Revisiting Multi-Channel Audio Output In DaVinci Resolve

This is a very useful tutorial on an aspect of Resolve that’s widely misunderstood. Much appreciated, Robbie.

Thanks very much, Robbie! I haven’t gotten into the audio aspects of Resolve so much, and this is helpful!

Another really good Insight, thanks. Is it possible to monitor 6 channels from your computer audio card (just for confidence, not necessarily quality)? Or will that just pass stereo and you’d need to take the BMD audio outputs?

This depends on your sound card’s abilities. My built in sound card on my home machine does indeed allow me to use a surround setup. In Resolve you just need to make sure you ‘Use System Output’ for audio in your prefs.

Thanks, good to know 🙂

Good to see this. I was still using my old habits of panning.

Do you usually deliver Stereo and 5.1 in the same Quicktime file? I tried this a few months ago and wasn’t able to select Stereo or 5.1 in VLC or other software from the Quicktime. Mediainfo told me there were indeed 8 channels, but I’m not sure how playback software interprets the 8 channels, or if it does at all. Or are these master Quicktime deliveries just for client’s safekeeping and audio channels can be selected and used appropriately further down the line? Thanks!

Hey Ryan – Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

To answer your question – yes I almost always deliver 5.1 + stereo and usually a boat load of over splits (its common with some of the deliverables I have to do to 24+ tracks)

QT, VLC etc while it will recognize those files, depending on your system setup you might not here those channels.

But bring that master into something like Resolve, or Premiere Pro that can be setup to handle multi-channel audio and assuming you have a multi-channel hardware setup you should have no problem playing back or soloing/routing tracks as appropriate.

Keep in mind that deliverable like this are often not for playout. As you sort of said, I’ll deliver a ProRes with 5.1 + Stereo Someone on the broadcasters side is plucking that 5.1 out encoding them to Dolby Digital for air. Same with stereo, while the other stems might only be for archival purposes. Make sense>

Hi, Robbie, new here, thanks in advanced I need to deliver deliver Stereo and 5.1 in the same Quicktime file I wanted to doit via davinci 14 but it seems everything has change, I only have a few days to deliver can you give me a few tips, thanks a lot

ok, no answers Im login out, its been 2 months

Hi Jeico – Yeah, your question fell through the cracks. A few weeks ago we had an internal discussion about doing a follow-up Insight to answer your question. We decided we couldn’t, since none of us have figured out how to get a proper 5.1 output from Resolve 14. With Fairlight, it seems they’re still working this out on the audio side.

For some reason I thought we gave you this response. Apparently not. In the future, feel free to use the Contact Us page to make sure the commenting system is working properly if you’re not getting a response here.

Hi, Patrick, thanks for your honest answer

Quick update: So we’ve enlisted some Fairlight pros to help us figure this out. It looks like, as with all things audio in Resolve 14, this kind of routing is part of Fairlight’s bus routing system. Which means, if you’re not an audio person, it makes no sense and you have to be taught it.

Once we understand how this works and know it well enough to teach it – we’ll do a follow-up Insight. We’re still in the ‘grokking’ phase of this.

But to be clear, it doesn’t look like it’s busted. But it is rather… non-obvious (making it feel like it’s busted).

It would be great to update this lesson for R17 since Blackmagic completely changed this system due to Fairlight. Fairflight for finishing is just hard.