Migrating audio to Fairlight, impressions after 3 months
Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2017 3:16 pm
Hi friends,
we've been migrating the entire audio production of a independent feature to Fairlight for the past 3 months. I' d like to share my impressions with the community after the first 3 months.
First, it's surprising that after many months after R14 release, we don't see much reviews on Fairlight. A quick google will lead to articles that announces it, as a revolutionary move from BMD (which is , surely), but not an in-depth review of it. So maybe this small post might add a lit bit of perspective to the current state of FL.
We've been working with Vegas (as audio editor only) and Reaper for many years. So, our perspective is from guys who love light-speed interfaces for editing, true multi-threading engines, and above everything, accuracy. The reason we are migrating everything to FL is for future proofing. We don't want in 10 years to have to open both Resolve V 22 (LOL) and legacy tools to remix the audio. Also, we don't want to depend on 3rd party plugins used in those legacy tools. We want to have a one-project, no-external dependency project file that contains everything. For that, we are generating inside Vegas and Reaper something that we call "TTM"s, (Track to Mix). We import statically these TTM into Resolve and we use fairlight just for mixing the tracks and applying basic corrections such as EQ and compressing. All the "dirty work" of ADR, Noise reduction, de-verb, de-essers, all done in the legacy tools. We are confident that if someday we need to change parameters at that level, we can open the legacy projects just for that piece of audio and regenerate the TTM, but this scenario is rare.
So, here we are, at Fairlight tab will all TTMs out in place. Unfortunately, our experience in Fairlight is way below reasonable. I'm going to put some points we have been "tolerating" during this process.
1 - First of all, the waveform engine is terrible. Basic things as independent-thread waveform generation seems to be very laggy. Apparently the engine is generating the waveform everytime we zoom in or out, which is weird, since it could be simply cached (Vegas does it is sfk files, for instance, and it is ultra fast). Also, the lower part of the waveform is just a mirror of the upper part , which is a basic mistake, and a waste of space.
2 - The sound output is erratically out of sync, sometimes it plays on sync, some times it doesnt. I have a feeling that whenever some thread is calculating something, it gets out of sync. If you wait a little bit, it gets in sync again
3 - the ballistics of the VU meters. They drop slowly and linearly. Also, it shows activity in muted tracks, which is confusing, and usually is out of sync (a quick test with a big peak audio will play it before the VU peaks)
4 - There is no way to draw a track level envelope. In another post I did, I asked about how to automate volume, which is possible by "real-time"ly moving the faders. This is annoying because usually we prefer to draw the envelopes in a track level way, so , for instance, we can mix music in a graphic way.
5 - The edit page plays way lower than fairlight page. Not sure why, maybe it's on purpose ?
6 - vertical zoom is available only for the track height, not for the waveform height. In Vegas, for instance, a priceless tool is to increase the zoom level of the waveform only. This gives you the ability to fine sync audio with lower gains without mess with the actual gain. This is useful to mach backgrounds in continuity. In FL, we have to both increase the track height and the clip gain so the waveform gets bigger , then you can synchronize between clips.
7 - clip overlapping showing both waveforms one in the top of the other slightly transparent. This is another feature in Vegas that we miss in FL, very useful to do some frankstein editing of dialogues specially, or to match the beat of some music that you want to cut/edit.
8 - several minor bugs. This is less serious as they might solved in time. But one of the most annoying is : when I import a modo media in a stereo track, it routes the mono to the left channel only. It should simply replicate the left to the right to make it sound mono yet conserving the type of the track (this was edited to be more accurate in the description of the bug). Another, just found, nested timelines dont respect the muted tracks in the lower layers (they still outputs, even being muted, which doesnt happen when you have the inner timeline opened itself).
9 - finally, speed. Everything in FL seems slower. We have projects in reaper with 30+ tracks that scrolling, zooming and dragging is light-fast. A simple 4 tracks in FL has painful UI performance. Even in our best workstation with (an I7 with 32 G Ram) we clearly feel the difference.
Again, this is just our perspective of FL so far. Surely BMD is working to improve it, and that's why we are putting our bets on it and migrating everything. However, it would be great if someday we can do the whole editing in FL, which is something that we don't consider at this moment, as we prefer to do the editing in Vegas/Reaper and just generate the TTMs for basic mixing in FL.
