over here, we have "Pre-fader metering on tracks." Now, this says, "Tell, tell me the metering levels, show me on the meter, show me the levels before anything goes to the faders. Don't let the fader affect it. I want to know what our raw level is, or our gain structure, as we call it in the audio world. What is my gain of our audio signal coming into DaVinci Resolve?" So I'm going to go ahead and turn that on. Go ahead and hit save. And now we're back into the Fairlight tab here, and you can see I still have my microphone patched, I'm still armed to record here. But now, if I take my faders and I drop it all the way down, notice on my meters right here, it doesn't do anything, right? Because the meter is telling me what my audio signal is coming into DaVinci Resolve, and this meter has no effect on the levels of our current channel because this meter is now showing the pre-fader audio level. So if I crank it all the way up, you see it doesn't change my meter on this particular track. What you will notice, though, is if I adjust this meter, it's all the way down on my main bus one out, it is affecting that, right? Because this channel is getting sent to our, our bus one. So when I adjust the fader on it, that is going to affect your main output. But for recording your voiceover into DaVinci Resolve, you want to set it up like this. And we can just double-click this and and leave it at zero right now, our fader here, you don't have to worry about it.
Now, let's say you need to adjust your audio levels because, let's say, it's maybe too loud or it's too quiet, right? We don't have good levels on our meter and our track right here, or down in our mixer. We need to adjust that. How can we do that if we can't use our faders? Well, some of your microphones might have an adjustment on the back, like the Blue Yeti here, there's a gain knob. So I can turn that up or down. So if I turn it all the way down, we lose a little bit of our levels. If I turn it all the way up, you can see those levels are peaking and it's too much. But a lot of microphones don't have any kind of adjustment on the microphone itself, right? Depending on what you're using. So we do have another tool here in Resolve that we can use to help us adjust our gain or our input levels for our audio. So if you come on up in your mixer right here, in our track, we have "Input." And I want to click on that input. It's going to give us a little drop-down, and we want to go to the "Path settings" section here. So go ahead and click on that. Now, in here, it's going to open up a few different options here for us, and there are a few things that we can change in here that are going to help adjust the level of our audio coming into DaVinci Resolve, or our gain levels for our microphone. So the first one we have here is "Record level." So if I drop this guy back, look at my meters now. My meters are going way down, right? We are way down low on the meters, and that's not going to give us a good audio signal. Likewise, if I crank it way up, now we're peaking and it's going to the top of the meters. No good there either. We don't want that either. So you can make adjustments here to the record level as necessary so that your audio is getting a good signal. Now, I recommend that you set your audio incoming levels somewhere between, you know, minus 10 and minus 18 dB. Maybe around -15 gives you plenty of headroom, right? So we can boost up our levels if we need to, and it gives you enough signal so that it's not too low. So you've got good audio to work with, right? The main thing is we don't want to be peaking, and we don't want to be too quiet either. Either. So you want to adjust this record level there to a a reasonable level for the input settings of your microphone, and you want to watch the meters to make sure you're hitting those levels pretty good. So you want to make sure you look at that record level first. You can look at the trim, too, but they work a little bit differently, right? So the record level is going to set the level of your microphone as it's being recorded onto your disk, right, on your hard drive. That recording is going to be affected by that record level. Now, if you're adjusting the trim, the trim affects how the signal enters the mixer, right? So it doesn't affect the actual recording level of it, it just affects how it reacts as it goes into the mixer. So it's kind of like adjusting it in the mixer itself, it's kind of how you could kind of think about it a little bit. So for setting your levels recording into DaVinci Resolve, you want to make sure you use that record level knob, not the trim knob, even though when you're just listening to it, you might be like, "Oh, they're kind of doing the same thing," but they're really not, right? You want to make sure that you've got good levels recording into DaVinci Resolve and recording on the software, not just adjusting the trim level. So you want to keep that in mind.
So if you need to adjust your audio levels for your microphone coming into Resolve, you want to make sure that you open up these path settings, adjust that record level, and you should be good to go. And by making sure that you're monitoring your audio pre-fader, you're going to ensure that you're getting a good signal into Resolve. It's not too loud, you're not peaking, you're not too quiet, you've got good audio to work with, and you should be all set with your voiceover or your recording into DaVinci Resolve. Then you can go ahead and work with that audio, make it sound the best that you can.
So now that you've got your recording all done, the last thing you need to do is go and turn off that pre-fader metering. Because if you don't, once you get into Resolve, you start messing with your faders a little bit, trying to set your audio levels, you're not going to see the results on the meter based on how you're changing that fader. So here's how you turn that off once you're done recording into DaVinci Resolve. So in DaVinci Resolve here, come on over to your project settings, the little gear icon at the bottom, that'll open up your project settings. You want to come back to Fairlight, and right here, "Pre-fader metering on tracks." Make sure that is not checked. You do not want that turned on after you record your voiceover or your audio into DaVinci Resolve. You want to turn it off once you're all done. So once you uncheck it, just go ahead and hit save. Boom, you're good to go. Now your audio meters will be showing post-fader changes. So now, just looking in Fairlight here, you can do it in the mixer in Fairlight or in the Edit tab. But if I play through here, you can see if I change my fader here, it's going to show the changes on the meter. And now we're going to be able to mix and adjust our audio levels as necessary for our project. So really important to make sure that you turn off that option once you're done recording into Resolve. Because once your audio is already in there, now we want the meters to show us exactly what our project is doing and the audio levels for our project, and we want any changes we make with the fader or anything else to be reflected on those meters so we can make sure we're getting good audio levels and everything is sitting where it should be. So be sure to uncheck that option once you are done recording into DaVinci Resolve.
Pre-fader and post-fader metering, guys, it's a big concept here in the audio world, and it's something that you need to be aware of if you're making voiceovers here in DaVinci Resolve or recording any audio into DaVinci Resolve. You need good levels as that audio comes in to Resolve so you've got something good to work with. So if you knew about pre-fader and post-fader, or you knew about the setting in DaVinci Resolve already, drop a comment down below because I'm really curious to see who knew about that. And if you didn't, drop a comment anyway and let me know that you learned a little something in this video. Maybe even smash that like button for me, that would be pretty sweet. That is it for this one. Get back to recording some voiceovers there in DaVinci Resolve. By the way, Blue Yeti here, this guy's old but still sounds good. All right, we will see you in the next video, guys. Peace. [Music] Thank you.