The right sound effects can change everything about a film.
In a recent shoot we were doing for the World of Depleted Creative Community, we managed to get a beautiful looking shot of our heroine, Kat Carney, turning and firing a full-metal airsoft pistol into the camera. Because the light caught the vapor emitted by the gun's recoil, it looked almost like smoke. Of course, the sound of the gun was much more in keeping with a silenced .22 pistol (rather than the throaty roar of an unmuffled 9mm M9), so the viewer immediately felt like the entire scene looked fake. When we laid over the sound of a powerful 9mm handgun, however, it transformed the entire scene. Now the pseudo-translucent gas was completely transformed into smoke in the eyes of the viewer and the entire scene was completely believable, without requiring blanks or post visual effects!
As such, finding the right sound effects for your next film can save you a ton of time, effort, and money. To facilitate that process, Sony has a number of sound effects collections to help you out. While we've reviewed the Sony Pictures Collection in the past, we now look to their new collection: The Detroit Chop Shop line. Somewhat more targeted than the Sony Pictures' Collection, the Detroit Chop Shop Collection allows you to purchase every set in the collection separately, as well as in a five or ten set collection.
The overall ease of use for Detroit Chop Shop was fairly comparable to many sound effects libraries I've tested. With that said, it does have some unique issues. For example, in the action set, it boasts a wide variety of different guns, which should make any action minded filmmaker very excited!
For example here is one portion of the machine gun line:
Unfortunately, for most of them, it has only one sound effect devoted to that type of weapon and usually has no mention of how far away they were recorded. (There were a few times where an effect was referred to as “Distant,” but that was pretty much the only Distance descriptor.) As such, two guns that are virtually identical in their makeup and their ammo could sound fairly different.
It would've been a lot simpler if they had listed something like “Submachine gun - .45 – 20 meters – 3 round burst” or “Rifle - .50 – 100 meters – single shot”. This would make it much easier for people to find what the right sound effect would be (and wouldn't require them to know as much about firearms), because the actual model is a lot less important than that the sound pair well with the image. (Not to mention, the differences in frame for a 9mm submachine gun provide a lot less change in how it sounds than the difference in ammo when you move up to a .45!)
For the future, adding searchable meta data would be a great idea, especially if it's in meta data that could be searched by the newer operating systems or Adobe Bridge.
While there's a lot of variety in the Detroit Chop Shop line, it is a little leaner on the number of effects than in the Sony Pictures collection. (1700 in 10 volumes of Detroit Chop Shop vs. 2300 in 10 volumes of Sony Pictures volumes.) The concept is undoubtedly that there's less filler and more of the audio effects you will actually want to use. Obviously, that's a tricky thing to predict, since so much of sound design is about layering multiple types of sounds together, so Sony doesn't appear to have any plans to do away with their Sony Pictures collection. At the end of the day, it comes down to which collections have exactly the sounds you need. And while Sony still doesn't have a way for you to preview all the sounds in a given collection, they do have a text or XLS list of the effects along with their durations to help you try to make your choices ahead of time.
While we weren't able to review all 10 albums, the two we were able to review seemed quite polished and to have a good number of options. The one downside I will say is that there can be quite a bit of disparity in some of the collections. For example, of the two collections we looked at, the Action collection (which one would think would be largest because it includes everything from fist fights to gunshots) actually only had 150 sound effects, while the Explosion, Fire, and Impact package had 392. As these are all packaged on DVDs rather CDs, I would've hoped for some more options on the Action set.
The overall quality seemed to be quite good in all the effects in this series. With that said, because of the ease of use issues I mentioned before, it's a bit hard to say for certain. After all, a shotgun blast recorded at 30 feet away is going to sound much shoddier than a shotgun blast recorded at 10 feet away. The actual quality can be just as high on both, but, because of dissipation of sound over distance and ring off, the perceived quality is different. If things were more clearly labeled, this would be much easier to gauge!
The overall value is pretty good, so long as you will use a decent number of the effects in a given package. While there's not an option for buying every effect ala carte, the fact that you can at least get individual volumes separately makes it easier for you to use your money efficiently. And, if you do need effects from many of the volumes, you're saving a pretty big chunk of change ($230 by my count) if you buy all 10 of them together.
With that said, I think a price point of $49.99 per volume would be more attractive to our readers and make it easier for folks to pop on one of these collections when they need reliable sound effects, rather than using as much of their time scouring the internet for free effects that might or might not be the right fit for their needs.
Despite some strange choices on number and variety of sound effects in each of the collections, there's a pretty good bang for your buck in the Detroit Chop Shop collection. I would highly recommend that you check out Sony's page for this collection, check out a few of the demos they have available, and look at the inclusion lists to see if what they have meets your needs!
