Frustrating the new Features 4 Fairlight in DaVinci Resolve

Again a big hope is gone after the announcement TODAY for fairlightusers.

During the webinars of Version 17 a lot of Users wish to have more compatibility for Music Videos. As founder of the DaVinci Resolve Audio and Sounddesign group i have to announce that most members ușe a different DAW for Scoring Music.

For example the ușe of just one Controller îs a pain. This îs like 20 years ago. Special for Film Music Composers i hope that soon the possibility for Plugins îs implemented to ușe more than just one Controller for Composing and still a Scoring editor îs highly wanted.

Still the concept îs decades away to build a modern workflow for film composers and postproduction with sense.

Its still a pain. So we need urgend: A Midi Editor! Midi learning! Possibilities to ușe all Controllers together that WE are able top controll Our Plugins.

Happy easter
Daniela Tocan

For this reason, we use Cubase and other apps.

It appears to us that Fairlight is years away from being fully functional, especially for scoring.

I don't see Fairlight as being designed for music production at all. Should you not be using Cubase or Logic for composing?

I don't see Fairlight as being designed for music production at all. Should you not be using Cubase or Logic for composing?

How you are involved in professional Audio workflow for this statement. We talk about workflow in Broadcasting TV and Radioproduction and! production of Sounddesign up to Dolby Atmos. We do not talk about home studios for some YouTube or Spotify fun productions for the Davincy Resolve YouTube influencers.

I guess I was the only one in some this years scoring competitions, that did score complete with Davinci resolve. We talk also about that Fairlight miss a lot of features that are simple to implement. How you like to do Dolby Atmos if you have no Monitor back channel after rendering to control the sound?

Yes, I use Resolve purely for my own YouTube projects. But I have been in professional audio since 1970, only retiring in 2018.
I started in film dubbing becoming assistant dubbing mixer. Then moved on to radio commercial recording and mixing. From there to the world of audio for corporate programs and videos including the World Service for the BBC. This then developed into sound design and soundtrack creation and mixing for special venues such as experience shows, visitor attractions, and museums, which I continued doing when I went freelance in 2001 up until retirement.
I have been a Pro Tools user since 1994 and still have and use it in my studio at home. I have not done any Dolby Atmos productions but all special venue soundtracks have been multi channel ranging from 4.0 and 6.1 for the Doctor Who Experience, to 10.0 for the Fram museum in Norway.
I also don't see composers such as Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson-Williams using Fairlight.

I don't see Fairlight as being designed for music production at all. Should you not be using Cubase or Logic for composing?

My understanding as well.

I don't see Fairlight as being designed for music production at all. Should you not be using Cubase or Logic for composing?

My understanding as well.

My understanding is that you are Note able to use the possibilities or do not know them. I force since some time in the Fairlight Audiogroup (strictly invitation based tools like VHost and some scripts including composition tools.

In fact a bit difficult to set up… but my concerns are inside Blackmagic Design development are not much music and Audio Developers. How it comes that in the 18 audio where are the most expensive parts of a film is in collaboration just fairly ignored.

You can do film compositions with an iPad right now trigger it with a VHost and use live with DaVinci Resolve Fairlight. No need of Cubase…

I request here just for easy to implement features to get a recognized DAW. Fairlight is a DAW but not recognized.

Complete done in Fairlight including composition.

Scores are there. For this I use MuseScore.
But workflow for any Audio is still a pain, Money and time consumption. No wonder just a view buy the Hardware.

My understanding is that you are Note able to use the possibilities or do not know them.

Daniela, it appears you are talking about scoring music and or sound design with midi and as has been mentioned there are many other programmes which are more commonly used for this. Fairlight along with Nuendo and ProTools is one of the few specifically post DAWS for tracklaying, ADR and mixing and finishing for Film and TV, as opposed to music. It is also by and far the cheapest at free, or less than 300 dollars, without currently anything further to pay whatsoever - you have to pay at least £2000+, + annual subscription, for anywhere near the same facilities in Pro Tools.

You only need to look at BMD's hardware offerings for Fairlight to understand it is aimed post mixing and finishing and not music scoring to see this.

Fairlight

received_478153889944944~2.jpeg (79.66 KiB) Viewed 3783 times

My understanding is that you are Note able to use the possibilities or do not know them.

Daniela, it appears you are talking about [i]scoring music and or sound design with midi and as has been mentioned there are many other programmes which are more commonly used for this. Fairlight along with Nuendo and ProTools is one of the few specifically post DAWS for tracklaying, ADR and mixing and finishing for Film and TV, as opposed to music. It is also by and far the cheapest at free, or less than 300 dollars, without currently anything further to pay whatsoever - you have to pay at least £2000+, + annual subscription, for anywhere near the same facilities in Pro Tools.

