Using a Sound Effects CD to Enhance Your Productions

Whether you are looking to enhance your production, add some reality to your amateur film or include a little zing to your website, using sound effects from a sound effects CD is a common way to do it. A sound effects CD is used in a variety of applications, but mostly you’ll find they are used to create realistic atmospheres for a motion picture, podcasting or some kind of film production.

While there are a variety of sound effects CD producers, there are three or four sound effects CD considered to be the professional sound effects CD producers in the industry for applications such as podcasting, film production and radio production; Sound Ideas, The Hollywood Edge, Sound Vision, and the BBC. An important item when choosing a professional sound effects CD is that it comes with MetaData. MetaData is essentially a description of the sound effect. When it comes to indexing and searching for sound effects, the MetaData is there to make sure you can find the sound effect you are looking for!

Further, if you want true feature film quality production, it’s also important that your sound effect CD comes in Red Book Audio format. Red Book Audio Format is the standard format a normal CD player will play. Sound effects CDs in Red Book Audio Format will produce their files in WAV format, with WAV sound effects being of much higher quality sound then MP3 sound effects. Why do so many people still look to sound effects? The main reason is “Foley”! OK, you ask, what is Foley? Foley is the process of adding background sound effects and noises to a film so that the film sounds everyday realistic. The many background sounds you hear (sounds other than the dialogue) during a feature film is what makes it so realistic! It’s a critical part of what deciphers an amateur production from a production film.

Productions are increasingly being produced by amateur producers without big feature film budgets. This has caused a spike in Foley being increasingly done by using digital libraries of stored sound effects which can be added to the film without having to painstakingly record the sounds oneself. Having the ability to comb through thousands of libraries of sound effects in a sound effects CD or a library of CDs, producers (both amateur and professional) are able to make fairly realistic productions without having to rent actors to re-enact certain aspects of a film in order to record realistic sounds (typical of only of big budget films).

Without Foley, films usually end up sounding unrealistic. That is because during our day to day conversations, you will hear hundreds of sounds in the background. Without these background sounds in a film, the film sounds more like a high school play where you’ll hear the dialogue, but that’s it. While getting the dialogue correctly captured is the first part, there are plenty of little sounds in the background like a lawnmower mowing, a car driving past, kids laughing and playing, dogs barking, all that make a film feel like we are really there. In the end, sound effects libraries and sound effects CD make the production come to life and give us all the additional sounds that you didn’t know you needed.