Fairlight Audio Post-Production & LUFS Loudness Standards Guide (2026)

1. The 4-Step Fairlight Dialogue Signal Chain

To make spoken dialogue sound warm, rich, and crisp like a professional podcast or cinema film, process your dialogue track using this signal chain order:

🎛️ Clean Dialogue Processing Chain

Step 1: AI Voice Isolation: Select your dialogue clip or track header on Fairlight Page. Enable Voice Isolation in Inspector. Set amount between 70% and 90%. *(Setting to 100% can introduce robotic phase artifacts).*
Step 2: Dialogue Leveller: Enable Dialogue Leveller. This automatically balances quiet whispers and loud speaking without pumping background noise.
Step 3: 6-Band Parametric EQ: Enable 6-band EQ on the track.
- High-Pass Filter (HPF): Cut everything below 80Hz (removes mic rumble, wind noise, and low AC thuds).
- Mud Cut: Dip -2dB to -4dB around 250Hz - 400Hz to remove boxy room resonance.
- Presence Boost: Add a gentle +1.5dB to +2.5dB wide bell curve around 3.5kHz for speech clarity.
- Air Boost: Add a high-shelf boost above 10kHz for high-end sparkle.
Step 4: Dynamic Compressor: Enable Track Dynamics (Compressor). Set Threshold at -18dB, Ratio at 3:1, Attack at 15ms, and Release at 100ms.

2. Master Loudness LUFS Standard Table

LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) measures perceived loudness over time. Unlike peak meters (dBFS) which only measure instant spikes, LUFS matches how human ears perceive volume.

Destination Platform	Integrated LUFS Target	Max True Peak	Normalization Behavior
YouTube	`-14.0 LUFS`	`-1.0 dBTP`	Pulls down loud videos. Does NOT turn up quiet videos.
Instagram Reels / TikTok	`-16.0 to -14.0 LUFS`	`-1.0 dBTP`	Re-compresses audio if True Peak exceeds -1.0 dBTP.
Spotify / Apple Music	`-14.0 LUFS`	`-1.0 dBTP`	Applies ITU-R BS.1770-4 loudness normalization.
Netflix / Amazon Prime	`-27.0 to -24.0 LUFS`	`-2.0 dBTP`	Strict EBU R128 compliance mandatory for delivery.

3. 1-Click Offline Loudness Normalization in Fairlight

You do not need to manually guess volume faders to hit exact LUFS targets! DaVinci Resolve has built-in 1-click loudness analysis:

Select all audio clips on your timeline.
Right-click and select Analyze Audio Levels...
Select BS.1770-4 (Target: -14.0 LUFS) and click Analyze.
DaVinci will calculate the exact integrated loudness. Right-click clips again > select Normalize Audio Levels... > set Target to -14.0 LUFS.

💡 Sidechain Ducking Background Music

To make background music automatically drop volume whenever someone speaks: Enable Send on your Dialogue track dynamics, and enable Sidechain Listen (Receive) on your Music track Compressor. Set Music Compressor ratio to 4:1 and gain reduction to -6dB. Now your background music ducking happens automatically in real-time!

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What happens if my video is -10 LUFS on YouTube?

If your video is exported at -10 LUFS (4dB louder than YouTube's -14 LUFS target), YouTube's server algorithm will automatically turn your video's master volume down by 4dB. Worse, your compressed audio will sound squashy compared to videos mixed properly at -14 LUFS!

Q: Why should True Peak be set to -1.0 dBTP instead of 0.0 dB?

When video platforms re-encode your WAV audio into AAC or MP3 compressed streams, inter-sample peaks can clip and distort if your master hits 0.0 dB. Leaving 1.0 dB headroom (-1.0 dBTP) prevents inter-sample clipping on mobile speakers.

🎯 Platform Loudness Standards Cheat Sheet