14:14Ben Claremont · Tutorial
DaVinci Resolve 21 Beginners Tutorial: Edit Like a Pro for Free
A 14-minute, start-to-finish walkthrough of cutting, mixing, coloring, and exporting your first project in free DaVinci Resolve 21.
September 22ndThe argument in one line.
Setting DaVinci Resolve's loudness meter to the YouTube preset, then leaning on its AI dialogue tools and one-click audio normalization plus a limiter, is enough to hit YouTube's -14 LUFS loudness target without running a full mastering session.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You edit your own YouTube videos in DaVinci Resolve and have never touched the Fairlight page's loudness meter or project settings.
- You've been told your audio is too quiet or inconsistent and want a concrete numeric target instead of guessing by ear.
- You're curious what DaVinci Resolve's AI-powered Voice Isolation, Dialogue Leveler, and Ducker actually do before buying third-party plugins.
SKIP IF…
- You already have a mastering chain dialed in and just want new EQ presets or plugin recommendations.
- You edit in Premiere, Final Cut, or another NLE — this is DaVinci Resolve UI-specific, down to exact menu paths.
The full version, fast.
Jay Lippman walks through DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight page to get YouTube-ready audio without a dedicated mastering session. YouTube wants 320 kbps, 48 kHz, a lossless format, and -14 LUFS integrated loudness, and Resolve's loudness meter can monitor that number directly once you switch its preset from EBU R128 to YouTube. From there he leans on Voice Isolation, Dialogue Leveler, EQ presets, and an automatic ducker to clean and balance a mix quickly, bounces the whole timeline to one stereo track, and uses Resolve's built-in Normalize Audio Levels plus a ceiling-limited limiter to close the remaining gap to -14 LUFS. He closes with the exact export settings, since Windows locks H.264/MP4 exports to AAC unless you switch to QuickTime or AV1.
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00:00 – 01:38
01 · YouTube's Recommendation for Audio
States YouTube's published audio spec (320 kbps, 48 kHz, lossless format, -14 LUFS) before touching DaVinci Resolve.
01:38 – 02:11
02 · Project Settings for YouTube
Sets Fairlight sample rate to 48,000 Hz and Target Loudness Level to -14 LUFS in DaVinci Resolve's Project Settings.
02:11 – 04:35
03 · Setting the Loudness Meter to -14 LUFS
Switches the Fairlight loudness meter preset from EBU R128 to YouTube, enables Absolute Scale, and turns on Lock Metering to Transport.
04:35 – 08:34
04 · Time-Saving Mixing Tools
Demonstrates Voice Isolation, Dialogue Leveler, EQ presets, and an automatic music ducker, then reveals the demo timeline's b-roll was generated with Sora 2 in Artlist.
08:34 – 15:46
05 · Normalizing Audio for YouTube
Bounces the mix to one track, analyzes it at -6.2 dBFS / -20.8 LUFS, normalizes with the YouTube preset to -1 dBFS / -15.6 LUFS, then rides a limiter to -14 LUFS.
15:46 – 18:14
06 · Export Settings for YouTube
Walks the Deliver page render settings, flagging the Windows AAC-only limitation on H.264/MP4 and the QuickTime/AV1/FLAC workarounds.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- YouTube recommends 320 kbps bitrate, 48 kHz sample rate, and a lossless delivery format like WAV or FLAC, because YouTube re-compresses audio on upload and double compression sounds worse.
- YouTube's target loudness is -14 LUFS integrated, and DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight page can monitor directly against that number by switching the loudness meter preset from EBU R128 to YouTube.
- Turning on Lock Metering to Transport resets the loudness meter every time playback stops, useful for checking one clip at a time instead of an accumulating average.
- DaVinci Resolve's Voice Isolation and Dialogue Leveler are AI tools that can replace a manual noise-reduction plugin and compressor chain on a dialogue track.
