Workflow Fairlight clumsiness.

I have just screen recorded myself using Fairlight and trying to workout how to get crossfade to work. In this video you can get an idea on how it worked for me and see what I found out about using the software. I do a comparison with another DAW and I also show what is slowing my workflow down a lot.

Now everyone has their own way of working but for new users of DR and the Fairlight tab it my help some to move forward and if there are things that can be improved on it might be worth discussing them after watching.

There are some new options for seeing the video you're working on while on the Fairlight page in version 15; check out starting around page 1-90 here:

http://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/D ... _Guide.pdf

Also see the video at

, which provides a really good introduction to everything you can do in Fairlight.

Edited to add; fundamentally, I'm not sure I agree with your suggestion to make the audio transitions available to the Fairlight page, since I think of transitions as an editing tool and they belong on the edit page (which is where they are). It's a conceptual difference...the Fairlight page is really for improving the audio once your basic edits and transitions are applied. It's similar to the coloring page: a lot of the editing tools are not available there, and that's for a reason.

Edited to add; fundamentally, I'm not sure I agree with your suggestion to make the audio transitions available to the Fairlight page, since I think of transitions as an editing tool and they belong on the edit page (which is where they are). It's a conceptual difference...the Fairlight page is really for improving the audio once your basic edits and transitions are applied. It's similar to the coloring page: a lot of the editing tools are not available there, and that's for a reason.

Hi Brad, thanks for your feedback I have just had a look at the PDF in your link but can't see anything about the video window in the Fairlight page but I could have missed that. I must try out the scrolling option for audio and video though as I haven't used that so far.

I only noticed the audio transitions in the edit page after I was struggling with Fairlights cumbersome crossfade. Audio transition or crossfades are something I use all the time and if its so easy to use them in the edit tab I can't see why Blackmagic wouldn't want to include them in Farilight as that something that an audio editor should be able to do quickly and accurately. I would rather the video editor give me a rough starting point to work from using audio transitions if they like but I don't want to have to open (Video) Edit to do that myself.

I would say that the refinement and creation of cross fades is one of the big things that one would want to do in the Fairlight page. I don't understand why we can't select the edit and use the shift T command to add a default audio transition.

I would also like to be able to drag the edge of the clip over the adjacent clip and have a cross fade auto created like the behavior in Adobe Audition.

The way it snaps to the frame is odd. A DAW should be able to focus on these tasks down to the sample. This precision and focus on the audio is one of the main benefits to working in a DAW or this page.

Edit page is for the association and juxtaposition of clips and elements the DAW is for sub frame accurate refinement and placement of audio. as well as effects and such

The "Show audio track layers" command in the view menu, I think, is giving that channel view you had in Cubase but that seems like to many steps for defining crossfades.

Screen Shot 2018-06-01 at 3.34.59 PM.png (309.66 KiB) Viewed 1696 times

I only noticed the audio transitions in the edit page after I was struggling with Fairlights cumbersome crossfade. Audio transition or crossfades are something I use all the time and if its so easy to use them in the edit tab I can't see why Blackmagic wouldn't want to include them in Farilight as that something that an audio editor should be able to do quickly and accurately. I would rather the video editor give me a rough starting point to work from using audio transitions if they like but I don't want to have to open (Video) Edit to do that myself.

Yes, that does make sense, and while there's certainly the capability to do crossfades manually from the Fairlight page it would make sense to have the transition effects for Fairlight also appear there.

As for a video window on the Fairlight page, here's what I see by default. The video window shows up if you display the meters (click the Meters icon to the right of the Mixer icon)

As for a video window on the Fairlight page, here's what I see by default. There must be some sort of setting to make this show up; it was enabled by default in my version of Resolve (15b3).

Sorry forgot to say the video window problem for me is only happen when set to dual monitor mode.

As for a video window on the Fairlight page, here's what I see by default. There must be some sort of setting to make this show up; it was enabled by default in my version of Resolve (15b3).

Sorry forgot to say the video window problem for me is only happen when set to dual monitor mode.

Okay, and I subsequently discovered that the video window shows up when you activate the meters; I don't think the meters were activated in your demo. I'm only using one monitor for editing.

I wish Fairlight used the same paradigm as Reaper and others, where you can just push two clips together and it automatically crossfades between them on the overlap.

Also see this earlier discussion of cross-dissolves in Fairlight (based on Resolve 14):

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=63365

Thanks i have found it. watching the video I have found that I needed to select from the VIEW menu, SHOW AUDIO TRACK LAYERS.

DR layers.png (99.71 KiB) Viewed 1642 times

which allows easy crossfading

DR layers 02.png (25.04 KiB) Viewed 1642 times

couldn't find this info in the PDF file.

Also see the video at

, which provides a really good introduction to everything you can do in Fairlight.

couldn't find this info in the PDF file.

The PDF file is meant to be a quick overview of new features in version 15; I believe most of the crossfade functionality was already available in version 14 (thought I don't think audio layering was available then).

Hopefully once the new full manual for version 15 is available all of the Fairlight functions will be explained more thoroughly. I thought the video provided a nice overview of most of what Fairlight can do; some of that was already available in the older version but she described the new features as well.