Master Audio

Okay, I don't make promises I'm a mixing and mastering engineer and here on t And today, we're talking about mastering, w Seriously, it's a lot more. I don't know who started that r I'm going to show you how to master audio in DaVinci Resolve using just the native plugins, w So that should be interesting and stick around till the end because I'm going to give you some pro tips that I had to learn the hard way. Okay, what is mastering? Basically, it's just the final step in the audio process. You're adding that last bit of extra polish onto the overall mix, you're making sure all of the components of your audio are glued together and acting as one cohesive piece of audio. And yes, you are normalizing or optimizing your loudness for whatever platform you're going to be delivering the video to, whether that be YouTube or Netflix, I do mastering on every single project that I work on, whether it's a song or one of the 500 plus videos on t And by the way, if you have a podcast or you work with remote collaborators, then you really need to be using today's video partner, Riverside. Riverside is kind of t I've been using Riverside for a few years now. It started off back when I had t And there are two really big reasons why I love Riverside. First, local recordings. Let me explain. A lot of times when you're on a video call or another platform where you're trying to do podcasting, everybody's audio and video gets shoved either into the same track or if they are separate tracks, they'recorded directly to the cloud, w But with Riverside, everybody's audio and video is recorded locally on their mac And t But if you don't want to edit your recording in DaVinci Resolve or some other NLE, you can edit directly in Riverside. They've even got some really cool AI tools that'll help you enhance your audio and take out filler words. And because Click the link in the description of t Let's j I've got a timeline here ready to go. It's a little movie trailer t We actually worked on t If you haven't checked that out, you really should. But here's my timeline completely mixed. I've worked on the dialogue. I've set my levels. I've done a little bit of automation on the music along with some other really fun stuff using some t And I even added a mix bus with some compression to glue everyt And real quick, if you don't know how to add buses to your Fairlight mixer, it'super, super easy. You just need to come up to Fairlight, click on bus format, and you can just press add bus. And now you've got a new bus. You can name it in here by double clicking on the name. You can choose whether it'stereo or mono, and you can even give it a new color. And then if you want to delete a bus, you can do that too. You can just select it and you're done. And then to route your tracks to a new bus, you just need to come down to bus outputs in your mixer. And you can choose w That's just a really quick and dirty tutorial on adding buses. If you want me to do a more detailed tutorial, because buses can actually be a lot of fun, let me know in the comments. So now that everyt But before we do that, let's go ahead and play the mixed timeline. So Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. So that didn't sound bad at all. All the levels are correct. And I could probably upload t But we're not done. There'still some polish we can put on there'still a little bit of glue that we can apply and it's not loud enough for YouTube yet. So let's go ahead and start the mastering process. First t So we'ready to master the very first step of w To do that is super, super easy. All we have to do is make sure all the tracks that we want to bounce and mix together are routed to the same bus, w Next, we need to go up to timeline and select bounce mix to track. From there, we're going to come down to bus two, we're going to And w If you're enjoying this video, if you're getting some value out of it at all, click that It really helps t All right, you'll see that we now have a new track and a new audio clip. And t And now we've got one single clip to work with. And all of our mastering is going to be done on t So first we will go ahead and rename t I'm just going to name t And since we're only working with then we're going to open up our index. If you don't see your index on the left hand side of your screen, all you need to do is come up to the top and click on index. Index is really, really cool because it allows you to rearrange your tracks and make them visible or invisible. You can lock them, you can do all kinds of stuff. Right now, all we need to do is make all of the tracks that we don't want to see invisible. We're not going to need to see our video tracks. We're not going to need to see our dialogue track, or our sound effects track, or our Foley or our music. And we're not going to need to see our mix bus. So we're done with our index, we can come up here and close that out. We're not going to need that again. Next t And we want to make sure that we have our metering set up for the platform that we're delivering to with DaVinci Resolve 19. There is actually a YouTube preset. So we're going to click on that because we are mastering for YouTube. And if you have been listening to your audio up at t I have my automation turned on. So I'm going to go ahead and get out of the automation settings. I want to make sure that my looping is turned on. And I want to make sure that we have in an out point set up at the beginning and end of our clip. From there, we're going to expand our audio track just a little bit so we can see a little bit better. And t Down here where you see bus one, we're going to expand that down. We're going to make sure loudness And we want to make sure integrated and short term are checked. I'm actually going to expand t And now we'ready to start mastering. Now the order in w And that is to basically smooth out the mix and take care of some of the transients. Then we're going to do some stereo width, then some EQ, some compression and some limiting. And we're not really going to worry about the loudness until we get to the limiting stage. So don't worry about that yet. But the first thing we need to do is set our order of operations because just So if you come into your mixer and you click on the order box, you'll see right now we're set up to process effects first, then dynamics, then EQ. But because of the order that I said, we're going to be doing t So set that. And the first thing I want to do, A transient is basically a peak in the audio, kind of one of those runaway peaks that are a little bit too loud. So we need to take care of them. Now in the mastering phase, I typically do t Unfortunately, DaVinci Resolve does not have a dynamic EQ, w So we're going to head into our effects library. If you're not seeing your effects library, just turn that off. And back on up here, click effects, boom, gonna go ahead and clear my search box. I don't remember what I was searc And under fairlight effects, you'll find the multi band compressor. So we'll grab that. And we're just going to drop it on our audio track. And I'm not going to give you a full tutorial on the multi band compressor. It is a really, really cool t And there's a lot of buttons and stuff that you can play with, but we're not going to worry about those. All we're trying to do is just attack some of these transients. So what we're going to do is we're going to set our threshold all the way up for each one of our bands. And all we're going to do is play our audio, and we're going to bring our threshold down until we start seeing these lines move. They don't need to constantly be moving. We want them to be moving momentarily or intermittently, just whenever we get a peak. You'll see what I'm talking about as we play t Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queens. Okay, so I went through and I tweaked all of my thresholds and got it to where they were just attacking whenever a certain range got too loud. And it'supposed to be a very transparent there's not supposed to be a very big difference in sound here. So if we play t So let's go ahead and just do a before and after. Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Okay, All right, let's go ahead and close out of t And the next t And t Now we don't want to push there are some t Unfortunately, that doesn't exist in DaVinci Resolve. So we're going to have to use their built in stereo width and just be really, really careful with it. So again, in your effects library, in the Fairlight effects, we will come down to stereo width and we'll drag that onto our audio track. And you'll see we have three knobs here. We've got width, diffusion and sparkle. Width is exactly what it sounds You crank that and it's going to make everyt Diffusion, I can't remember what diffusion does, but we're going to play around with it and see what kind of difference it makes. And sparkle boosts the super, super So we'll play around with that as well. T Back to the beginning of the timeline and There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. So once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. So there's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. Okay, so I played around with the diffusion. It could be my ears playing tricks on me, but it seemed Not sure why. And Make sure you stick around for that. But if you heard, we did a little bit of a before and after and it's just a fuller sound. It's much wider. It's much bigger. It's a bigger sound, which I really, really So I t Next, we're going to add an EQ to the overall mix because we have changed the sound just a little bit with that multiband compressor and that stereo width. So we're going to add just a little bit of a boost to the We're going to try and take out some muddiness, maybe add some presence. Well, let'see what we can do here. We'll come over to our EQ, w And same t We're going to play and we're just going to start messing around with these bands. And I'm probably going to boost somewhere around 5k Hertz and maybe around 125 Hertz. And we'll probably cut somewhere in the three to 500 range and maybe boost a little bit towards the 1k frequency just to bring out a little bit more of that dialogue. And if needed, we'll set a low cut and a Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. So there's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. So so once upon a time, the world fell apart. Beware the nightmare queen. So nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. So there's only one rule. So beware the nightmare queen. Okay, that sounds a lot better. We definitely needed that boost in the 3 kilohertz mark. And the removal of the mud was definitely a help. And so was the boosting of the lows. And I decided that I would in fact do a low cut filter at least to get rid of some of that super low r So we got rid of some of that with the low cut filter. And for now, I t Now we've already done some compression in the mix. We even added some compression to the mix bus to help everyt But t We first need to kind of get an idea of our dynamic range, we need to kind of see what the difference is between our peaks and our valleys. And we're just going to try and lessen that a little bit. We're not going to try and make it a flat line, because then everyt We still want dynamic range in there, but maybe we want to get rid of some of it. Let's go ahead and take a listen and figure out what our dynamic range is. Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. All right, so we've got a pretty decent dynamic range here. I mean, we're going from probably minus 17 LUFS all the way up to minus 14 LUFS. So we want to squash that just a little bit, not too much, but we are going to even it out. So let's go ahead and open up our dynamics. And we want t We'll turn on our compressor. We want it to be smooth. And we don't want it to be too noticeable or too aggressive. So we're going to keep our ratio anywhere between one and two to one. And for t And we'll go ahead and bring our hold up just a little bit. And just Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. Okay, compression is done. You can see that we made the dynamic range a little bit smaller. It'still there, but it's not as extreme as it used to be, w That's going to help us a lot with loudness normalization and considering we're normalizing for YouTube, where most people are watc If were working for Netflix or doing a film, we might want a little bit of a wider dynamic range, but for YouTube, t So let's go ahead and close out of our compressor. The next t So once again, we're going to come into our fairlight effects. We're going to find our limiter. We're going to drop that t And we're actually going to start with the preset. We're going to come up and go to transparent master. And we are going to bring our ceiling to one minus 1. 0. We're going to start with 3 dB of gain. We may not even need that much. And from there, we're going to, we never actually started our meter. So we're actually going to start our meter so we can start seeing our integrated loudness line here. And we'll start getting some more data in these ranges. We're looking for minus 14 LUFS at the loudest. The quietest that I would go for YouTube is minus 17 LUFS. So as long as we're between minus 17 and minus 14, we're going to call it good. Go ahead and start our meter and we'll start playing. Once upon a time, the world fell apart. Nobody really knows how it happened or how to fix it. There's only one rule. Beware the nightmare queen. It's couldn't have gotten more perfect than that. We are at minus 14. 1 LUFS. Perfect. That's T Now, the last step that we can do, if we are done in here, w So I've got all my normal settings here. But if we j In my case, we're 02 true peak. So it's probably not going to actually do any normalization. But if it was a little bit too quiet or a little bit too loud, it would bring it down to where it needed to be or bring it up to where it needed to be. Alright, I promised And here they are. N Headroom means that your loudness is you're not quite getting up to that minus 14 LUFS. You're not peeking or anything You're not clipping or anything You want minus six to minus 10 dB of headroom because you're going to be messing with the levels when you start mastering and you don't want to start clipping and destroying your audio. So always leave headroom. I've made the mistake of not doing that before. And it's cost me n And t So always make sure you're taking frequent breaks. And along those same lines, pro tip n If you take a break, go ahead and give your ears a rest, but then go watch an episode of your favorite show or watch a movie where you really, really So that way you kind of can come back into your mix or your mastering session with an idea of how t And for guys, t You really need to know about the order of operations in Fairlight.