All language subtitles for 07. Automation Fairlight

All right guys, so in this lesson we are talking about automation. Now,

if you don't know what automation is,

it's basically like key framing in the world of video. But for audio,

you're basically just changing values over time. Within your timeline,

you're changing values of certain parameters in your timeline.

So I have this one section of the song over here that

goes underwater.

So there's a section of the video where we enter underwater here,

it starts with this clip and we enter the underwater world.

And I was thinking it could be cool to apply a low pass filter here so that the

audio is kind of muffled. Well, how would we go about doing that?

We basically want to start with a normal audio here and then go into

a more muffled audio here and then back to normal afterwards.

So in this video I'm gonna show you guys exactly how to do that and I'm gonna

show you a couple different ways of how we can do that.

So the automation side of Fairlight can be enabled by pressing this button right

here. If we hover our mouse over it, we can see that it says automation.

If we click this, we have a bunch of different things that come up. Now,

don't worry about these too much right now.

I know it looks like there's a lot of different options here, but to be honest,

uh, I don't use most of these options, um, within these dropdowns here.

So I usually stick to one setting when doing most of my automation.

But of course, it's important to understand what each one of these functions do.

So we we're gonna be walking through all of them in this lesson.

We could see a couple different things happen when we enabled the automation,

uh, button Here. I'll undo it. Let's take a look. If I press it,

we can see that we have a bunch of different options up here,

but we also can see our main bus output here too. And that's because, uh,

when we enable automation, we also have the ability to automate buses as well.

So this is really important because automating buses can be a great way for us

to apply automation to a bunch of tracks at once, right?

A bus is basically just a group of tracks.

We are able to route a bunch of different tracks into one bus.

Let's say we have, you know, a bunch of different tracks here.

We have our dialogue, we have our sound effects, we have our music.

And let's say that we have like 20 different tracks of sound effects,

which is not unreasonable in, in a bigger production,

you will definitely have tons and tons of tracks, uh,

for each type of sound effect. You know,

let's say we wanted to apply automation to all the sound effects at at once.

Let's say we had 20 tracks of sound effects and we wanted to apply this same

muffled low pass filter to all of those tracks at once over here. Well,

we could do that on the buses as well.

So the same automation that we're gonna be applying to this clip over here to

this track, actually not the clip. Well,

cuz you apply automation on the track level,

not the clip level within the Fairlight.

So the same automation that we are applying to this track over here can also be

applied to buses as well, which is very useful in certain situations.

So that's important to know.

So let's first understand what it is that we want to do to this sound here in

order to make it feel like it's underwater.

So I already know the answer to this. The,

the answer is we're gonna want to create a low pass filter effect.

And basically the way that we do that is to just use an eq.

Because an EQ allows us to see all of our sound frequencies, right?

And what is a low pass effect? What is the low pass effect doing?

It's just allowing our low frequencies to pass through.

We're eliminating our high frequencies,

letting the low frequencies pass through. So we have a two over here.

This is where our music is sitting.

So let's go to a two in our mixer and what we're gonna do is open up our eq,

let's set this range over here. I'm gonna press r. Let's set a range on here.

So this area, I know that uh,

actually from here it goes from the louder part to the quieter part and I'm

gonna make sure Loopings turn on. I'm gonna press shift space bar.

So it's just gonna loop that area and I'm gonna play with the equalizer so we

can see what allows us to get that low pass sound effect.

So shift space bar.

All right, so you guys can already tell when I bring the frequency of the band

six to about two 50,

we're just taking it from the right over here to the left.

We're eliminating all of the high frequencies in our EQ here and only

allowing the low frequencies to pass through. All right?

So we can see that by moving the frequency of Band six we're able to

eliminate those high frequencies. That's all we're really doing.

We're just moving the frequency, the gain doesn't really matter,

it's really just that, um,

frequency change that is allowing us to cut off those high frequencies.

So we basically know that that's what we're trying to automate here.

We're just trying to move band six from here to about here and then

back to over here.

So now that we know that what we can do is set this up so that we can

record this automation live as we're playing through the timeline over here.

Now before we do that,

the first thing we wanna do is make sure that we have a visual representation of

the automation on our track.

