Original subtitles

All right,

so in this lesson we are going to be talking about the general interface of

Fairlight, which is the second last tab down here at the bottom.

And this is pretty much where I go to do any kind of sound work.

Now you can definitely do a lot of sound design within the edit tab. Uh,

before Da Vinci,

this is really what I was used to in programs like Premier and Final Cut.

This is all I really knew. And you can do a lot of things like this. You can,

you know, of course add tracks, do all that stuff.

You even have access to the mixer over here.

And of course you can play with the audio effects within your inspector as well.

But you are definitely limited in terms of functionality within the edit tab

when you compare the workflow within Fairlight.

And that's why Da Vinci created Fairlight so that we have a designated place to

just focus on sound design.

And I'm so happy that they did because I honestly love spending time in here.

It's so well thought out, and it's just a space that allows me to enter flow,

stay easier when it comes to creating sound design.

So this is just gonna be a more general walkthrough of the entire Fairlight

page. I'm not gonna be diving too deep into certain aspects of it. For example,

automation, that's going to be an entire video in itself.

If you don't know what automation is,

it's pretty much the same thing as key framing if you're coming from the world

of video. But it does work a little bit differently within Fairlight.

So I'm excited to dive into that in a later video. But with that being said,

let's start up here in the top left.

So I'm just gonna close automation over here.

So in the top left we have our very familiar media pool. So if we open that,

we can see that we have the same kind of file structure that we had before.

We have all of our folders over here. If we enter our folders,

we can see the footage that we have over here, except within Fairlight.

If we double click on any one of our clips within our media pool or any media,

really we're not able to preview it in our previewer. Over here,

we are just going to see the waveform for the selected media.

Now obviously that makes sense because within Fairlight we really only wanna be

focusing on audio.

Now you can see when I double click on a clip in the media pool,

we have this timeline up here at the top,

and this allows us to scrub through our clip.

We can create in and out points over here.

So we can use four and five to create an endpoint, five to create an outpoint.

Once we've made our in and out points,

we can simply just click on the waveform up there and drag it in.

So we can do this with any media within our media pool.

So the media pool is actually not the only place that we're gonna be importing

audio into Fairlight from Fairlight also gives us a really awesome feature in

here called the Sound Library, which is a huge time saver.

We're gonna be diving into that in just a second,

but just know that the media pool over here is not the only place to bring in

audio and not necessarily the best place to do it either.

And I'll be explaining why once we get to the Sound library.

So that's the media pool. I'm just gonna close it off over here.

And let's head over to Effects. So Effects is pretty straightforward.

This is just where we keep all of our audio effects.

We have things like Fairlight Effects, V S T effects and AU effects.

So V S T and AU effects are pretty much like standalone programs that you can

download onto your computer that work with different dos,

which are digital Audio works stations. So for example,

my VST effects over here, some of these can actually work with Ableton,

which is a daw, so they're kind of like cross compatible between programs.

I'm sure a lot of these could work with other audio softwares as well.

And at the top here, we have some audio transitions as well. Now remember,

just like any other of the effects windows,

we can click this little star over here to the right to add whatever effect we

want to our favorites over here.

And then we can just expand this favorites window over here and just quickly

access any of our effects or vsts that we want.

So we can add a VST in there too,

so that way we don't have to be jumping in and out of different folders.

We have all of our favorites right here in one place. So next two effects.

We have our index. To be completely honest,

I don't really use the index that much in the edit tab or anywhere else in the

program, but the index within Fairlight is huge.

This is a really important panel to work with. So over here to the top left,

we have the edit index.

And this is the same edit index that we see within the edit page.

If we go to the edit index,

this is basically just all of our clips in our timeline in chronological order.

Now in this kind of a workflow where we don't input much metadata over here,

we don't label what camera is what,

this view is not as important to me in my workflow,

but the edit index could be useful for people that are doing things like short

films. But for me, in my workflow, I haven't really used the edit index much.

But in Fairlight, we don't just see the edit index,

we also have this little button here for tracks.

And this allows us to see all of our tracks within our timeline.

So the really cool thing about the tracks view over here is that we are able to

hide certain tracks if we don't want to see them within our timeline. Now,

hiding them does not mute them, it just hides them. So for example,

in this case,

I know that we just have to do some minor adjustments to the music over here.

We'll probably just wanna limit the volume. But that's pretty much it.

And once we've done that,

we can basically just hide both of these tracks by pressing the little eyeball.

And as you can see, they're now gone from our timeline.

And this is awesome because it gives us so much more space to focus on the

tracks that we're actually working on. So for example,

if I'm working on sound effects now I can just add a couple more tracks over

here and it gives me a lot more room to just work on those sound effects.

And now I don't have those music timelines cluttering the space in the tracks

menu over here. We are also able to click and drag tracks to rearrange them.

So if we want to rearrange the order, we can do that very easily just like this.

