How to achieve the equivalent of a buss track in Fairlight?

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Steven Reid

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How to achieve the equivalent of a buss track in Fairlight?

PostMon Jul 16, 2018 8:04 pm

In the slower summer months, I decided to dig into Fairlight in the hopes of migrating my audio editing to Resolve from my current DAW. The effort is as much learning Fairlight as it is me appreciating a different workflow, and here I am stuck, as my post's title asks. I'm on 15b6, and I've studied the manual for 14 in addition to the update for 15b6. If I'm against a personal limitation, then I'm only to happy to re-educate myself.

In my current DAW, I can patch any number of tracks to buss tracks, which themselves can be routed to yet additional buss tracks, all capable of having their own FX, pan and volume envelopes, etc. This is massively useful where, for instance, I receive many separate tracks of mono audio clips constituting several pairs of stereo. Thus, I would place 1Clip-left on its track, 1Clip-right on its track, and then route this pair to a stereo buss, mutatis mutandis for all remaining pairs of mono (left-right) clips. I often route several stereo busses, once they are mixed appropriately, to a single stereo buss, which resides on its own buss track, where I can keyframe volume, pan, FX for the entire buss mix. Thus, I have only to adjust one volume envelope. Easy.

I know Fairlight doesn't work this way because, so far as I can tell, there isn't a concept of a dedicated buss track, but I can't figure out how to achieve the same end result. Suppose I have 4 mono clips constituting 2 stereo pairs. I can easily put each pair on its own stereo buss, pan to taste, then route each pair of stereo busses to the main (or another sub-buss). How to control/keyframe volume envelope for any of these busses?
  • keyframe volume for each clip, or at least just one, then copy and paste volume attributes to the other clips. This works, but is laborious. Making changes to a keyframe thus requires 4 times effort.
  • Create compound clip from the four source clips, then keyframe audio of the compound clip. Yes, this works, but it's a kludge of a workaround, and I'm sure this isn't the correct way.
  • 15b6 introduced the ability to bounce mixes to a new track. This is close to what I want, but obviously the bounced mix, by dint of being rendered, won't respect any changes made to its sources.

Can someone please tell me what I'm just not getting about Fairlight?
DR Studio 17.1.1 Build 9 | Windows 10 Pro x64 (20H2) OS Build 19042.867 | AMD Radeon RX580 8GB | GPU Radeon Adrenaline 20.4.2 - Driver Version 20.20.29.01-200910a-359160C (manual updates) | Intel i7-5960X 3 GHz | 64GB RAM
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Steven Reid

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  • Location: Oregon

Re: How to achieve the equivalent of a buss track in Fairlig

PostTue Jul 17, 2018 5:14 pm

Maybe this will be a soliloquy. :?

Some quality time with the manual (again), in Fairlight, and excavating some rare gems in this forum led me to a correct and simple answer. The control I'm after can be had by leveraging a combination of:
  • Resolve's flexible handling of multi-channel audioclips and
  • compound clips.
Thus, in Resolve or another DAW, I first prepare (from my example above) a 4-channel audio clip consisting of the 4 mono clips, assign resulting channels 1/2 and 3/4 to respective stereo pairs in the Media Tab, and place the multi-channel clip on a timeline thereby showing two stereo tracks. Each track is independently processed, of course.

The key to my desired workflow was to collapse both tracks into a compound audio clip, any parameter (like volume) of which can then be key-framed, sent to a sub-buss, etc. If the component tracks of the compound clip need tweaking, then I right-click on the compound clip and "open in timeline," thereby re-exposing the two stereo tracks in their own timeline. Double clicking on the main timeline in the media pool brings me back to the compound clip.

One oddity is an apparent inaccuracy of the compound clip's displayed waveform. Presumably, it should be a composite of all clips' waveforms embedded in the compound clip, but in my case the composite showed large peaks during soft passages, etc. Maybe a bug, maybe something I need to further understand...
DR Studio 17.1.1 Build 9 | Windows 10 Pro x64 (20H2) OS Build 19042.867 | AMD Radeon RX580 8GB | GPU Radeon Adrenaline 20.4.2 - Driver Version 20.20.29.01-200910a-359160C (manual updates) | Intel i7-5960X 3 GHz | 64GB RAM
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Vit Reiter

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Re: How to achieve the equivalent of a buss track in Fairlig

PostTue Jul 17, 2018 11:52 pm

You can record sound from any tracks to a new empty track and then edit them using keyframes.
Maybe some knows more comfortable solutions.
DaVinci Resolve 18.6.6 Studio (macOS Monterey 12.7.4)
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Film Editor, Colorist, DIT, Datalab technician
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