- The built-in Fairlight EQ ships with presets like Female Lav Mic Fixer and Dialogue Clean that give a faster starting point than building an EQ curve from scratch.
- A ducker set to a 4.6 dB duck level with a 101ms lookahead and 1000ms recovery automatically drops background music under dialogue and brings it back up when the talking stops.
- Bouncing a timeline's full mix, dialogue, SFX, ambience, music, plus every plugin and level, to a single new stereo track turns a multi-track project into one file that's easier to master.
- Analyzing a raw stereo mix showed -6.2 dBFS true peak and -20.8 LUFS integrated, nearly 6 LUFS quieter than YouTube's -14 LUFS target.
- DaVinci Resolve's built-in Normalize Audio Levels with the YouTube preset brought that same mix to -1 dBFS and -15.6 LUFS in one click, close enough that most viewers won't perceive the remaining gap.
- Adding a limiter on the main bus with its ceiling set to -1 dB, then manually riding input gain while playing back, pushed the mix the rest of the way to -14 LUFS without clipping.
- On Windows, exporting an MP4 with H.264 video locks you to the AAC audio codec, so matching DaVinci's ideal spec means switching to QuickTime with Linear PCM audio or MP4 with an AV1 video codec instead.
- DaVinci Resolve's manual export settings support FLAC audio inside an MP4 container at 24-bit depth, delivering lossless audio without leaving the H.264/MP4 workflow.
- Every b-roll clip in the demo timeline was generated with Sora 2 inside Artlist from text prompts alone, including synced audio, used here to replace traditional stock-footage searches.
Hit YouTube's -14 LUFS loudness target without a full mastering pass
WHAT TO LEARN
YouTube publishes an exact audio spec, and DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight page can monitor and hit that spec directly if you know which settings and tools to use.
01YouTube's Recommendation for Audio
- YouTube's own spec asks for 320 kbps bitrate, 48 kHz sample rate, and a lossless format (WAV or FLAC), not a pre-compressed MP3, because YouTube re-encodes audio on upload.
- Target loudness for YouTube is -14 LUFS integrated, a different (and more useful) measurement than peak decibels for judging perceived loudness.
02Project Settings for YouTube
- Two settings control everything upfront: Fairlight sample rate at 48,000 Hz and Target Loudness Level at -14 LUFS, both set once in Project Settings > Fairlight.
03Setting the Loudness Meter to -14 LUFS
- Switching the loudness meter's preset from EBU R128 to YouTube reformats the whole meter around -14 LUFS instead of the European broadcast standard.
- Turning on Absolute Scale keeps the meter reading real LUFS numbers instead of a relative 0/+6/+12 scale, which is easier to act on.
- Lock Metering to Transport resets the loudness reading every time playback stops, so you can check one clip in isolation instead of watching a running average.
04Time-Saving Mixing Tools
- Voice Isolation and Dialogue Leveler are AI tools built into Resolve that can replace a manual noise-reduction plugin and compressor for dialogue.
- The stock EQ has genre/role presets (Female Lav Mic Fixer, Male Dialogue, Background Music Shaping) that give a usable starting curve instead of building one from a blank slate.
- A ducker on the music bus (duck level, lookahead, rise time, hold, recovery) automatically pulls music under dialogue and restores it after, no manual keyframing.
05Normalizing Audio for YouTube
- Bounce Mix to Track collapses every track, plugin, and level into one new stereo clip, which is what actually gets mastered.
- A raw bounced mix measured -6.2 dBFS true peak and -20.8 LUFS integrated, nearly 6 LU under YouTube's target.
- Resolve's built-in Normalize Audio Levels with the YouTube preset can close most of that gap in one click, landing this mix at -1 dBFS / -15.6 LUFS.
- The gap between -14 and -17 LUFS is close to imperceptible to a viewer, so landing in that range is acceptable even without hand-tuning further.
- A limiter on the main bus with its ceiling set to -1 dB lets you ride input gain up during playback until you hit -14 LUFS without risking clipping.
