FREEMONT, Calif.—Sound designer and mixer Randy Bobo recently used DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fairlight audio post production tools to complete “Magnificent Madness,” an upcoming TV documentary series, Blackmagic Design has announced.
Bobo, who founded Independent Studios, a video and audio post house in Wisconsin, also used a Fairlight Desktop Console to expedite audio post, it said.
Produced by Duncan Entertainment, the four-part documentary series looks at the life and times of acclaimed Italian racecar driver Tazio Nuvolari, who left his mark on the sport in the 1930s.
“I started by cleaning up the dialogue and adding all the sounds needed to bring the story to life,” said Bobo. “In this case, there was a lot of archival footage that was MOS, or that had no synchronous audio track, so I had to recreate sound for entire scenes,” he said.
Some of the scenes for which Bobo recreated sound included ‘30s vintage reader cars, WWI and WWII battle scenes and people working in factories.
“I was seamlessly able to import our existing sound effects library into DaVinci Resolve Studio and easily search for what I needed,” he said. “I used DaVinci Resolve Studio’s foley sampler to produce various foley effects by assigning sounds to a keyboard and creating them in real time.”
Bobo relied on the tool’s elastic wave retiming function to time certain sound effects to correspond to pictures. It allowed the sound designer to stretch the length of a clip in the timeline without changing pitch, making retiming easy, he said.
“Fairlight’s strength has always been in its editing,” said Bobo. “Having dynamics and EQ on every channel was a plus, and the new bussing protocol was amazing. I also used the Fairlight Desktop Console, and having 12 faders at the ready was fantastic, along with pan automation. It provided all the features I needed in a compact console.”
Bobo ran the entire DaVinci Resolve studio on a Mac mini with the M1 ship. Independent Studios also uses DaVinci Resolve Studio for grading. It is upgrading one audio suite, adding a three-bay Fairlight Advanced Console for mixing larger projects with higher track counts.
More information is available on the Blackmagic Design website.
