How to Do a Voiceover in DaVinci Resolve

Direct answer: to do a voiceover in DaVinci Resolve you have two paths. Record it live on the Fairlight page by patching a microphone to a track, arming that track, and pressing record. Or generate the narration elsewhere, drop the audio file into the media pool, and place it on its own audio track in the timeline. Importing is the better path when the narration has to be repeatable or revised later, and it is the path this guide focuses on. Either way, the real work happens afterward in Fairlight, where you set levels, shape the voice with EQ and dynamics, and drop the music under the dialogue.

Most searches stop at "how do I add the audio," but the import is the easy part. Resolve accepts virtually any professional audio format, so a generated file drops straight in. What separates a finished voiceover from a raw file sitting under the picture is the cleanup on the Fairlight page, and that is where this walkthrough spends most of its length. For a presentation, course module, or training video, the training video narration guide covers the writing side before you ever open Resolve.

Two ways to add a voiceover in DaVinci Resolve

Pick the method before you touch the timeline, because the cleanup differs for each one.

If you are the narrator and the take is short, recording live is free and gives you a human performance. If the narration describes steps that may change, a generated file is easier to fix, because you edit one line, regenerate one clip, and swap it in rather than re-recording the whole thing.

Import a generated narration file into the timeline

Write the script before you generate anything, and split it into one short block per scene. Resolve works in clips, and a scene is the smallest unit you will want to redo. Then follow this sequence.

1. Create the narration and export a common audio format. Resolve works with virtually all professional audio formats, so a WAV or M4A file imported from your Mac drops in without conversion.
2. Drag the file from the Finder into the media pool, which is the bin at the top left of the screen. You can also drag whole folders and keep their structure.
3. Switch to the Edit page and drag the clip down onto a dedicated audio track, ideally a track you name Narration so it stays separate from music and effects.
4. Name each exported file to match its scene, for example 02-export-settings.wav, so it sorts in order in the Finder and the media pool.
5. If you generated one long take, cut it apart at scene boundaries with the blade tool and nudge each piece until the words land on the right frame.
6. Save the clean master outside the Resolve project so you can regenerate or re-import a single line without touching your edits.

Keeping one script file and one audio file per scene is what makes the loop reusable. When a fact changes, edit one line, regenerate one clip, and replace it. Murmur is a local-first macOS voice studio for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 15 or later, and it exports the narration file you drop into this step. Because it runs the models on your own machine, an unreleased feature name or client detail in the script never leaves the Mac. The audio export guide explains master versus delivery files if you want the fuller picture.

Clean up the narration in the Fairlight page

Click the Fairlight page, then select the narration clip. Every clip in the timeline has its own volume, pan, pitch, and a 6 band parametric EQ, and the timeline combines clip and waveform editing in one view. The order below matters: fix level and noise first, then shape tone, then place the voice against the music.

Level, noise, and sibilance

1. Set a target level. Right click the clip and choose the normalization command to set a consistent target level across all your narration clips, then fine tune with the clip gain line in the middle of the clip.
2. Remove steady noise. Drag the noise reduction plug-in from the effects library onto the clip or onto its mixer channel, then either let it detect noise in a selection or select a quiet section and click Learn so it removes what matches.
3. Cut power line hum with the de-hummer plug-in if your recording picked it up, though clean generated audio usually will not need it.
4. Tame harsh "s" sounds with the de-esser, which the Fairlight page includes for exactly this purpose.
5. Watch the loudness meters at the right of the monitoring panel. The meters are color coded blue when levels meet the selected standard, yellow for tolerance, and red when they exceed it.

Generated narration is usually clean, so you may only need the level and the de-esser. Spend the noise tools on real recordings, not on a file that never had noise to begin with.

EQ and dynamics: shape the voice

Double click the EQ area above the channel strip in the mixer to open the 6 band parametric equalizer, and double click the dynamics area to open the dynamics window. From there you have three tools that do most of the work for a spoken voice.

• A gentle high pass filter in the EQ to remove low rumble below the voice.
• A compressor to even out loud and quiet passages so the narration holds a steady presence.
• A limiter to catch any peak that would otherwise clip, set so it rarely engages.
• The expander or gate to push down any low level hiss between phrases when you are working with a live recording.

You can adjust the controls, A/B the result, save a preset, and copy the settings to another track, which is handy when every scene should sound the same. For a clean generated file, a light compressor and a true peak safety limiter are often enough. Do this pass after the edit is locked, because moving clips can change what overlaps and what you hear.

Duck the music under the narration

A music bed that sounds fine on its own will bury the voice on laptop speakers. Ducking fixes this automatically. Open the ducker on the music track, which is a track FX plug-in, and choose the narration track as its dialogue source from the dropdown. The ducker then lowers the music whenever there is dialogue and raises it when the voice stops. Adjust the duck level to set how far the music drops, and set the recovery so the music returns at a natural pace. This is the single most useful setting for a narrated presentation, and it is faster and more consistent than drawing volume by hand.

Fit the narration to the picture

A generated take will rarely match your cut exactly. Two Fairlight tools solve that. Elastic wave retiming lets you right click a clip, choose elastic wave, and drag its edge to stretch the length without changing the pitch, so you can line the voice up with the picture instead of re-recording it. For aligning sound to a specific frame, turn on the audio and video scrollers from the timeline view options menu: you get a scrolling filmstrip next to the waveforms, and you can double click a frame to move the playhead and then slide the audio into place.

Here is a short two-scene narration script to import and practice on. Keep one block per scene.

Scene 1, Dashboard tour Welcome back. This is the dashboard, where every saved project appears as a card. Hover a card to preview it, and click once to open it. Scene 2, Export settings Before you export, open Settings. Choose your format and resolution here. The export runs in the background, so you can keep editing while it finishes.

Example two-scene narration script

When the narration is longer than the shot, resist speeding up the voice until it sounds rushed. Trim a sentence or give the visual more time. If you mixed on studio headphones, watch the whole project once with sound on the speakers your audience will use, and check the joins between scenes, where an imported clip can start a beat early or end with a tail of silence. If the same narration also needs to go out on video with another voice track, the AI dubbing workflow covers that delivery path.

Where a local voice studio fits

Murmur handles the generation half of this workflow on a Mac. It covers text to speech, voice cloning, voice design, and multi-speaker projects, and it exports the file you import in the steps above. It runs its models locally, so there are no per-character fees and your script is not uploaded, which matters when a presentation mentions an unreleased feature or a client name. If you want the script to audio handoff in one place, the Mac narration workflow walks through it. Murmur costs $49 one-time with a free plan and a 3-day Pro trial, and a 7-day refund policy, and the model list lives in the app, so check it there for the voices and languages you need.

When Murmur is not the right choice

Murmur is a Mac app, so if you edit Resolve on Windows or Linux you will want a different source for the narration. It is also not built for live or real-time streaming speech, and it does not do speech to text, so it cannot transcribe an interview into a script. If you need a specific celebrity voice, or an emotional performance only a person can give, plan on recording a human narrator in Fairlight. And if your team needs several editors working in one shared cloud project, a cloud service fits better. Murmur is strongest when you want private, repeatable narration you can regenerate and drop into a Resolve project you already own.

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