Elevate Your Video’s Audio with This Editing Technique!

The post-production work you do to your audio can make or break the sound. Today I'm going to walk you through what I like to do.

A couple of years ago, I switched from Adobe Premiere to Blackmagic Resolve as my main editing platform. I did it for a couple of reasons. One, I was just tired of Premiere crashing. You'd look at it, and it would crash. Everything else on that computer worked beautifully, but Premiere would just crash so much. When it works, it works great, but the crashing just got really old. They've become known for it.

Even more so, I film a lot with Blackmagic cameras, and Blackmagic owns Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. The two just work hand in hand. In fact, when you buy a Blackmagic camera, you actually get a free seat of their studio version of the software. That's the full-featured software, which was normally like, I think, 300 bucks, but buy a camera and you get a free one. Even better than that, DaVinci Resolve has a free version, and you might think, "Oh yeah, the free version is probably really limited, more of a demo version." No, it is a full-fledged editing platform, and the majority of projects I do, I could use the free version and get away with it and do the majority of what I want to do. The paid version does have a couple of extra bells and whistles that I do like to use.

One of the things I love about Resolve is it's evolved as a platform over the past few years. It started out as a color grading application, and it was great at that. I used to use it in conjunction with Final Cut and with Premiere. But over the past few years, DaVinci or Blackmagic has really built on it. They bought the platform and developed it into a full-fledged nonlinear editor. So now, you can do all of your editing within the program. You don't need to jump between two different programs to do your color grading in Resolve and then editing in another program. You can do it all in Resolve, and it works beautifully. It's made editing fun again. You can do all of your video edits, you can do special effects like After Effects in their area called Fusion, and you can do all of your audio editing like you would do in Logic or Audition in an area called Fairlight. Then you can export your final project and deliver it. To the point that I spend 99.9% of my editing time now just in Resolve. It's a great platform.

So today, I'm going to show you what I like to do to sweeten up my audio just to give it a little bit better sound. Now, I do have to give a shout-out to my friend Tyler Vincent. He's the one who showed me this method, and I've been really happy with what it's done for my sound. I'm going to link his channel in the bio. Great guy, a phenomenal filmmaker, someone to learn from and get inspired by, but I've got to give props to him. Let's take a look.

Alright, so the first thing I like to do is normalize my audio. I've got a shortcut set to pull it up. You want to set your normalization mode to ITU-R BS.1770-4. I couldn't tell you what that is specifically, but I know that is what I've liked the best and works the best. Target level I'll usually set to -2 and Target loudness to -14. I will run through the normalizing, and then chapter one, The Boy Who Lived. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Now I'm going to head into Fairlight. Fairlight is the audio section for Resolve. You can do a bunch of editing of your audio in Edit, but Fairlight is where you can really do the editing. The first thing I like to do is set my order to EQ, Dynamics, and FX. Then I'm going to go into my Dynamics. Dynamics are really just going to help to limit your audio so it doesn't peak and really controls the audio. First thing, I put on the compressor, and basically what that's going to do is anytime the audio goes above this point, it's going to help to pull it down, and that just really helps to get your levels to where you want them.

So when I play it, "Chapter one, The Boy Who Lived. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four," you can see how it's stopping the audio right here, it's pulling that down. A lot of times I like to put the ratio to about 3 to 1. I would say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. The next thing I'm going to do, my threshold, that's really just at what point it really kicks in. -5 is working great for me. I'm going to pull up the makeup just a little bit to boost the audio just a hair. They were the last people you would expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious. Right now, it's going to go around just below plus five.

Once you're done there, now you're going to come into EQ. In EQ, what I like to do is go to Bands 2, 3, and 4, and I make sure that they are all set to that mode and turn on Band 1. What you're going to do is turn your Q factor all the way up for those three. Basically, what we're going to do is find the frequencies where the audio sounds terrible, where it almost sounds inhuman. We're going to start playing it and see if we can find that spot, and what we're going to do to do that is pull this all the way up.

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you would expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn't."

So about there, it's starting to sound a little inhuman, alien, not so good. Basically, what we're going to do is take this and now pull out those frequencies.

"Hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache.” And there, it sounds kind of robotic. It doesn't sound so great. We're going to do that again. “Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice…” and you're not pulling it out a ton; you're just pulling out a little bit. Then we're going to come up to this next one. “It's the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences spying on the neighbors…” I'm pulling that out.

The next thing you do, if your audio just seems a little bit muffled and you want to open up a little bit more, you can come to this last one and just boost it just a little bit. Had a small son called Dudley and, in their opinion, and that just opens up just a little bit more.

So hearing the before and after, this is what it sounds like before: "Chapter one, The Boy Who Lived. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you would expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious." So it's not doing a ton, but it's just giving it a little bit more of a pleasant sound.

Now, the other thing I like to do is come back to the edit page, and this is the one thing you cannot do on the free version. They've got a feature called voice isolation, which basically uses AI or computing power to isolate the voice, and it really pulls out any background sounds or room hiss and those types of things. So, this is without: "Chapter one, The Boy Who Lived." There's a tiny bit of a hiss in there, but if you turn on voice isolation, give it just a second to process, and then: "Chapter one, The Boy Who Lived." It just really pulls out a lot of that hiss.

That's more like the icing on the cake. Honestly, without that voice isolation, I would be happy using this audio and putting it over some music, and it just sweetens it up just a little bit. But that really helps to bring your audio from a 9 to a 10, and it pulls even a medium-sounding microphone up a couple of notches because it's really helping you to hit the frequencies that sound the best. So, that's what I do.