So we wanna be able to just see a visual of what it is that we're doing on our

track here. So let's think this through.

We are basically just automating the frequency of Band six, right?

We figured out what it is that we need to automate.

So now what we could do is on the track level over here we have this dropdown.

And this dropdown is only available to us when automation is turned on, right?

If we turn off automation, that dropdown goes away.

So that is something that only comes up when we're in automation mode because

it's only for automation. So if I click this little dropdown,

what we want to do is locate the frequency of

band six. So that's in the eq.

So we're gonna go to band six and we're gonna wanna select frequency here.

Now we already had it selected, you probably won't. Uh,

but you can see that we have this green line over here and that basically

represents the frequency of Band six. This is showing us what's going on here.

So I'm gonna go back to my Arrow tool here.

Now what we need to do is make sure that all of our settings up here are correct

before we start doing any kind of automation. Now,

when I press play and I change these parameters of uh,

band six, we can see that that line,

notice this green line here, it's moving, right? Because that green line,

it's a visual representation of what the frequency of Band six is doing.

So as we are moving the frequency of Band six left and right,

that line is gonna update over there, right?

But what should be happening if it's recording the automation,

it should be drawing a curve, right? As we're moving this back and forth,

it should be kind of updating things in real time.

It should be drawing a curve throughout here. Well,

it's not doing that and that's simply because we don't have the EQ enabled over

here.

Now the reason we have all these buttons over here is because we want to make

sure that we are intentionally enabling certain parts or certain parameters

of our mix to be automated. If you know,

we didn't have the ability to choose what we want to automate and everything was

just automated, that it would be complete chaos.

You'd have so many different automation parameters, right?

That are being changed.

You can also accidentally be automating things like if you were just changing

volume and stuff, things would be automated.

These buttons here allow us to choose what we want to enable

in terms of automation. So in this case, we're gonna want to enable eq, right?

So let's select EQ. Now before we actually do any automation,

let's go over what these dropdowns here allow us to do.

The first one allows us to choose between right and trim.

Now 98% of the time so far I've really only stuck

to right and right basically is what you're always going to choose when you're

first doing any kind of automation.

Trim is what you would choose once you're trying to adjust automation that's

already been put down in your track. Now personally,

every single time I've done automation,

if I didn't like the way the automation turned out the first time,

I would just undo the automation command Z and then rewrite it. Uh,

if I ever did want to edit my automation,

most of the time what I would do is just use the pencil tool and just draw it

out. So the trim mode, I,

I believe that that is a mode that would work better if you're using, uh,

the Fairlight console. I think it's like optimized for the actual physical,

uh, Fairlight console. Just like a bunch of other, um, aspects of Fairlight.

I think they work well with the physical Fairlight console. But in my situation,

um, I don't have the Fairlight console and to be honest,

I don't really want to have another big piece of hardware.

I like to just do everything here. And uh, in my case,

I've pretty much always stayed with Wright.

I've experimented with Trim sometimes, but I'm not that keen on using the uh,

the trim mode. So Wright is where I stay most of the time.

Next we have touch and this basically just changes the way the automation works

once we've uh,

actually touched any of the controls that have been enabled for automation.

So in this case we have enabled our eq, right?

So we have three options here. We have off, we have Latch, we have Snap.

So if we have this set to off and we go over here, we press play.

Even though our EQ is enabled,

it's not writing anything because Touch is basically telling the automation.

What do we want to happen once we've touched that parameter,

that is enabled for automation, right?

So in this case it's off, so it's not gonna do anything.

So let's switch this to Latch and let's see what happens.

So let's press play here and let's start playing around with this.

So now as I move this,

we can see that line is updating based on the frequency of

Band six that I'm moving it to, right? Cool.

So one thing I want you to pay attention to on the equalizer over here when I

have touch set two latch, uh,

watch what happens to the band button over here once I let it go.

So if I press play over here and I'm playing with six,

we can see we're recording that automation data. But when I let go,

that band stays there and if I, if I press pause, uh,

we can see that it records all the way to where I stop recording, right?

So that's kind of a default. I'm gonna hit command z, I'm gonna reset that, uh,

band over here. So let's bring this over here. Let's go back to the beginning.