06Export Settings for YouTube
- DaVinci's YouTube 2160p export preset defaults to H.264/MP4 with AAC audio, the one place Windows users get boxed into a lossy codec.
- To get lossless audio out of an H.264/MP4 export, switch the audio codec to FLAC at 24-bit depth instead of accepting AAC.
- Alternative escape routes: QuickTime with Linear PCM audio, or MP4 with an AV1 video codec, both sidestep the H.264+AAC artifacting the creator reported on Windows exports.
Terms worth knowing.
- LUFS
- Loudness Units Full Scale — a measurement of perceived loudness over time, used by YouTube and most streaming platforms instead of raw peak decibels.
- dBFS
- Decibels relative to Full Scale — measures the loudest peak in a digital audio signal, with 0 dBFS being the point where clipping occurs.
- True Peak
- The highest instantaneous level a waveform reaches, including peaks that occur between digital samples, used to leave headroom before clipping.
- Bitrate
- The amount of audio data processed per second, measured in kilobits per second (kbps); higher bitrates preserve more detail in compressed formats.
- Sample Rate
- How many times per second an audio signal is measured, measured in kilohertz (kHz); YouTube recommends 48 kHz for uploads.
- Voice Isolation
- An AI-powered DaVinci Resolve tool that separates a speaker's voice from background noise, reverb, or ambience automatically.
- Dialogue Leveler
- An AI-powered DaVinci Resolve tool that evens out a speaker's volume swings automatically, reducing the need for manual compression.
- Ducker
- An audio effect that automatically lowers one track's volume (usually music) whenever another track (usually dialogue) is present.
- Bounce to Track
- A DaVinci Resolve command that mixes down multiple tracks, plugins, and levels into a single new audio clip.
- FLAC
- Free Lossless Audio Codec — a compressed audio format that shrinks file size without discarding any audio data, unlike MP3 or AAC.
- AAC
- Advanced Audio Coding — a lossy compressed audio codec commonly paired with H.264 video in MP4 files.
- EBU R128
- A European broadcast loudness standard (target -23 LUFS) that differs from YouTube's -14 LUFS target, relevant because it's DaVinci Resolve's default meter preset.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“If there's one thing that I know about YouTube, it's that bad audio is one of the quickest ways to get somebody to click off of your video.”
13:21
“The fact that these numbers are yellow here means it is acceptable, but what if I told you we could go a little bit louder than that?”
12:52
“The difference in loudness between minus 14 LUFS and minus 17 LUFS is negligible. You're probably not going to be able to tell the difference really.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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If there's one thing that I know about YouTube, it's that bad audio is one of the quickest ways to get somebody to click off of your video. So in this video, we're going to take a look at how to set up DaVinci Resolve so that the audio in your videos is both good enough. and loud enough for YouTube.
Hi, I'm Jay. I'm a mixing and mastering engineer. And before we dive into DaVinci Resolve, let's take a second to talk about what YouTube is actually looking for in terms of audio.
This is very important information. Luckily, it's also very accessible information. All you got to do is Google it and you'll get your answer.
If we are looking at a just basic YouTube video with a stereo audio. track, then what YouTube is looking for is a bit rate of 320 kilobits per second, a sample rate of 48 kilohertz and some sort of lossless audio format. So wave or flack or something like that, not a super compressed delivery format like MP3 or anything like that, because YouTube is actually going to compress your audio when you upload it anyway.
So you don't want that compressed twice. It's just. sounds horrible.
As far as loudness is concerned, you want your videos to be minus 14 LUFS. That is basically the integrated perceived loudness of your video. I'm not going to go into detail about any of these technical terms, but if you want a more detailed video about bitrate and sample rate and LUFS versus decibels and all of that fun nerdy stuff, let me know in the comments.
I'll put it on the list. So now that we know what YouTube is looking for, let's go ahead and set up our DaVinci Resolve project. I've got a blank project here.