The alternative to that is to go down here to the header of any of your tracks,

and then you can right click um and select move track up or move track down.

So that's not really a convenient way to do this,

especially when you're working with a lot of tracks.

So that's why the Tracks index over here is going to be your best friend.

So this is a feature that we don't have within the edit tab. So honestly,

just for this feature alone,

it is so much more worth it to do your sound design,

any kind of sound work within Fairlight versus the edit tab.

Now next to tracks we have markers which just show us all of our markers within

our timeline and we can change the way that we view this by clicking these two

buttons over here. We can do list view or thumbnail view. Now in this case,

the markers are actually not important. These first two are fusion markers,

so they have nothing to do with Fairlight.

And this last marker doesn't have any information,

so I don't even know what it's for anymore.

So what I'm actually gonna do is just delete all of these.

So I'm just gonna click on them, click delete goodbye markers.

But the markers index can definitely be useful,

especially when you're working with other people or you've left notes for your

future self.

You'll have all of your markers in chronological order right here and you can

very quickly just click on those markers to get to those points of the timeline

very quickly and easily. So next to the index, we have our sound library.

If we click on the sound library, we are presented with this window here.

Now the sound library is gonna be your best friend when it comes to doing any

kind of sound design,

this is basically just a much more efficient way for us to bring sound effects

into the program. So you could go the route of using the media pool,

but the sound library interface is just much cleaner and much simpler.

So basically the sound library allows us to connect to different folders that

hold sounds within our computer or external hard drives.

Once the sound library has processed all of those sounds,

we're able to then search for specific sounds. So for example,

if I type cat up here,

we can see all of my sound effects that have the word cat in them.

I can double click on any of these sounds over here to play it back,

and I can do some really cool things here like audition the sound.

So that just means like throwing it into the timeline to preview it.

And then after previewing it, I can either confirm or cancel.

And we're also able to do a couple other cool things in here like set custom

sync points, and we're also able to rate certain sound effects as well.

So basically the sound library is like a catalog that we are able to leave

metadata in, like rating each sound.

So if we rate a sound here and we open this sound library in another project,

we will have that same metadata.

We will have that same rating on this clip and we'll also have that same sync

points.

So that's something that's going to be very beneficial to us as we dive deep

into the world of sound design because obviously having to restart this process

every time you open up a new project would be an absolute headache.

So the sound library is a huge tool for us as sound designers.

Now the Sound Library has its own video lesson In that video,

I'm gonna walk you guys through the entire process to set this up in the best

way possible, but for now, just know that it is awesome.

It's a great place to go to grab sound effects,

quickly audition them in your timeline.

And it's a huge upgrade when we compare it to the old workflow,

which was just importing clips into your media pool.

Now next to the sound library,

we have adr and that just stands for automated dialogue replacement.

So this is where we do any kind of dialogue replacement work or any kind of

narration really. If we want to just narrate in on a timeline,

we can add text in this area so that we can actually read on the preview as we

are playing through the timeline.

So we can very just easily read off the words that we're supposed to be saying

at certain points within our timeline and recording our audio to a track.

At the same time, ADR is also going to be its own lesson.

So I'm just gonna close this off by clicking on ADR and hiding it.

Now this window over here is our meters.

We have a meter here for every single track of our timeline.

So if I go to a certain part of our clip here,

so right now I'm not seeing our audio and that's because we've hidden those

tracks. So let's show them.

And let's zoom in on these clips over here.

So I'm just gonna mute this right now,

but you can see as I scrub through here our meters update.

So right here we have audio in track one A one,

and if I scrubbed through here,

we can see that track one updates and it gives me a meter reading.

It's telling me what the volume is of the clip at any specific time.

So meters are a very important tool for us just to monitor our audio levels and

just to make sure that we're not peaking. So in this case,

we probably are peaking at certain points,

which just means that our audio is getting to that zero point that's the top.

Um, and once we surpass that, we start to lose information.

So that's something that we always want to be avoiding next to these meters.

We have meters for our buses. So right now we only have one bus.

And don't worry if you don't know what a bus is,

we're gonna be diving into that in its own lesson as well.

But a bus is pretty much just a way for us to group a bunch of tracks and apply

certain adjustments to all those tracks at once.

So we're basically funneling a bunch of tracks into a bus and any of the

adjustments that we make on that bus apply to any of the tracks that we funneled

into the bus. If that sounds complicated to you, don't worry about it at all.

We're gonna be breaking this down step by step in a separate video for now,

just know that buses are freaking awesome.

So next we have the control room meter,

which shows us the main output level from the program.

And next to that we have the loudness meters,

which allow us to measure the mixes loudness according to the scale that we

choose.

So up here we can choose a bunch of different options and based on what option

we choose, it's going to read us that meter a little bit differently.

So next to our mixture, we have our preview window.