Please let me know your thoughts, I'm very curious about other people's opinion on FL so far.
we've been migrating the entire audio production of a independent feature to Fairlight for the past 3 months. I' d like to share my impressions with the community after the first 3 months.
First, it's surprising that after many months after R14 release, we don't see much reviews on Fairlight. A quick google will lead to articles that announces it, as a revolutionary move from BMD (which is , surely), but not an in-depth review of it. So maybe this small post might add a lit bit of perspective to the current state of FL.
We've been working with Vegas (as audio editor only) and Reaper for many years. So, our perspective is from guys who love light-speed interfaces for editing, true multi-threading engines, and above everything, accuracy. The reason we are migrating everything to FL is for future proofing. We don't want in 10 years to have to open both Resolve V 22 (LOL) and legacy tools to remix the audio. Also, we don't want to depend on 3rd party plugins used in those legacy tools. We want to have a one-project, no-external dependency project file that contains everything. For that, we are generating inside Vegas and Reaper something that we call "TTM"s, (Track to Mix). We import statically these TTM into Resolve and we use fairlight just for mixing the tracks and applying basic corrections such as EQ and compressing. All the "dirty work" of ADR, Noise reduction, de-verb, de-essers, all done in the legacy tools. We are confident that if someday we need to change parameters at that level, we can open the legacy projects just for that piece of audio and regenerate the TTM, but this scenario is rare.
So, here we are, at Fairlight tab will all TTMs out in place. Unfortunately, our experience in Fairlight is way below reasonable. I'm going to put some points we have been "tolerating" during this process.
1 - First of all, the waveform engine is terrible. Basic things as independent-thread waveform generation seems to be very laggy. Apparently the engine is generating the waveform everytime we zoom in or out, which is weird, since it could be simply cached (Vegas does it is sfk files, for instance, and it is ultra fast). Also, the lower part of the waveform is just a mirror of the upper part , which is a basic mistake, and a waste of space.
2 - The sound output is erratically out of sync, sometimes it plays on sync, some times it doesnt. I have a feeling that whenever some thread is calculating something, it gets out of sync. If you wait a little bit, it gets in sync again
3 - the ballistics of the VU meters. They drop slowly and linearly. Also, it shows activity in muted tracks, which is confusing, and usually is out of sync (a quick test with a big peak audio will play it before the VU peaks)
4 - There is no way to draw a track level envelope. In another post I did, I asked about how to automate volume, which is possible by "real-time"ly moving the faders. This is annoying because usually we prefer to draw the envelopes in a track level way, so , for instance, we can mix music in a graphic way.
5 - The edit page plays way lower than fairlight page. Not sure why, maybe it's on purpose ?
6 - vertical zoom is available only for the track height, not for the waveform height. In Vegas, for instance, a priceless tool is to increase the zoom level of the waveform only. This gives you the ability to fine sync audio with lower gains without mess with the actual gain. This is useful to mach backgrounds in continuity. In FL, we have to both increase the track height and the clip gain so the waveform gets bigger , then you can synchronize between clips.
7 - clip overlapping showing both waveforms one in the top of the other slightly transparent. This is another feature in Vegas that we miss in FL, very useful to do some frankstein editing of dialogues specially, or to match the beat of some music that you want to cut/edit.
8 - several minor bugs. This is less serious as they might solved in time. But one of the most annoying is : when I import a modo media in a stereo track, it routes the mono to the left channel only. It should simply replicate the left to the right to make it sound mono yet conserving the type of the track (this was edited to be more accurate in the description of the bug). Another, just found, nested timelines dont respect the muted tracks in the lower layers (they still outputs, even being muted, which doesnt happen when you have the inner timeline opened itself).
9 - finally, speed. Everything in FL seems slower. We have projects in reaper with 30+ tracks that scrolling, zooming and dragging is light-fast. A simple 4 tracks in FL has painful UI performance. Even in our best workstation with (an I7 with 32 G Ram) we clearly feel the difference.
Again, this is just our perspective of FL so far. Surely BMD is working to improve it, and that's why we are putting our bets on it and migrating everything. However, it would be great if someday we can do the whole editing in FL, which is something that we don't consider at this moment, as we prefer to do the editing in Vegas/Reaper and just generate the TTMs for basic mixing in FL.
Please let me know your thoughts, I'm very curious about other people's opinion on FL so far.