Learning Sound Design / SFX

[Ty Maier]

Hey there!

I'm trying to expand my knowledge of sound design. Are there any resources you would recommend?

Specific questions would be:

How much planning (or what kind of planning) goes into sound design?

Are sound effects usually recorded uniquely for a project or do people usually pull from an FX library? If from a library, are there any packages I should look into purchasing?

My workflow is Premire / Audition. I also have Pro Tools / Ableton.

Thanks,
Ty Maier

 

[PatrickFaith]

http://designingsound.org I think is a great site if you haven't hit that yet, go through all the articles. I am also premiere for editing and protools for sound. Lynda.com has some fairly good beginner and intermediate courses I have taken, but it's almost impossible getting into the advanced stuff without watching people or just experimenting on your own for a few years.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I would also ask around on Gearsluztz.com, which is a discussion group for sound people in general but also has a section for post people, particularly re-recording engineers, sound designers, and SFX people. 95% of the sound-for-film work I see is all done in Pro Tools.

All of the questions you asked have popped up over there from time to time. I would say Sound Ideas and Hollywood Edge are well-regarded SFX packages that have been around forever, but there are also newer ones recorded in exotic formats like 96kHz and 5.1 surround. I think it's fair to say that a lot of movies & TV series are put together with combinations of library tracks and unique, newly-recorded effects. There are cases where the sound people literally went to the ends of the earth to record very unusual sounds for certain films; I'm reminded of the work Peter Jackson's people did, recording an incredible array of animals and jungle noises for the King Kong remake. I think they took more than 6 months just recording the sound effects, even before the movie was shot.

 

[Ty Maier]

Thanks for the resources guys!

 

[Simon Leonhardt]

I am from the audio world, and connecting to video, so I am here on this great red forum! ;-)
There are a lot of guys who are specialised in FX/sound effects. Their studios inside often look like a scrapyard,
but they keep a lot of things to record what they can! ;-)
May it be falling and breaking glas and so on.

You can look at Pro Sound Effects Hybrid Library for example.

Often used sound effects like explosions, wheels and so on can be found easily in google,
but you have to be aware og the license and use for commercial projects.

I have s studio and if you guys here need some special sound effect I can do it when I have free time,
only the bigger sounds like a helicopter or similar would become difficult! ;-)