As we've mentioned here before, there's an old saying that viewers notice visual images when they are great, but they notice audio only when it's bad. Good audio goes unnoticed, and no one experiences that more than the heroes in sound effect editing, toiling away at their digital workstations, only taking occasional breaks to go to the foley stage to record someone smacking a leather couch with a table tennis paddle.
Proper sound effects can make a huge difference in your productions, and these days, particularly with motion graphics, whooshes and low-end rumbles are practically expected.
Check out this great example I found. It's the Pirate of the Caribbean movie trailer, but with only the Sound Effects track enabled.
You can download the QuickTime movie clip here.
Pretty cool, eh? And there's a lot of subtle stuff going on in there, along with the usual collection of explosions and sword sounds. (My favorite is the swoosh sound at 1:14, as the image fades to black.)
So where do you get your own collection of effects? Well, first of all, Final Cut Studio comes with a hefty collection that often goes overlooked. That's a great place to start. Online, there places like SoundDogs and The Recordist that provide free or very reasonably priced sounds.
Make sure you check the usage agreements, of course.
So what do you think? What are your favorite sources for Sound FX?
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sound FX
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5 comments:
Great post. Audio *is* often the poor stepchild to video. It's important to remember that it has a place.
I'm actually a pretty big fan of rolling your own... Get a mic and make some SFX! It's a lot easier to customize to exactly what you want.
Adam - Yes! I once spent an hour trying to track down the sound of paper tearing before I stopped, smacked myself in the forehead, then went and grabbed mic and just recorded the dang thing!
I inadvertently deleted a comment that a reader had about his mixes getting squashed by cable head-ends. My bad! Please repost.
-Dave
Hey Dave, That was my comment but to a older post of yours about compressing audio.
I've HAD to start compressing as many tv stations & Cable companies have such high automatic gain controlls that I've had spots run that got slammed down in volume because of too much dynamic range.
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