I've done nothing with it. Let's jump into project settings. That's this little gear down here in the bottom right -hand corner.
I'm going to click on that. We're going to come over to Fairlight. And we're going to make sure audio sample rate is 48 ,000.
Target loudness level is minus 14 LUFS. Now mine's like this by default. So I'm going to hit cancel.
But if you are changing this, then you're going to hit save. And as far as project settings are concerned, that's all you have to do. Just change those two things and you're good to go.
When you go into your timeline, you have a couple other things that you want to change. So I have a timeline here. If when I play this back, you're going to recognize the audio.
from the previous video that I did, the little first day of work thing from my surround sound video. But there's actually a change. I actually added some video clips and these video clips are very, very special.
I'm going to tell you about them in just a minute. Make sure you stick around. But first, let's hop over into the Fairlight page and change some things.
See, we've got our loudness meter up here in the top. Right. And what we want to do right now, it's set to EBU R128.
If we click those three dots, we've got a whole bunch of other presets here. And if we're editing for YouTube, we should probably monitor for YouTube. And by changing that preset to YouTube, we have now set up our loudness meter for minus 14 LUFS.
So while we're monitoring our audio, we know. how loud our videos are and whether or not they are too loud or too quiet for YouTube. A couple other quick tips for this loudness meter.
If we go to absolute scale and turn that off, it's kind of crazy. You no longer see the minus 14. Now you see zero and you see plus six and plus 12 and plus 18.
You can do the math yourself if you want, but I prefer having absolute scale so I can actually see that minus 14 luffs. The other thing that you can do is turn on lock metering to transport. And what that is going to do is it's going to read your loudness as you're playing, but it's going to automatically reset all of these numbers here every time you stop.
So if I play. Well, here I am, my first day on the job.
To be honest, it wasn't my first choice of careers. And we stop and we move over to here. Yeah, give me five minutes.
It resets everything. Okay, deep breath. Here we go.
And there you go. So now that we have our project and our timeline set up for editing audio for YouTube, I want to give you a couple of tips because one other thing that I know about editing for YouTube is that YouTubers typically don't have the luxury of time. I can't just sit down a lot of times and really dive into a mix.
I need a way to get things sounding good and getting loud enough as quickly as possible. DaVinci Resolve has some really great tools to help you with that. For example, you've got voice isolation and dialogue leveler, which are really good AI powered tools that completely replace the noise reduction plugin and your compressor.
Like it just, it really just, it levels out your dynamic range and it. isolates your dialogue. So if you have any background noise or reverb or anything like that, it's just going to take care of that.
Also, did you know that the built -in EQ in DaVinci Resolve comes with presets? If we come up here, if it's on default right now, and I did a little tweaking, but if I come up here, we can do female lav mic fixer. We can do background music.
Well, background music shaping is my own. We've got dialogue, male dialogue, clean high end. You can start with a preset and then it makes the rest of the dialogue editing a lot faster.
And if we come over to our music track and we open up the ducker and we start playing our audio, you'll see how quickly this just automatically ducks the background music against the dialogue. And it actually sounds really, really good. well here I am my first day on the job to be honest it wasn't my first choice of careers but it's no big deal I've got plenty of time to do what I actually wanted to do with my life right okay deep breath here we go There you have it.
It automatically ducks it. It's quick. It's easy.
These things will speed up your workflow. These AI tools in DaVinci Resolve are absolutely bonkers. And speaking of AI tools, remember how I told you that I have brand new video clips on this little project of mine?
Well, these aren't just any video clips. Every single video clip on this timeline was generated using AI and not just any AI, Sora 2 in Artlist. That's right.
You can now use Sora 2. in Artlist to make AI videos. And they're super, super good and super realistic.
I mean, just take a look at that. I can't tell that that's, these are like, these look like real people. I just, it's crazy to me how realistic this looks.
It still blows me away. And all I did was type in what I wanted. That's it.
