Resolve's Fairlight Audio

Resolve has a surprisingly powerful audio engine, somewhat confusingly, named Fairlight. The tab they've built into Resolve is slightly intimidating, but ultimately, if you're starting to get the hang of Resolve's layout you'll feel right at home here without too much of a learning curve.

Fairlight offers some really wonderful, if slightly advanced tools like ADR and auto-ducking that can be extremely useful in increasing your efficiency as an editor or bumping up the overall quality of your video. But in truth, unless you're working as an audio engineer, you can actually do almost everything you need to in the Edit tab, without ever touching the Fairlight workspace.

That said, in the spirit of free information, I'd like to take a quick tour of the workspace and link in some tools you might find useful.

Fairlight interface

Like the Edit space, this is broken out into a series of modular tools that can be hidden or revealed as needed. Most of them are identical to the Edit tab, so instead of having you read them twice, I'll simply link to them here.

ADR

Automatic Dialogue Replacement, or more commonly known as voice overs. This is specifically designed with replacing on-site dialogue with clean, studio dialogue recordings. It has everything you need to create clean, timed-out recordings.

Mixer

The mixer is a dynamically reacting window that opens up a new, simple interface for every clip on the tracks, mainly meant to be a fast way to adjust levels, it also has space for equalizing, panning, and organizational tools.

Meters

The interface for meters in this is probably what makes the Fairlight page look so intimidating, but in reality all it is is data feedback, telling you how close to peaking or under boosted your audio is. It's that it does this for 43+ tracks that makes this seem so enveloping. Don't worry, though, the whole reason for so many tracks is more preparedness than expectation! It's by no means typical for a single project to have so many audio tracks(but also not unheard of!)