Let's switch the touch mode to snap.

So let's see what happens when this is on snap mode. So same thing,

I'm gonna press play,

I'm gonna move band six down and now when I let it go we can see it

jumps back to its original place so it jumps back over there, uh,

unless I'm holding onto it.

So it behaves differently when you change uh,

the touch mode from Latch to Snap. So in my personal experience so far,

I've really stuck to Latch.

Latch seems to be the best for the types of things that I want to

do, but feel into it. You know,

if you want that control to kind of snap back to its original place,

uh, when you let go of it, then you'll want to select Snap. Um,

but Latch has worked well for me.

And then the last dropdown over here is Ons Stop.

And this gives you a couple different options to choose from as to what happens

once we stop the automation.

So I'm just gonna reset all the automation down here and the way to do that is

with this tool we have the select range tool right here.

And you can see once we've enabled the select range tool,

all of our key frames in our automation are highlighted red.

And basically what we could do is click and drag over top of our clip here and

just select all these and hit the delete button on our keyboard to

delete all of our automation like that. Uh, so the reason we have this is,

you know,

to reset our automation but also to just go in and delete different parts of our

automation. And next to the select range tool, we also have the pencil,

which allows us to manually go in and make changes like this so we can

draw in our own automation as well.

Now this is a little bit different than using like a curve editor in video.

Basically with this we can't like click and drag and play with like bezier

handles and stuff. You basically need to draw things in like that,

which at first, uh,

I was kind of annoyed by I think Fairlight optimized in this way so that you

have a better experience when using the Fairlight console,

like the physical console that you can buy from, uh, black Magic.

But I've actually come to like this tool, I think it's pretty, pretty great.

I think it just takes a little bit of actually using and experimenting with to

get the hang of it. I'm just gonna hit Command Z. But yeah,

those two tools allow us to modify our automation just like that.

So with the select range tool, we can go in,

select all the key frames that we want to, um,

delete and we can also highlight them and move them over like this too.

So that's just another way for us to easily change automation,

but we can also go in select everything and delete the automation just like

that. Now in order for us to get a better idea of what Ontop does,

I'm gonna record some automation on the second half of this and then we will

play around with uh,

the Ontop controls at the beginning just to see the difference between um,

what happens uh,

between all these different options when we stop our automation recording over

here. So first I'm just gonna record some other automation, um,

and I'll start it low.

So EQs on,

so it's starting low goes up, whatever. Cool,

so we can see that it starts over there. So now when we have return selected,

let's see what happens. So

I can automate here,

Press stop and we can see once I press stop the automation returns back to its

original level. Now let's do hold and see what happens there.

So I'm gonna go back here.

I'm gonna overwrite this automation that we have right here, middle mouse,

click and drag. Now let's, uh, let's play around at this.

Let's do something different.

So I'm gonna make sure I'm holding band six here before I press play.

So I'm gonna bring this up and I'm gonna stop.

So we could see when we have ons stop to hold,

it's basically going to hold the last position of the automation,

the last value that we stopped at. Um,

and it's basically gonna overwrite everything else within the clip just like

that.

So we can see all the previously recorded automation that we've done at this

stage is now gone. So that's important to understand. Um,

if you're recording some new automation and you're overwriting some old stuff

and maybe you don't even want to, uh, you know,

play around with the other stuff that's over here,

just change the unstop mode to hold. So by selecting this option,

I could have bypassed the need for me to even delete the previous automation

that I did.

I could have just set the unstop option to hold and then I can just overwrite on

top of the previous automation and not really worry about it.

And then I know that once I let go it's gonna overwrite everything that was next

to the automation if there was anything left over. So that's hold.

So with events selected,

let's go back to the start of our range here and let's play around with this.

I'm gonna hold six before I press play, I'm gonna press play

And we can see what happens is it holds the last recorded

automation value until the next automation value that's been

recorded.

So it's held this value but it doesn't overwrite any of this previous recorded

automation and then it just, uh,

brings it back to that next recorded automation level once we hit

that stage. Uh, now let's go back to return and just compare those two.

So hold, we know it overrides everything else in the track.

Let's take a look at return again.

