Audio
June 22, 2025
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In this review, I demonstrate how to make a boom or shotgun microphone and a lavalier microphone sound the same so that you can cut between them in DaVinci Resolve Fairlight version 20. We’ll use the EQ match feature. Then we’ll compare it to Fabfilter Pro Q4’s EQ match feature.
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In DaVinci Resolve Studio 20's Fairlight tab, two simultaneously recorded tracks — a Sanken COS-11D lavalier and a Sennheiser MKH50 boom — sound noticeably different, which becomes a problem if you need to cut between them mid-take (e.g., the lav got bumped and you switch to the boom). The lav sounds stuffier/more attached to the body; the boom sounds more open.
Using Fairlight's built-in EQ Matcher: right-click the boom clip, choose Clip Operations > EQ Matcher, and capture its EQ profile as the reference; then right-click the lavalier clip, choose EQ Matcher again, and apply the captured profile to the clip or track EQ. The result was a fairly gentle correction curve (small boosts/cuts, the largest being about +3/-4 dB) applied to the lav track, which helped some but wasn't very aggressive.
For comparison, running the same lavalier track through FabFilter Pro-Q4's EQ match feature instead produced a much more aggressive correction curve (up to +7dB, -6dB, and a large ~14dB low-frequency shelf boost), and the resulting match to the boom mic sounded noticeably closer and more convincing than Fairlight's built-in matcher. My hope is DaVinci Resolve's EQ Matcher becomes more aggressive in future updates, similar to how Pro-Q4 handles it. Hopefully that's helpful — get out there and make some great sound, and we'll talk to you again next week.