You only need to look at BMD's hardware offerings for Fairlight to understand it is aimed post mixing and finishing and not music scoring to see this.

I own Nuendo and Cubase but ușe IT rare.
I am a Hobby user AMD Avid îs realy not a company You can trust in my mind.

Allong Fairlight hardware... When for You Work past time with Fairlight Hardware? Me today... But realy was Not a good choice of Blackmagic top destroy as most they can the History and a lot of Features of the old fairlight DAW.

Yes it îs a fairlight and i love it... Just think different.

As someone who also attempts to make music within Fairlight, the tools are very weak I agree. At minimum you would expect VSTs Midi Mapping for your controllers to automation, A Midi Arranger, Piano Roll, Quantizing and improves sample editing etc. OSC and better ASIO support would be nice too given the immersive tools that are included, as would removing the 32 channel I/O limit/bug when you don't ant to be cramped to only the first 32 channels as many studios do not setup like that, they might have inputs coming in way above 32 for example, you shouldn't have to pull the routing apart in your studio just to feed it some audio. Likewise it would benefit from improved VST Support and these days the VST engine really needs to be sandboxed from the application so that audio crashes don't crash the application.

My understanding is that you are Note able to use the possibilities or do not know them.

Daniela, it appears you are talking about scoring music and or sound design with midi and as has been mentioned there are many other programmes which are more commonly used for this. Fairlight along with Nuendo and ProTools is one of the few specifically post DAWS for tracklaying, ADR and mixing and finishing for Film and TV, as opposed to music. It is also by and far the cheapest at free, or less than 300 dollars, without currently anything further to pay whatsoever - you have to pay at least £2000+, + annual subscription, for anywhere near the same facilities in Pro Tools.

You only need to look at BMD's hardware offerings for Fairlight to understand it is aimed post mixing and finishing and not music scoring to see this.

I think it depends on what and how you want to work. There's certainly been times I've wished for a basic DAW package within Fairlight to more seamlesslyand fluidly edit between midi,audio and video concurrently, especially with the immersive offerings available like Dolby Atmos etc. If we take a modern DAW and sound design approach such as Bitwig, the boundary between midi and audio is very small now. In fact Bitwig doesn't even define a track as really audio or midi anymore they are the same and/or hybrid. Working directly within Video and Music at the same time is a bit niche though, but there's not many options out there. ProTools and various video workarounds in various DAWs are as near as you can get. I even route 32 channels of audio from Bitwig to Davinci and have both running side-by-side to build my perfect setup, but it's not ideal and the whole synchronisation of two different audio, midi and video timelines not simple to crack, but is possible.

+1 for Midi editor and midi instruments!

As has been said, Fairlight is for audio post not music production.

As has been said, Fairlight is for audio post not music production.

Shure and for postproduction workflow it’s still a pain. It is ok as long you do just dialog. But if you do foley like me you have to work often in yours workflow with more than one controller. But for dialogue realy it’s not necessary to have Dolby Atmos.

Hell you start sounddesign for this in a different daw to layer yours sound and bring it to Davinci Resolve just to sort the results out and bring it to production level.

One controller to use with Fairlight is more than a joke.

I do not say there are no solutions. I say workflow is just still a pain.

Here it is . MidiPipe.
You can do all kinds of magic and routing with this utility.
So try and route all midi inputs from the controllers to the same IAC (ToResolve) and Resolve should respond to al controllers.
Return traffic is different but you should be able to do similar tricks.

Have fun

http://www.subtlesoft.square7.net/MidiPipe.html Here it is . MidiPipe.
You can do all kinds of magic and routing with this utility.
So try and route all midi inputs from the controllers to the same IAC (ToResolve) and Resolve should respond to al controllers.
Return traffic is different but you should be able to do similar tricks.

Have fun

http://www.subtlesoft.square7.net/MidiPipe.html

If you are doing sounddesign and foley in another DAW why are you not finishing it there before bringing it into Fairlight? The availability of a Dolby Atmos workflow should not affect you in any way. It's there for those who need it.
Yes, BMD make proprietary hardware designed to work specifically with the software, just as Avid does for Pro Tools. For both companies it's a revenue stream.
You seem to be hell bent on using a program that is not suitable for your needs in the first place, and then complain about it.

I always have fun.

As charles said, Fairlight is a post production app, not DAW. Usually i use Presonus studion one to create a music.

Thing is, there are people who develop music and video concurrently. In fact the only reason they don't is this odd notion that there can't/shouldn't be this overlap, but I think a lot of it comes from old-school thinking about video and audio software and also there simply wasn't the computing power to essentially run a DAW inside a Video Editor, but heck I'm running ProTools & Davinci or Bitwig & Davinci and literally using both concurrently, but it's a pain to setup. If it was made more possible, more would work that way I'm sure.