And the preview window in Fairlight is really simple.

We really only have one button here and this allows us to pop it out.

So if we click that, uh, it actually popped out onto my other monitor.

And this is just a great way for us to pop out the viewer so we can continue to

watch the video, but have it not take up any space within the actual program.

So in my personal workflow, I pretty much always do this when I'm at home.

I'll pop out this viewer, put it on another monitor,

and that way I pretty much have a live preview of my timeline at all times,

but it's not taking up any of my precious real estate here in Fairlight.

And if you ever wanna bring this preview back,

all you gotta do is press this little button right here and we're back to where

we started.

So I'm actually just gonna enter full screen by pressing the Tilda key over

here.

Now a lot of the time I will hide the meters when I'm doing sound design work

just to fill up as much of my screen with the timeline as possible.

So to hide the meters, all you gotta do is press meters over here.

But notice that we've also hid the preview as well.

So this is another reason why you'll probably want to just pop this out.

That way you can hide the meters, put this preview wherever you want.

You can even keep it down here on your screen.

So this is really awesome and just gives us the flexibility to optimize our

workflow however we want.

So I'm gonna click this button to bring that back to its place. Now, next step,

we have our mixer. So the mixer is over here to the bottom right,

and we can actually expand it by dragging it over like that.

And the mixer basically shows us channel strips for every single track within

our timeline. So we have four tracks in our timeline right here.

So we have four channel strips over here in our mixer.

And notice that when I select a different channel strip,

it will automatically select that track over here in my timeline as well and

vice versa. So if I click the music track over here,

I have the music channel strip over here, selected Audio four,

same thing. Now we also have something here called a bus.

And this is what I was talking about earlier.

We are able to feed the outputs of different tracks into buses.

We can even feed the output of a bus into a bus.

This is basically just a really cool way for us to make global adjustments to

multiple tracks at the same time. And it's something that's very,

very important in the world of audio. So in our channel strips over here,

we have a bunch of different properties that we can change for each one of our

tracks over here. So things like effects,

we can add effects and visually see them right here on the channel strip for the

track. So if we add an effect to a track, let's just do that right now.

So I'll give you guys an example. Let's go to Fairlight Effects.

Add this delay to the track itself.

Over here we can see that within this channel strip we see delay over here.

So this is an effect that has been added.

This is a great way for us to very quickly visually see what effects are on each

track if we have any effects on a track. Now,

one thing to note is that we are able to add effects to both the clip and track

level. So right now I added delay to the track itself.

So any clips within this track are going to be affected by that effect that's on

the track. So it's affecting this entire track on the track level.

Or if we have a clip within our timeline, like this one for example,

we can apply this effect to just the clip itself.

So now it's just this one clip and not all the clips within this track are going

to be affected by the delay. Just this one clip over here.

So important thing to understand, we can apply effects to both the clip level,

so individual clips, but also on the track level.

So I'm just going to hit X over here.

I'll head to my inspector and just delete that effect.

So we have this clip selected over here.

We just applied that delay and we can just delete it just like that.

I'll close off the inspector and let's bring our focus back to the mixer over

here. So audio four has an effect on it now, and if we wanna delete that,

we can just click this drop dropdown over here, click delete plugin,

and we can remove it just like that.

So this is a way for us to visually see what effects are added to our tracks,

and just a quick way for us to add other effects as well. Underneath effects,

we have Dynamics, EQ bus sends, pan bus outputs groups,

a lot of different options over here that allow us to modify each one of our

individual tracks. Don't worry if you don't know what any of these do.

We're gonna be diving into all of these in separate videos.

Now down here below we have our faders,

and this is basically just a quick way for us to adjust the volume for any

track. So for example, if I thought both of the music tracks were too loud,

I can simply turn them down right here. I can turn them both down.

And just like that,

I've managed to quickly change the audio levels for both tracks.

Now the best practice is to save using your faders until the very end.

You want to kind of fine tune your mix within the timeline first,

adjust your levels within here first,

and then once things sound like they're in a good place within your timeline,

then you can head over to your faders over here when they're all in unity.

So meaning they're all at the same level.

And then you can start to play around with each individual track and just use

these faders to balance and fine tune things a little bit more.

If we ever want to reset a fader,

all we gotta do is just double click on it and it'll jump back to its original

position. Now,

this isn't the only place where we can change the overall volume of each track.

Over here on the track headers themselves,

we have this little rectangle over here, and if we click and drag,

it allows us to change the level of that entire track.

Now notice when I'm changing the volume here in the track header,

we can see the fader moving in the bottom right as well.

So this is just another place that we can perform that same action of moving the

fader. Again, double click on the fader to reset. Now,

sometimes you might not want to have your mixture in view,

just to have more space to focus on your timeline.

So you can hide the mixer as well just by clicking mixer up here,

and that gives you a lot more real estate for your timeline here.