I just typed in what I wanted and They gave me videos and I can have audio integrated in those videos. They're super realistic.
The model listens to your prompt. It understands it. It's just, I, it's, it's crazy.
And it's a huge time saver too. Cause honestly, sometimes searching for that perfect piece of stock footage is just a gigantic time suck. But with text to video from Artlist, especially with Sora 2, it just.
It just makes the whole process easier and faster, and I couldn't be happier with it. I'm super, super excited. So it's linked below.
You should click the link and check out Artlist for yourself. If you sign up using that link, you'll get two free months on top of your annual subscription, and you'll be helping out the channel. Win -win.
Thanks so much to Artlist for sponsoring this video and for continuing to support creators like me. Now, let's dive back in. I gotta go back to the Fairlight page here because we have a mix.
Everything's leveled out. We're good to go. I've got some EQ.
I've got some voice isolation and dialogue leveler and my audio ducker and all of that stuff is done and I'm ready to master my... audio and make sure that it's loud enough for YouTube. Now I did a whole big long video on how to master audio in DaVinci resolve.
So I'm going to do some very quick and dirty stuff here. I'm going to speed through it. If you want to really get into the nitty gritty of mastering audio, you should check out that video.
I will have it linked below, but Here's what we're going to do. First thing we need to do is set our in and out points.
That's done. If you don't know how to do that, I've been yelled at recently for not teaching people how to set in and out points. So put your playhead at the beginning of the range that you want to work with.
You know what? Let me clear. I'm going to clear my in and out points by pressing Alt X.
All right. So here we go. Take your playhead.
Place it at the beginning of the range you want to work with. For me, it's the beginning of my timeline. I'm going to press I.
Then I'm going to come over to the end of my timeline. I'm going to press O. And now I have a range to work with.
Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to timeline, audio, bounce mix to track. I'm going to go to bus one, main out, bounce to new track and click OK. And what that did was it took my dialogue and sound effects and ambience and music and it mixed it all down, including all of my plugins and levels and EQ and stuff like that.
It mixed it down into a stereo track. And this is what we're going to use for mastering. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to mute all of the tracks with the exception of my master.
We're also going to label our master track. And for good measure, let's go ahead and change the track color to blue to match our main out. We'll mute our sound effects and our ambience as well.
And then we're going to come into our index. And this is really cool since we're only working with one track. We're just going to hide all.
of the tracks except for the master and the main out. Now we've got a lot more real estate to work with here. So I'm going to go ahead and expand my main out, which is going to give us some more options.
And I'm going to bring my master track, make that a little bit bigger. What we're going to do here is we're going to right click. We want to get kind of our base and figure out how loud our video is as it stands right now.
We're going to right click, come down to. It's saved. Clip operations, and we're going to go to analyze audio levels, loudness standard, YouTube, and we're going to click analyze.
So here's what we're looking at. We're looking at minus 6 .2 dBFS. That means the loudest peak in our audio is at minus 6 .2 decibels.
That leaves a lot of headroom before we're in danger of clipping our audio. We're also at an integrated loudness of minus 20 .8 LUFS. a lot of headroom here and we definitely need to be louder.
So there's a couple things we can do. If I do this, if I'm doing this math correctly, we've got minus five point, we've got 5 .2 decibels, I believe, 5 .2 decibels until we hit the minus one that we need for YouTube. And we've got 5 .8, 5 .8 or 5 .2, 5 .2 LUFS before we're at minus 14.
So honestly, if I'm doing the math correctly in my head, I could probably normalize this. Right click, clip operations, normalize audio levels, normalization mode YouTube. And if I go ahead and analyze that again, we're now at minus 1 dBFS, which is good.
and minus 15 .6 LUFS. And to be honest, the difference in loudness between minus 14 LUFS and minus 17 LUFS is negligible. It doesn't, you're not going to perceive that difference very easily.
