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Thoughts on Resolve 14 Fairlight audio?


Jim Feeley

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Remember that Blackmagic Design bought (at least part of) Fairlight last year? So now in Resolve 14, they've rolled at least some of Fairlight's audio tools into Resolve 14. Here's one picture from BMD's website:

tools-md.jpg?_v=1493004591

Details and more pix:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fairlight

And BMD says they will offer four mixing consoles. Here's a smaller one:

mixing-consoles-2bay-md.jpg?_v=149257358

A little more info (and a few more pix) on those here:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

So the Resolve 14 software is in a public beta right now. There's a free version with "Revolutionary new tools for editing, color correction and professional audio post production for SD, HD and Ultra HD, all in a single application!" And a $300 Studio version that "Includes everything found in the free version plus multi user collaboration features that let editors, colorists, and sound engineers all work together on the same project at the same time, plus 3D tools, dozens of Resolve FX and more."

Huh. So I don't know much about Fairlight, though I remember them...

What do you all here think of this?

Anyone planning on trying the beta version?

 

 

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I believe that Fairlight have been building some quite big systems that have been used for big sports OB events, though I have not actually experienced the same in the UK yet ;-). I believe one of the big post audio places in Soho, London, has a lot of (networked) Fairlight kit.

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For color grading, Resolve it is very good. For editing, Resolve has been terrible, not in a good way. Lots of problems. Putting audio editing and mixing capabilities into Resolve; really I don't know.

Pro Tools is the standard industry and will continue to be. Nuendo has better capabilities and it's more stable from Pro Tools (IMHO), but for some reason; can't be the number one in the industry. It's nice to see a third player, but when you try to make new friends; should offer and solve problems, which the rest of two players have.

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I've been using Resolve 12 for the last 2 months on a personal project. I of course am a non pro editor, but I like it a lot. I like it better than my old NLE Final Cut Pro 7. I will buy the v14 Resolve w Fairlight. Never been around Fairlight so I look forward to getting to know it. In my experiences w Resolve I've never had a crash or issue with it. Not sure what VAS thinks is terrible about it but I have no issue with all of the features being in one program. On my project I did do my mix in PT because it is what I know. Time will tell if I like Fairlight better.

CrewC

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I posted something when Fairlight was purchased by BMD. I found it interesting and wondered what the plans were. I honestly didn't see this coming. Fairlight has a long storied past which many don't know because it wasn't a major daw or just too young etc... whatever it was Fairlight was never a huge company and struggled to grow and almost went under a few times. Which was a scary thing because there were a pretty big handful of Fairlight based shops in LA. Spares and repairs would of next to impossible. Like Pro Tools tdm/hdx it was a dsp based system. Fairlight made some changes to their platform in order to compete with modern daws but remained a small company. Here we are today. It doesn't appear BMD has ported all features from Fairlight over to resolve but all in all this is now the most powerful free daw on the market as long as you can import and export AAF/OMF.


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On May 3, 2017 at 3:20 AM, VAS said:

For color grading, Resolve it is very good. For editing, Resolve has been terrible, not in a good way. Lots of problems. Putting audio editing and mixing capabilities into Resolve; really I don't know.

Pro Tools is the standard industry and will continue to be. Nuendo has better capabilities and it's more stable from Pro Tools (IMHO), but for some reason; can't be the number one in the industry. It's nice to see a third player, but when you try to make new friends; should offer and solve problems, which the rest of two players have.

nuendo has more features because it is a native platform. they don't have to develop or maintain DSP cards which is a lot of work. so if you are looking for features ya sure nuendo and logic. for raw power DSP based system will better serve most people. best scrubbing on the planet is Fairlight!   

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On 3 May 2017 at 0:20 PM, VAS said:

For color grading, Resolve it is very good. For editing, Resolve has been terrible, not in a good way. Lots of problems. Putting audio editing and mixing capabilities into Resolve; really I don't know.

I had very good experiences with editing on resolve as long as I used decent hardware with good GPUs and high end codecs (ProRes, DPX, etc). I found it not fully stable when working with codecs such as h264 or if the project gets extremely complex.

In 14 they claim they improved playback for these situations, and if it turns out to be true I will switch to Resolve as my main video editor as I really like the interface, workflow, and colour grading capabilities.

