First of all if you don’t remember what foley was and you need to take a peek, do it here. In here I cover what foley is and where in the process of audio post-production lies exactly.
Well, let’s suppose you are about to begin the foley process of your film and it’s the first time you go around it and you don’t know where o start. Ok, don’t stress out, in here you will find a pretty decent guide on how to start as soon as you finish reading this post.
Get your gear together.
What you will need essentially is:
I leave you here the link to the mic stand, the mic, the mixing table and every piece of gear we used for the film DOPPEL. But the more you can expend in better gear, the better.
Find a safe acoustic environment in where you will create all the sounds for foley.
You have essentially two basic options when it comes to this point:
This is a video in which I cover how you can create your own home studio.
Get your Pro Tools session ready.
For that I here leave you guys a video that covers all the steps necessary from having an inexistent organisation to being organised like PRO inside your new Pro Tools session.
Record your sounds for each and every object/prop, movement and footsteps of your characters for your movie.
In Pro Tools it’s dead easy to record sounds for foley for your film.
You just need to import your video to the new session you’ve created inside Pro Tools and hit the recording button on the track you want to record and hit the recording button sitting on top of your timeline in Pro Tools.
Here there is a visual explanation of what I am talking about…
https://youtu.be/ksiKKmgJpkIhttps://youtu.be/LK_b2sqsdK0
Things to take into consideration before hitting the record button: how to set your gain for recording and knowing when to apply effects to your audio clips.
How to set your gain for recording it’s dead easy but difficult to guess if you are not really into audio.
Here I leave you guys a post in which I talk about how to set your gain for recording.
In short, what you want is for your output signal to be around -12dB (peaking), that way you have enough room for the audio not to peak at 0dB. You don’t want to set your gain to high because you will get distorsion. And neither you want to set your gain too low because you will get pink noise coming in from your mixer and your mic (from almost any device that it’s standing between the sound you want record and your PC.
There are many videos on the web on how to apply effects to your clips but the golden rule for audio is: “the less you touch, the better”.
But if you are compelled to applying effects to your audio clips I strongly recommend that you get a high fidelity audio system (may that be a really good pair of headphones or two awesome speakers). Either way, before applying any effects you need to know that your audio system is giving you a completely flat response and it’s not colouring your bases or your highs.
If you want more information on how to cope with the audio post-production process here I leave you a link to my personal post-production playlist of youtube where you will find everything discussed above and tons of useful information. Also, in here you will find professional foley artists and audio engineers recording sounds for feature length films and series!
Hope this was useful and see you guys next time!
Ale Fito POSTPRODUCTION creative work, creativity, filmmaking skills, skillsLeave a Comment on How to Record Foley like a PRO (4 Steps)
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