Mixing With Resolve via Black Magic Cloud
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I am pleased to welcome Laki Fotopoulos as a guest contributor to the blog today. Laki is a skilled mixer and sound designer based in Australia who recently navigated a workflow many of us are watching closely. He was asked to skip the traditional Pro Tools handover and mix a project entirely within DaVinci Resolve v20 using Blackmagic Cloud. As the industry moves toward more cloud based collaboration it is helpful to hear an honest account of how these tools perform in a professional setting. Laki shares his findings on where the process excelled and where he encountered significant technical hurdles. Laki Fotopoulos Apr 8, 2026 TLDR Version The client asked me to mix directly in Resolve via Black Magic Cloud instead of Pro Tools. Setup and collaboration were excellent. No media wrangling and instant access meant clients could hear mixes immediately if I stuck to stock plugins. Fairlight is capable and clip based processing is genuinely strong. You can work fast once you get past the muscle memory shift. But the cracks show quickly. Cloud workflow can be unstable with random offline media. Control surface support is weak and plugin compatibility limits flexibility. AAF export is unreliable especially with proxies and speed changes or layered clips. I ended up finishing in Pro Tools due to bounce and export issues. The big win is collaboration speed but the trade off is a loss of control and painful troubleshooting when things break. And now the extended version. Full disclosure: I got ChatGPT to polish this for me. Note, I use Fairlight and Resolve interchangeably here but I mean the same piece of software. Recently a client asked me to mix some spots directly in Resolve instead of sending an AAF to Pro Tools. The goal was to present fully mixed spots to their client while keeping my work intact if edits changed later. I had not spent much time in the Fairlight tab before but I was up for it. What could go wrong? We worked via Black Magic Cloud which ended up being both the best and worst part of the whole process. The handover was excellent. My client created a bin and dropped in the sequences and I was immediately up and running. There was no media wrangling or relinking and no importing. I just accepted the Blackmagic Cloud invite and created a free account and waited for everything to download. I used proxies for picture and full res audio which took about an hour to download. Editing in Fairlight is smooth. There is a bit of muscle memory friction coming from Pro Tools but nothing major. You can load a Pro Tools style keyboard layout which helps a lot. The standout feature for me was clip based processing. You can stack plugins directly on clips and they are fully tweakable and non destructive. It is like Clip FX in Pro Tools but with access to almost your entire plugin library. In my opinion it is a better approach than the ARA implementation in Pro Tools. When you commit processing, it creates a new layer underneath with the previous version. This is a great idea in theory but in practice I found those underlying layers did not always behave the way I expected once edits changed or exports came into play. Another strong point is that if you stick to stock Fairlight plugins, your client can hear a work in progress mix immediately. For the pre approval stage I used stock tools and set up routing and gain staging like I would in Pro Tools and got close enough with compressor settings. Anything that needed heavier processing like noise reduction I rendered at the clip level. The SpectraLayers and RX workflow works but it is clunky compared to Pro Tools. You have to set them up as external editors and open clips via Finder then drag them in and process and save back. It updates live in Resolve which is nice but it is not a clean send and return flow. The cloud workflow introduced some weirdness. The media would randomly go offline, especially pictures. Clips would unlink without a clear reason and relinking was not reliable. The only fix was to disconnect from the cloud and redownload everything. Mixing was also limited by control surface support. I could not get my S1 working with Fairlight. I tried using an iPad over HUI but it was clunky. I ended up mixing with the mouse which is fine for short form but not something I would want to do on a long form job. There is also a bit of a scavenger hunt when it comes to features. Functions are spread across different menus that don’t make intuitive sense. This would be a non issue after a few weeks and maybe some Keyboard Maestro or Streamdeck shortcuts. Once client revisions were done, the project came back to me for final mixes. I considered finishing in Fairlight but ran into a wall. My client did not have the same plugins, so I would need to bounce mixes for them to hear the finished product. That is when I hit a bigger issue. Any audio tied to video clips simply would not bounce. This was mostly dialogue. If I had rendered the audio for noise reduction it would bounce but otherwise I got nothing. It was possibly a proxy related issue but I could not pin it down. So, the bounces would have chunks of dialogue missing. At that point I pulled the project into Pro Tools and this is where things got messy. When I exported the AAF myself, the dialogue linked to video proxies came across as empty clips with silent media. My client exported the AAF on their system which improved things but not completely. Some dialogue clips were missing and they were oddly not the same ones that I had issues with before. SpectraLayers round tripped clips came through muted, which was easy enough to fix but still odd. Speed changed clips reverted to their original duration which threw sync out for everything downstream on that track. There is no clean way to identify those clips other than visually hunting them down prior to export. That layered edit/render system in Fairlight also caused problems. Sometimes it would export the wrong layer. Flattening audio layers before export helped but it is not something you want to rely on. I also ran into a repeatable crash in Pro Tools that traced back to a single corrupt clip used multiple times in the timeline. Muting it did not help. The only way to find it was to try consolidating clips one by one. If a consolidation failed, that clip was the culprit. Interestingly the source file itself was fine and only the timeline instances were broken. One genuinely great moment happened after finishing the mix in Pro Tools. I dropped the final files straight into the Resolve timeline via Finder and the client could review them instantly. No exports or uploads or links were required. That is a serious workflow advantage. If I had to switch to Fairlight full time I could. It is capable and most of the friction comes down to familiarity and learning its quirks. I think a lot of the issues I had were related to working in the cloud. The cloud workflow introduces risk you do not fully control. Plugin compatibility becomes a limitation if you want quick feedback. AAF export is fragile especially when proxies and speed changes or layered clips are involved. The upside is collaboration through instant access and shared timelines without media wrangling. That is powerful. The downside is control. You are relying on the media handling and translation of Resolve to behave perfectly and when it does not, the troubleshooting is painful. The project is always live and can be changed at any moment which is great for collaboration but also means things can move or disappear if you are not careful. I am sure there are ways to lock things down but it is something to think about. Overall it was a great learning experience. It cost me nothing apart from a little extra time because everything was done in the free version. That alone is pretty impressive. I want to thank Laki for his time and for providing this detailed breakdown for our community. You can find more of his work at http://lfosound.com.au/ |