Fairlight Questions

A week after publishing our new mini course on editing and mixing dialogue audio in DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight, I received a few interesting questions from my friend Jacob Fenn. Here are his questions and my answers.

While processing the audio for this session, it occurred to me that one of my answers was not very clear. Jacob asked, “Is it possible for Fairlight or any other digital audio workstation app (DAW) to clip since they do all of their processing in 32-bit float?”

This is the short answer: The internal processing of Fairlight will never lose data to clipping as long as the source audio was not clipped. However, when you export your mix, if the audio exceeds 0dBFS at any point in the mix, the exported audio will be clipped.

Zoom F4 Firmware, Fairlight, & Sennheiser XSW-D Wireless

In our first audio-only Sound for Video Session, we cover the new features Zoom added to the F4 recorder in the 3.0 firmware update. Now F4 users have AutoMix an the Advanced Hybrid Look-Ahead limiters that were previously only on the F8 and F8n.

We also cover my impressions of the Fairlight digital audio workstation page in DaVinci Resolve 15.2.4. It is getting pretty close to the point where I can move to Fairlight and away from Adobe Audition. There are still some minor issues. In fact, in mixing this episode, I learned that Resolve has issues exporting audio only projects. Sigh.

And finally, we talk about a new wireless lavalier microphone I just received in for review: Sennheiser XSW-D Portable Lavalier Set. I have yet to do the review, but cover some of its features here. This is a consumer/prosumer grade wireless system that is made to be as easy to use as possible. The review should appear on my YouTube channel in the next few weeks.

Gear used/discussed in this episode:

Zoom F4 (Amazon) audio recorder

DaVinci Resolve - Free video editing, coloring, and audio mixing

Sennheiser XSW-D Portable Lavalier Set - Wireless microphone system for those who need wireless to be as simple as possible

RODECaster Pro - Mixer and recorder used to record this session

Golden Age Project R1 Active mkIII (Amazon) - Affordable ribbon microphone which I used to record this session.

Copyright 2019 by Curtis Judd