Audio so far has always been a pain in Resolve and while I'm sure I will only use 5% of the capabilities Fairlight offers, I'm glad that those 5% are there.

chris

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5 hours ago, chrismedr said:

well, the marketing images on blackmagics website are completely baffling to me - why would a company which makes some really good cameras and one of the best colour correction systems put up a picture like this:

talkback.jpg

 

I think they would use a picture like that because they also sell an entry level Monitor/Recorder (Video Assist .HD in photo)  which sells for less than $500 US and is aimed directly at the user depicted.  A one-man-band DSLR videographer.  

Not sure what the headphones are for since the Video Assist 4.5" has no audio inputs other than embedded audio on the HDMI or SDI inputs and the DSLR probably has a crappy electret mono mic built in.  Maybe there is a sound mixer off camera (HDMI cable runs out of frame) Although it would be a lot of trouble to inject mixed Track into the HDMI input.of the BMD VA recorder.

 

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I was more thinking of the colours - I mean just look at the skin tones (and the rest of the colours are nothing to write home about either)

But judging from the haircuts and clothing, the target group seems to be indeed the cool one-man videographer (who has no taste ; )

 

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Like Crew I went to Resolve when FCP7 was no longer cutting it re current codecs--I mostly use it to make mix demos to upload to clients.  I kind of expected it to be lousy, and was pleasantly surprised--it mostly just worked well enough for my simple needs w/o manual patrolling or web searches for info.  When I get a chance I'm going to DL the new one and check it out.  If they really can get some real Fairlight mojo on then it could be very cool.  Yes, early reports are of not very stable beta type releases.

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I use Resolve almost every day in my other life as a colorist and sometimes post supervisor. I think it's great for color (in many ways the standard of the industry), but it's not quite there as editing software just yet. Getting closer all the time.

Resolve v14 is very, very "Beta-ish" and not stable enough to use for anything beyond testing at this point. I was surprised that they shoehorned Fairlight into it; even Avid isn't crazy enough to combine Media Composer and Pro Tools into one product, since they serve different markets. I think Blackmagic's philosophy is that if editing, color, and sound editing/mixing all uses the exact same timeline, there will never be a problem with the post handoff between departments. 

Fairlight is so new for Resolve, most of the user manual pages are still blank. I'm gonna wait for the paint to dry before trying this thing out. Potentially, this could shake a lot of things up: you can literally have an editor working in one room, a colorist working in another room, and a sound editor/mixer in a third room, all accessing the same project and updating on the fly. I think it won't really be stable enough to use until July, but there are parts of it that are formidable. Hell, I'm thrilled that it runs faster and has more color features, which is all I want. 

I don't think it's a super-serious competitor for Pro Tools just yet, but then, when Resolve was introduced at $995 about 7 years ago, it had a fairly catastrophic effect on the post business: everybody in the color business eventually had to cut their rates and all competing software/hardware prices went way down. Then again, a Deva 2 was $15,000 15 years ago, and a machine that does all of that is roughly 1/3 the price today, so the same thing is happening in many parts of the business. 

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I hope to finish my project (2nd one) soon(this month) in 12.5. My stuff has not been taxing for a NLE at all. Straight cuts, a few title cards, and a few fade in/outs. My friend is going to color correct them both and I hope I can get a beginners feel for that craft from watching him work. I did my 1st project sound mix in PT and will do the 2nd that way too. Hopefully a better 14 will exist later this year and I will buy a copy. 

CrewC

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Beyond my simple video needs, I would look more seriously at Resolve as an app for my studio if I saw some picture editors working with it (and thus realize the unified platform dream).  But right now most editors I know are driving Premiere (if they aren't on Avid), and the FCPX debacle is still recent enough that I kind of think they'd need the editing aspects of Resolve to get a lot better before considering a switch, even if the color side is really good.  Then there is also the critical mass issue--like for businesses to be able to get extra editors that are already up to speed on their edit app...

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19 hours ago, Marc Wielage said:

I use Resolve almost every day in my other life as a colorist and sometimes post supervisor. I think it's great for color (in many ways the standard of the industry), but it's not quite there as editing software just yet. Getting closer all the time.