So I'm gonna hit command Z here now that we're on return.

Let's press play while holding six here. Let's play with these levels.

Stop it there and we can see that it's not holding that last automated level up

until the next automation.

It kind of automatically right away just jumps back to the,

uh, start point so it returns back to the value that, uh,

the automation was at at this point. So it kind of ramps it back to that point,

but it doesn't hold that last point until the next automation.

So those are the differences there. In terms of the automation,

most of the time I leave both of these on the middle options.

So latch and then return and then 98% of the time I'm, I'm using right mode.

So, um, but if we want to make adjustments to our already recorded

automation, uh, relative to its original recording, uh,

we can make those changes using the trim mode.

So let's just take a look at what happens when I modify the band here

while we're in trim mode. So I'm gonna hold it here,

press play and let's make these changes.

So we can see that red line over there that's basically showing me the

changes that I'm making on top of the already applied automation.

So this is a mode I definitely do not use that often.

I think it's something that would work a lot better when you have the Fairlight

console, um, and you're all,

you're playing with like moving faders and things like that, you can, you know,

slow down the movement of the fader you have. Uh,

it's just more intuitive that way. Um, but Percy,

the trim mode is not something that I'm really interested in.

I haven't really had to use it, so to be honest,

I wouldn't really worry about it much.

If you are wanting to make any edits to your automation down here,

just use the range selection,

the select range tool as well as the pencil to make those kind of edits.

Now of course this entire time we've just been animating one parameter and that

is the frequency of band six. That's it, right?

What if we wanna start animating the frequency of band four or what if we wanna

automate the gain and frequency of band four? Well,

because we have EQ selected over here,

anything that we do to any of the equalizer parameters is going to be

recorded. Now in this situation right now from this dropdown,

we only have the frequency of band six selected.

So that's all that we're gonna see here.

We can't get a visual of like a million things at once, right?

We need to choose what it is that we want to get a visual of so that we can see

what the automation is that we're doing.

Now you don't really always have to have a visual of it, right?

You can still automate without having a visual, but it does help,

especially when you're gonna want to make changes and stuff afterwards.

But why don't we reset this cuz this is just absolute chaos. Uh,

so I'm just gonna zoom out here. Let's use the range select tool,

select all that. Let's just delete all of our automation here.

And now let's modify a bunch of these parameters in our EQ while we're playing

here. So first I'm just gonna hold the six here. Let's mess with that.

Let's play with the four, the gain here and the frequency.

Notice that nothing's updating here and that's because this line is only showing

us the six, right? It's only showing us band six.

But if we go down here to the dropdown, let's go to our eq,

let's go to band four, let's press frequency.

We can see that automation has also been done to that parameter as well.

So if we're trying to edit that specific, uh,

automation for that specific parameter,

we're gonna have to navigate to it in here. Now to be honest,

I can find this to be a little bit cluttered if you're doing a ton of stuff.

So if you're just playing the video back here and then you're playing with every

single band of the equalizer,

it's gonna be pretty hard for you to go into every single

band and start playing around with the automation of each one of those.

Just flipping between all the different automations within this menu here.

In my personal experience, I've never actually had to automate like 10,

like all these like six bands at once. Um, if I'm trying to do a low pass cut,

I'm literally only gonna automate the frequency of band six, right?

So I'm only gonna bring the frequency of band six to the left.

So that's the only value I'm changing the gain.

You don't really have to change it for that kind of effect.

And same with band one. If we're trying to do a high pass filter,

then we're just gonna do the same thing but the opposite. Uh,

so I'm gonna grab one instead of two and this way we're gonna eliminate all the

low frequencies and we're only allowing the high frequencies to pass.

So this is a high pass filter.

So just be aware of that when you're doing automation, you don't want to go, uh,

too crazy If you have EQ enabled, just be mindful of, you know,

changing all these other parameters.

You don't want to go too hard and accidentally, uh,

make changes that you didn't mean to make.

And then you'd have to like navigate into this dropdown and try to find that

specific parameter that you've, uh,

modified and then go in with the pencil and sucked range tool and delete that

stuff.

But really I think the EQ is like the main thing that you should just be careful

of any other effect that you're putting into the program.

