I have spent the last couple days learning DaVinci Fairlight, a subsection of DaVinci Resolve.
Resolve is a video editing suite that I have some very limited experience with. I dabbled with it early this year in an attempt to learn better stop motion animation. It’s a very powerful suite of tools… honestly, too powerful for my limited brain at this stage. I tried, but the layers you have to dig through before you can do something remotely useful… it’s a lot. A lot a lot.
But Fairlight is part of the suite, specifically for audio editing. I asked a very successful (and talented) podcaster for advice for polishing up and improving my own work, and he immediately suggested switching from Audacity to Fairlight. I can see why… Audacity is free and reasonably powerful, but it’s really designed to be idiot-proof to a large extent, and so it does some things suboptimally because they’re more beginner-friendly. Fairlight… is not beginner friendly.
But I’ve been recording audio (and podcasts) for over a decade at this point. I know Audacity. I don’t know Fairlight, but even then, I can tell it’s powerful and it does a lot of things in a really clever way.
Just to take an example: when I’m editing in Audacity, I actually have 3 files open at the same time: the file I am editing, a second file for all the music, and a third for all the sound effects. I copy and paste music or explosions from their files into the file I’m editing. It works, but it crashes periodically because I’m doing all this on my tiny, old Mac.
Fairlight has a “Media Pool” built into the program. All my effects and music are already in the program, just two clicks away. You can drag and drop files over where you want them to go, and make them translucent so you can overlap them perfectly, and then fade the old audio out so only the new audio is heard. I’m pretty sure I can do that in Audacity, but it’s not trivial, and inserting a piece of audio into an existing track… lots of cutting, moving, and pasting. Which is fine! But it’s time to upgrade my tools.
So that’s what I’m doing for the rest of the day. Watching tutorials and trying to stay focused. Wish me luck!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!