DavinciGirl, I would highly suggest, if you haven't used it already, to look at a product by Plogue called Bidule. Comes as VST2.4 (VST3 beta) plugin and Standalone version that really helps streamline the Midi, VST, ASIO and Audio between applications. It's a bit like Blue Cat Audio Patchwork & Connector combined but very powerful. Use it with JACK Audio and really it just turns everything in your computer into one big connectable entity, but you'll still have to work on syncronisation between applications, it fully support latency compensation within itself though.

https://www.plogue.com/products/bidule.html

Let me chime in as I am trying to solve a similar puzzle.

I am trying out BlueCatsAudio Patchwork with Fairlight in order to control a channel strip plug-in with my midi controller. With BlueCat I have no success getting midi CCs in or out from a track or bus VST slot. With another VST (AudioToCC) I am able to get midi out from a bus slot but not from a track.

Do you gurus know if there are restrictions in Fairlight or is it a question of how the VST implements the midi interface?

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I am on Win10.

I think this point has very high relevance. MIDI tools have always being such a crucial part of many aspects of sound design and sampling. Fairlight historically had these features , and it makes more sense than not for them to be reintegrated.

I’m taking midi tracks , midi and musical time based, and more hardware integration.

I have I doubt we will see it back at some stage in the near future.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It's fairly typical for composers to slave their preferred sequencer (e.g. Logic) with a master Timeline containing picture and dialogue (e.g. ProTools or Fairlight) - either on the same or on separate machines.

Resolve Studio generates LTC which may be converted to MTC via software (e.g. Source-LTC) or hardware. Resolve may be slaved via Fairlight I/O.

If you're looking to compose music without spending a fortune then I'd give Reaper a try.

Inexpensive, powerful and comes with the standard tools that composers need (piano roll, etc).

I've never thought of Fairlight as being an alternative to a music production focused DAW fwiw

Hello,
Midi features could be useful for film mixing, not only in music work. A lot of features from bluecats or other plugin manufacturers could be used to automatize some mixing tasks, like ducking, gain staging or « autosleep ». Not for great mixer, but for a few small compagnies where one editor have to do a lot mixing tasks… will internal routing be implemented in Resolve ? Between plugins themselves and with the application, like faders ?

The main problem I find with Fairlight is it isn't exactly mouse friendly. It really needs the dedicated controller to get the most out of it. Maybe it's me, but I find routing to be the most unintuitive. This probably comes from the 26 years that I've used Pro Tools where a track input or output, aux output, or send is but two clicks away with a mouse. I also do have a dedicated control surface for PT.
This is also why I never got on with Reaper.

The main problem I find with Fairlight is it isn't exactly mouse friendly. It really needs the dedicated controller to get the most out of it.

I agree Charles and the Fairlight controller is truly something to behold, unique in its way. But Fairlight is getting better with mouse and keyboard. And whilst I agree again, with you on routing, it's perhaps just our muscle memory, since I was long used to Avid/Pro Tools too. Fairlight has totally replaced it for me now, though audio post isn't my main job, by any stretch and since I cannot afford to maintain both Avid MC and PT. For the same feature set (Atmos, comprehensive ADR, etc.) you have be looking at 2K + annual support in PT and around a grand for Nuendo, which is the only other main competing dedicated audio for Film & TV post daw. I have the Artist Mix for Fairlight, which though limited is, for me, quite useful with it. Reaper was great for quick and dirty but since Fairlight has got better, I've uninstalled that too. If it was my job though, I think I would still have to be on PT, at least here.

It's what you get used to I suppose. I've only ever used Resolve for my own YT channel projects and tend to use Fairlight for trying out things such as music edits to pic.
On the other hand, I still have my Pro Tools rig. When I stopped doing commercial work in 2018 I froze PT at that point and it hasn't cost me anything since. Being retired I have the time to edit in Resolve and then tracklay and mix in PT. No deadlines to meet!
I can't justify a decent controller for Fairlight, hence the Faderport 1. For Pro Tools though I have my trusty Mackie HUI which was designed for PT from the get go. It might be old, like me, but is built like a tank and has never let me down.
My Pro Tools toys

It looks very nice and well thought out, Charles. Unfortunately my last ProTools was V8 and my Digi002 blew up it's power but since it was firewire, it was of little use to me by then anyway.

I ran PT8 for a short while before going 64bit with PT11. I froze at 2018.4. I'm still using my Digi 002Rack via Firewire.

An interesting thread. Philosophical as much as technical.

Thing is, there are people who develop music and video concurrently. In fact the only reason they don't is this odd notion that there can't/shouldn't be this overlap, but I think a lot of it comes from old-school thinking about video and audio software and also there simply wasn't the computing power to essentially run a DAW inside a Video Editor, but heck I'm running ProTools & Davinci or Bitwig & Davinci and literally using both concurrently, but it's a pain to setup. If it was made more possible, more would work that way I'm sure.