The main thing I find myself automating when I'm working with any kind of effect

is just the dry and wet values, right?

So if I have a reverb applied to this, for example, um,

so let's go in here, let's delete this. Um,

let's also delete the EQ band six. So,

uh, let's delete this frequency over here as well

just to reset that. Um,

now let's say that we wanted to apply a reverb effect to this and automate it.

So let's add reverb. We don't even have to show our effects here.

We can just go to a two. Uh, and let's add reverb.

So let's say we're playing with this reverb to try to get something that we

like.

Maybe we go through some of these presets so it doesn't sound too great,

but this is just an example.

So we can see that we've applied this reverb effect to this entire track.

Right Now if I move these parameters around,

we're affecting a bunch of these different parameters. If I'm moving this box,

if I'm changing the size here,

really what I'll do with any kind of effect is I'll play around with all the

parameters until I find something that sounds good.

So I'll just play with the parameters until I have the final effect.

And then the only parameter that I'm gonna be automating is the dry and wet

value. That's it, right?

Because the dry and wet value is really just telling the program.

How much of this effect do we want to be applying to our track when we're at a

hundred percent wet, that means we're applying a hundred percent of this effect.

And then anywhere between zero and a hundred is just, uh,

a different percentage of how much the effect is going to be applied.

So knowing that, what are we gonna wanna do? Well,

we're gonna want to go to this dropdown over here. We're gonna wanna select, um,

our plugins reverb, and then we wanna do dry and wet, right?

So now the line that we're seeing, which I'm currently not seeing,

oh it's at the top here.

It's a little green thin line that is showing you our dry and wet value.

So let's open up our reverb effect. Let's play with the dry and wet value here.

We could see that line updates. So if I bring this up press play,

we could see that it's updating, it's not updating live.

We have to actually press play and stop to update that.

But now that we know that what we can do is create some automation for this

dry wet value. So in this situation, I'm not gonna do it live. Uh,

why don't we just draw it out with the pencil? So, um, but just like before,

if we did want to do it live,

we gotta make sure that plug-ins is selected because reverb is under plug-ins,

right?

So we're gonna wanna make sure that we have plug-ins enabled and then we'd

probably wanna disable EQ just so we don't accidentally mess with EQ again

because at this point we would've had our EQ dialed and we wouldn't want to mess

with that anymore. But in this case,

we don't even have to have plug-ins enabled because we're just gonna be drawing

out our automation line. So, uh,

we basically wanna go from the wet value of zeros to all the way down here and

we, we just wanna draw a line like that so we can see nothing updates as I'm

drawing, but once I let go, we have an update. So what should this sound like?

It should sound normal at first and then we're gonna slowly bringing in that

wet value so that we are hearing a hundred percent of that reverb effect on

this. So let's press play and take a listen.

Cool. So in this case, does it sound that great? No.

Does reverb make sense here underwater? No it doesn't.

Maybe if we were entering like a big warehouse or something and we were playing

music, then yeah. Um, and also, you know, this specific, uh,

reverb effect that we've applied to our track,

we could play with these parameters, make it sound better.

Like even just changing the reverb time just prolongs it makes it sound a little

bit better, slowly bringing it in over time.

And then we're at a hundred percent and you know, a hundred percent is a lot.

So in this case, we could just redraw this line and like stop it halfway.

So we could start there halfway. And uh,

what we could do is just delete the rest of these key frames here.

Uh, now in this case I would probably just do a low pass filter effect on this

underwater section and not use the reverb,

but I'm just showing you guys that as an example.

So there are a couple different ways that we can apply automation to a bunch of

different effects and just parameters of our track automation can definitely be

a tricky one at first, it could definitely feel a bit intimidating.

My recommendation to you is to keep things simple. Like I said,

these three options here,

don't think about them too much when you're first starting off.

Just leave it on right latch and return.

And then if you want to play around with these more, feel free to do so.

But this is the place that you basically want to start. And like I said, trim,

don't really worry about that unless you're trying to dive deeper into

automation later on, then feel free to experiment. But yeah,

that's pretty much everything we need to know about automation within Fairlight.

I hope you guys enjoyed this video.

I hope you learned something new and I'll catch you in the next one.