10 Quick VOICE FIXES for Davinci Resolve

This video walks through the ten quick audio adjustments I apply in DaVinci Resolve to improve voice clarity, consistency, and overall sound quality. These steps take only a few seconds each and provide a reliable starting point you can fine‑tune for your own voice and microphone:

In this video I’m going to quickly go through the ten steps I take to improve audio in DaVinci Resolve. These are the exact steps I take every time. Each step takes only a few seconds. The setting values I use are based on my particular voice, so your results may vary somewhat. This should give you a great starting point, and you can always tweak things further. So let’s get started.

Step number one: normalize audio levels. Whenever I import a clip into DaVinci Resolve, I always normalize the audio level to negative two decibels. I then continue editing and proceed with steps two through ten when I’m finished with everything else.

Step number two: de-esser. In the Fairlight section of the program, click on Effects, then under Restoration select De-Esser. The default settings are used.

Step number three: vocal channel. Click on Effects, then Channel, then select Vocal Channel. Now select High Pass and set the frequency to 100.

Step number four: multi-band compressor. Click on Effects, then Dynamics, then select Multi-Band Compressor. These settings are left at default. I have started to leave off doing this step sometimes, maybe try your voice out both ways and see which one you like better.

Step number five: gate threshold. Double click on the Dynamics box to pull up the Dynamics window. Steps five through nine are done from here. Click on Gate, then change the gate threshold to negative 42. If you find that your voice starts to cut out at the beginning or end of words, you may want to try negative 43 or negative 44.

Step number six: compressor threshold. Click on Compressor, then move the compressor threshold value to negative 19.

Step number seven: compressor ratio. Move the compressor ratio value to 4.0.

Step number eight: limiter threshold. Click on Limiter, then move the limiter threshold value to negative 16.

Step number nine: makeup. Hold the Makeup slider and pull it up to 10.0. This value can be highly dependent on your microphone and the volume you originally recorded at. The idea is to have the output meter flash into the red while you speak to a value of roughly negative three to negative five decibels, while very rarely or never maxing out and clipping the top of the meter at zero decibels. Move your slider as necessary and test playing the audio back to achieve the desired behavior.

Step number ten: equalizer. Double click on the EQ box to pull up the equalizer window. Click on Band 6 and then select a frequency of 15k.

Bonus: If you have the AI voice Isolation setting available in your version of Davinci, I would highly recommend trying that out as well.

So there you have it: the ten audio settings I apply in DaVinci Resolve to increase voice quality. If you have any questions or tips of your own on how to improve audio, please feel free to leave a comment in the video, and thanks for watching!