I think I agree that as we have the cut and edit pagea we could have two Audio pages. One as it is now for production audio and one for music scoring. Just a thought.

At one time an edit program didn't do colour correction/grading nor have a seperate audio section, So things are changing It depends on where BMD wants to go.

Though my grip is lack of decent ASIO support I but wouldn't know what to do with midi .I don't score or "do music" other than loading completed tracks. However I can see some people would have a need for it.

The question is how would it help BMD to put this music scoring page in Resolve? They are unlikely to sell more Resolve because of it?
.

I think I agree that as we have the cut and edit pagea we could have two Audio pages. One as it is now for production audio and one for music scoring. Just a thought.

But at the same time, the Edit page has suffered pretty severely at the expense of the Cut page. I think before adding on more pages to do particular tasks, the broader essentials should be very solid first. There is much to do in Fairlight (VST sidechaning, a complete overhaul of the routing, and Track Folders would be a great start) so I don't think putting Fairlight on the back burner while working on another new page would be worth it at the moment. It's certainly an idea worth considering for the future, just not yet IMO.

Interesting thread, indeed.
Don't know if this has been shared already:
A glimpse of the future? :

A gem for console freaks like me :

Enjoy!

I think I agree that as we have the cut and edit pagea we could have two Audio pages. One as it is now for production audio and one for music scoring. Just a thought.

But at the same time, the Edit page has suffered pretty severely at the expense of the Cut page. I think before adding on more pages to do particular tasks, the broader essentials should be very solid first.

100% Agree. IT needs to be robust and reliable before new features are added.

But at the same time, the Edit page has suffered pretty severely at the expense of the Cut page. I think before adding on more pages to do particular tasks, the broader essentials should be very solid first.

100% Agree. IT needs to be robust and reliable before new features are added.

I'm not opposed to new features being added, but IMO the focus should be on adding in the basics that are still missing. In regards to audio, my biggest issue is the lack of VST sidechaining because this is an essential feature that should be included in any modern DAW. Resolve's sidechain implementation of being limited to just one sidechain track and being limited to Resolve's dynamics (I have 3rd party VST plugins I'd like to be able to use instead) makes rountripping to another DAW the better option instead of staying inside Resolve.

And to the point of musical scoring with MIDI, working with multi-channel VST instruments in Fairlight would be so much easier with a better routing system and Folder Tracks (both for routing and organizing). Tacking on new features without having the basics in place makes working with the new features so much more frustrating than it needs to be.

We round trip all audio work to and from Cubase Pro. It adds those steps, but we get the benefit of a rock solid DAW with more features than we could ever use.

An interesting fact: in the years we have been following this workflow, Cubase Pro has never crashed, never corrupted any files, or lacked any feature we needed.

I love Davinci's control surfaces and am considering the Fairlight Control Panel but in order for me to amortize the investment really need Resolve to support Midi Tracks. Resolve supports AUs and VSTs so all my Kontakt libraries and Arturia synths which house patches I use for effects or entire songs. Midi data isn't particularly expensive computationally or, considering how long Midi has been around, hard to understand or implement. This simply seems to be a matter of not enough people requesting that Resolve add Midi tracks in addition to audio. Midi is not just useful for triggering a sound effect or sample but also for automations which the Fairlight control surfaces even highlight as a feature. Midi is perfect for that.

Please Blackmagic add this feature! Until you do I can't justify the purchase of any Fairlight control surfaces.
And thanks for all the updates. Many great new features added. Just really missing Midi.

Please Blackmagic add this feature! Until you do I can't justify the purchase of any Fairlight control surfaces.
And thanks for all the updates. Many great new features added. Just really missing Midi.

The whole MIDI implementation of DVR is rather basic and has not been updated since ages. Implementing new features might require more effort to update the base modules then the feature itself.

Please Blackmagic add this feature! Until you do I can't justify the purchase of any Fairlight control surfaces.
And thanks for all the updates. Many great new features added. Just really missing Midi.

The whole MIDI implementation of DVR is rather basic and has not been updated since ages. Implementing new features might require more effort to update the base modules then the feature itself.

Sounds like you might have more legacy Fairlight experience than I can imagine

I've just tried to give examples of why Midi and Midi automation would greatly enhance Fairlight within Resolve and by extension make the Fairlight panels more useful. Fairlight can already work with VSTs/AUs so why not make it possible to talk to them via a Midi track?

Nuendo is popular in ADR studios and can handle Midi. It's Steinberg sister product Cubase certainly can. Without Midi tracks the control panel doesn't make much sense to me. Especially as it would be perfect for midi automations.