After two years of development, the Cinema Sound Foley Library has arrived! Distributed by Impact Soundworks, this ground-breaking library allows users of any DAW to trigger an immense foley library of footsteps, clothing, skin and thousands of ancillary disciplines from a MIDI keyboard. In the fashion of Ben Burtt and other world class sound designers, MIDI triggering of samples is one of the most efficient ways to create sound immersion – and now with one of the world’s largest foley libraries, you can create foley via the incredible power of Native Instruments Kontakt Player.
Now, in the Cinema Sound Education, we talk about how to create foley in your closet and record in real-time with real performances. Of course, this is always to be desired. But it is gear and time consuming, and if there is an issue with the client not liking the performance, you’ve got to re-perform it. You don’t get the advantage of digital foley creation this way. To learn more about how to do foley in your closet, look to this article.
The Cinema Sound Foley Library offers the best of both worlds. With our custom Kontakt instrument, you can quickly audition thousands of sounds in seconds, and implement them on the fly by ‘performing’ them on a MIDI keyboard.
With easy layering, keyswitching, per-sample editing, and FX – all within a single UI – editing these performances couldn’t be any easier! This has extensive advantages over other methods of foley creation and design:
1. Massive time savings in implementing and auditioning foley sounds, because they’re already collated, edited, organized, mastered, and processed for maximum punch in the mix.
2. User-friendly, versatile options for performance, with easy switching and crossfading between layers all within a single MIDI channel.
3. A huge selection of categorized sounds includes the bulk of what every production encounters: footsteps, clothing, and skin.
4. Footsteps with multiple tempi and intensities, so you can perfectly match the action on screen, as well as program each heel-toe-slide-pickup separately.
5. Easy layering of sounds to create super juicy and punchy effects, or super-ethereal ambiences, within seconds.
6. Full ADSR envelope controls to create “Distance to Camera” mixing, and all controls are automatable from your DAW.
With CSFL, you can add Hollywood-level, immersive foley to any production with a fraction of the time and budget previously required. We hope you’re able to take advantage of this in a huge way, and enhance your productions to the maximum!
The Recordings
CSFL was primarily recorded with the Røde NTG-8 shotgun mic, which, thanks to its beautiful frequency response and powerful off-axis rejection, gives the recordings a very “on set” feeling.
You’ll find this library blends far more readily with dialog recorded on lavaliers and shotgun mics and brings a far more cohesive frequency response to production audio in the mix. Exterior recordings were recorded with the Røde NTG-3 and, similarly, its world-famous sound allows foley samples to blend wonderfully with on-set dialog.
All samples were captured at 192/96 kHz/24 bits and audio was processed at that sample rate. It was only downsampled to 96kHz for final export. We implemented state-of-the-art noise and artifact removal to further clean up the recordings and added a proprietary neuro-passive aural EQ curve on all samples to enhance their use in complex mixing.
Using these pristine high bit and sample rates means virtually no digital noise buildup or harsh artifacts, even with lots of processing and pitch shifting!
Library Content
CSFL is split into five broad patches: Clothes, Female Footsteps, Male Footsteps, Skin – Miscellaneous, and Ancilliary (everything else!)
Within these patches, you can explore a huge range of categories and sub-categories. For example, the Male Footsteps patch offers 14 categories, each of which is a different material such as Carpet, Cement, Dirt, Gravel, etc. Exploring the Carpet category, you’ll find 17 subcategories representing different footwear and intensity: e.g. Boots – Loud, Tennis Shoes – Soft, Dress Shoes – Medium, and so on. Selecting a subcategory (or ‘bank’) will load a full menu of individual sounds triggered by MIDI, with one unique sound per key. Up to five banks can be loaded per layer at once!
For a complete list of all library content – categories, subcategories, materials, clothing types, etc. – please see the following PDF!
Cinema Sound Foley Library – Content Layout
Console: Modular FX Rack and Mixer
The sounds themselves are only one part of our foley library. You’ll also gain a powerful mixer and modular effects rack so you can customize these foley sounds with a variety of subtle to dramatic effects. With Console, you can make subtle adjustments to tone and space, or go hyper-realistic with sounds that really punch through the mix.
You’ll find multiple EQs (digital and analog-style), compressors, spatial FX, modulation FX, amps, distortion pedals, reverbs, and a selection of over 30 custom cabinet IRs! Using Console, you can easily save and load FX chains or presets between projects or even different Console-enabled ISW instruments.
Download the Console manual here to learn more!