If you're watching one video that's at minus 14 LUFS and then the next video is at minus 17, you're probably not going to be able to tell the difference really. So minus 15 .6 is actually really, really good. And I would say.
That this is acceptable. In fact, the fact that these numbers are yellow here means it is acceptable, but What if I told you we could go a little bit louder than that? Let's go ahead and close this out and we're gonna come on to our main bus and we're going to add a Limiter grab a limiter from our audio effects.
It's just the built -in limiter in DaVinci Resolve, and we're going to set our ceiling to minus one, bring our playhead back to the beginning, and all we're going to do is bring our input level up as we play until we start hitting that minus 14 LUFS. Well, here I am, my first day on the job.
To be honest, it wasn't my first choice of careers, but it's no big deal. I've got plenty of time to do what I actually wanted to do with my life. Right?
Okay, deep breath. Here we go.
Well, here I am. My first day on the job.
To be honest, it wasn't my first choice of careers, but it's no big deal. I've got plenty of time to do what I actually wanted to do with my life. Right?
Could you email me that report when you're done? Yes, give me five minutes. Copy that.
Okay, deep breath. Here we go.
Well, here I am. My first day on the job.
To be honest, it wasn't my first choice of careers, but it's no big deal. I've got plenty of time to do what I actually wanted to do with my life. Right?
Okay, deep breath. Here we go.
Well, here I am. My first day on the job. And there we go.
We are now right at that minus 14 LUFS line and it's looking good. All right. So now that we have our track mastered, we know that it's loud enough for YouTube.
The only thing left to do is export. So let's head over to the deliver page. Let's take a look at our audio settings for export.
Now you can, you can absolutely use the YouTube preset. If we go to YouTube, 2160p, that's what I normally upload. If we come down to our formats and let's say we're in MP4 because, you know, whatever, I'm on Windows.
And so we're in MP4. My video codec is H .264. I only have the audio codec AAC.
So if you are on Windows. and you want to use the YouTube 2160p or any YouTube preset to export your video, what I would do is either switch over to QuickTime and set your audio codec to linear PCM, or you can do MP4 video codec AV1, because for whatever reason, the AAC codec with AV1... When I upload it to YouTube, I don't get that artifacting that I used to get with the MP4 AAC exports.
I don't get it, but AV1 works great for me. Now, if you want to go full manual settings, then we can come over. Let's just do H .264 master.
We'll go MP4, head over to the audio, and we actually have the option to do FLAC now. with mp4 which is super super cool same thing bit depth 24 we want 24 bits we want to do same as project for the sample rate we're going to come down to audio normalization we're going to say normalize audio and choose the youtube preset after that you had to render cue you export upload it to youtube and your video will sound good and it's going to be loud enough which is super super awesome Bye.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Bad audio gets people to click off, so Jay Lippman opens by naming YouTube's exact audio spec, then spends the rest of the video showing precisely where to set it inside DaVinci Resolve.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:44list
YouTube Audio Recommendations
- 320 kbps bitrate
- 48 kHz sample rate
- Lossless format (WAV, FLAC, etc.)
- -14 LUFS integrated loudness
YouTube's published audio spec for stereo uploads, stated as a checklist before any DaVinci Resolve work begins.
Steal forany video-delivery checklist or creator onboarding doc
05:02list
DaVinci Resolve Time-Saving Mixing Tools
- Voice Isolation
- Dialogue Leveler
- EQ presets
- Ducker
Four built-in Fairlight tools used instead of a traditional plugin chain to clean and balance dialogue quickly.
Steal fora fast-turnaround editing workflow doc
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
08:33product
“It's linked below. You should click the link and check out Artlist for yourself. If you sign up using that link, you'll get two free months on top of your annual subscription, and you'll be helping out the channel.”
Mid-roll sponsor read for Artlist/Sora 2, tied contextually to the AI-generated b-roll already playing in his own demo timeline, framed as a time-saver rather than a hard sell.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