Resolve v14 is very, very "Beta-ish" and not stable enough to use for anything beyond testing at this point. I was surprised that they shoehorned Fairlight into it; even Avid isn't crazy enough to combine Media Composer and Pro Tools into one product, since they serve different markets. I think Blackmagic's philosophy is that if editing, color, and sound editing/mixing all uses the exact same timeline, there will never be a problem with the post handoff between departments. 

Fairlight is so new for Resolve, most of the user manual pages are still blank. I'm gonna wait for the paint to dry before trying this thing out. Potentially, this could shake a lot of things up: you can literally have an editor working in one room, a colorist working in another room, and a sound editor/mixer in a third room, all accessing the same project and updating on the fly. I think it won't really be stable enough to use until July, but there are parts of it that are formidable. Hell, I'm thrilled that it runs faster and has more color features, which is all I want. 

I don't think it's a super-serious competitor for Pro Tools just yet, but then, when Resolve was introduced at $995 about 7 years ago, it had a fairly catastrophic effect on the post business: everybody in the color business eventually had to cut their rates and all competing software/hardware prices went way down. Then again, a Deva 2 was $15,000 15 years ago, and a machine that does all of that is roughly 1/3 the price today, so the same thing happening in many parts of the business. 

i think you need to understand who was using Fairlight to realize it will never be at the level of Pro Tools, Nuendo, logic etc.... my first gig was at a post house in LA that was a Fairlight house expect one room (pro tools). at the time there were around 5-6 places in LA using Fairlight. all the shops were TV / Radio. The Fairlight systems where tied to controllers which made for seamless editing. the method of editing was entirely different than every DAW on the market but it was insanely fast if you were good. if your wondering where clip based fx came from it was fairlight. you could set eq and compression per clip. but the company took too long to evolved beyond this and ad meaningful features. a example was it wasn't a simple task to create a mp3. you couldn't even do it within a fairlight! i believe the company was sold twice since 2002. it wasn't until the late 2000 that Fairlight went to a PC platform with a DSP card. there are some diehard Fairlight users out there and it is a great platform for some people out there. it is powerful and fast in the right hands. it just will never have the user base to compete with the big three.

Now that this has all happened i am interested to see what happens to Fairlight as a dedicated DAW. does BMD have any interest in that? i would love to see the Fairlight controllers become cross platform and come down in price. maybe the $10k market.....

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I'm flashing back to when BMD bought DaVinci; that seemed audacious and kinda WTF?...Super expensive systems, demanding customers, and narrow market (at DaVinci's system price). But Avid was kinda blowing it with Symphony, Final Touch/Apple Color and other apps kinda made software only/mostly solutions intriguing... And dang, BMD followed through with development and set typical crazy BMD software prices (while keeping some control surface and OS options). That was widely unexpected.

With the editing features, some of my editing pals elsewhere are intrigued... These are long-time editors and haven't dived into using Resolve to replace their main NLEs...But they're spending time at least checking out the NLE since they already have Resolve for grading or at least format conversion or something, One gang cut some fairly straight-ahead corporate stuff with Resolve, but their secret sauce is more script and camera, and they edited in Resolve as a long experiment. Conclusion seems to be: Huh, not quite there yet, but huh. If the improvement trajectory continues at this rate, will be interesting to see where it stands in a year or so.

Seems like Resolve is worming its way onto post people's hard drives as at least a utility. And plenty of Premiere & Audition users aren't Premiere & Audition lovers. Sound is a bit more of a reach user-wise than picture. But considering that Fairlight was based in Australia (as is BMD) maybe they got some post-sound aware people (and not just IP) with the acquisition, and that BMD seems to be doing an OK job with distributed/virtual offices, and the ongoing WTF is up with Avid situation... I'm not flag waving for Resolve... but I'm not betting against it.

Anyway, once/if the beta stabilizes, I hope some smart audio post people fire it up and share their thoughts...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here's a long write up about Resolve/Fairlight from the perspective of a long-time Pro Tools user, Marco Solorio. A couple caveats: This is based on Marco's feelings after sitting with a system during NAB, not quite IRL. Also: Marco's a nice and smart guy, but note that he's in real tight with Blackmagic Design; tight enough that I don't think of him as an independent observer. But still, if you have the time and interest, this is interesting: 

https://library.creativecow.net/solorio_marco/blackmagic_davinci_resolve_fairlight/1

 

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