This Plugin Completely Changed My Sound Design Workflow

in this video I want to show you a piece of software that I think can completely change how you sound design your videos it's called Coto studio and the team behind it are sponsoring this video but the only reason we even agreed on a sponsorship deal in the first place is because I genuinely think it's absolutely amazing and this is something that I'll personally 100% be using anytime I need to do any sound design I'll show you how it works but the very short version is that it's a software that lets you kind of perform your sound effects in real time based on what your video needs and this next part might sound a little dumb when I say it out loud but it's essentially like you're painting on your sound effects that's like the most accurate way that I can explain it and I'll show you what I mean so that hopefully you can see why it actually makes sense now first up they've got two versions of the software on their website one of them is completely free it's not like a limited time trial or anything you download it and you just use it for as long as you need to and then there's a premium version which is a monthly subscription and it costs like $10 a month I think and that obviously has access to a lot more content and it also gets updated every month but I'll talk about that later so you download it open up the installer and you have the option to install it as either a VST Plug-In or a standalone thing and you can install either one of those or just install both then when you open it up on the left side you'll see a few categories like ambiences cinematic footsteps weather and and so on and when you click on any of them you'll get a bunch of subcategories or presets now if we go to something like weather and then rain Urban Street you'll notice that it says recording at the bottom right away I'll stop it for a second so that I can explain what we're actually looking at so each of these presets has a control panel that's going to look something like this depending on the preset the controls can look a bit different but once you get how one of them works you'll figure out the rest pretty easily so for this preset you can see that each of the squares has labels on some of the corners and these are basically the sound effects that each of the control panels combine when you move the dots on either of them you can control the ratio that the software uses to kind of mix each of these sound effects together in real time I'll just click the record button and show you because it's easier than talking about it [Music] as you can see I'm able to dynamically change the way that the preset sounds depending on how I move the dots and all of the changes that I'm making get recorded then when I'm done I can just hit the stop button and I can grab what I just performed and drag it into my editing software for other presets like something in the footsteps category instead of dragging the dot you click to create a footstep sound effect and each corner will control what surface the footsteps are on you can choose to have it be a very specific sound or a combination of a few [Music] surfaces another kind of better way to get the sound effects into resolve would be by directly using Coto studio in the fair light tab to do that you want to create a new stereo track at the bottom and call it Coto Studio then go to the effects on the left and add Coto Studio to it from the instrument and then VST menu then you want to go into your fair light menu at the top and change input monitor style to Auto you want to do all of these steps so that you're able to hear what you're recording from Coto Studio onto the audio track in real time so that you can make any changes that you need to then you want to hit the little R button on the audio track itself to prepare it or arm it for recording and then when you open the Coto Studio plug-in you can hit start right away You're going to hear the sound effects so that you can adjust them but to actually record them to the audio track you want to position your playhead wherever it needs to be for the effect that you'll be recording then hit the record button under your preview window and it's going to play the video and automatically put the sound effect on the audio track when you're done you hit stop for the video playback which is going to stop recording the sound effect and then you can also hit stop in Coto studio so that you don't have to keep listening to it finally you just have to move the sound effect that was just recorded onto a separate track so that you don't record a different one over top of it by accident so you can essentially just play your clip in your editing software and then just perform each of the sound effects that you need as they're supposed to happen I would say that the normal drag and drop method is good enough for like a few oneoff sound effects here and there but if you're going to be doing the sound design for an entire scene this Fair light method would probably be the better one for that honestly I think the easiest way you'll understand how it works is if you just go and download the free version try it out and get a feel for it the free version has like 14 of these presets available but if you decide to go with the premium one down the line you get access to over 130 and they add new ones every month but instead of just sitting here and talking about it for an hour I want to show you a bit more of a practical example of how you can use it and that's why I actually went out and recorded a few very short scenes that I'll do the sound design for with this software and we'll do a little bit of a breakdown of my thought process so this is the sequence we're going to be working with and first I'm going to play it back with no sound at all and I'll talk you through what I plan on doing to it with Coto Studio it's essentially a short sequence of a friend of mine who goes outside grabs his shoes puts them on then does a short warm-up routine and goes for a run nothing too complicated or anything just a few quick scenes now usually for a sequence like this I'd start by building out the ambience for each scene scene and by that I mean adding the sound effects that you would probably hear if you were in that same environment which in this case should be pretty easy because there weren't like that many environments to begin with so for this first indoor shot I'm thinking I can add a bit of a room tone and I'll probably go to the ambiences category and maybe down to the apartment preset now I'm going to drop the control for the right panel all the way to the bottom here because I don't really want to hear anything from the exterior like cars or whatever and I also don't want to have any people next door then I'm thinking I'll put the control for the left panel somewhere in between air and hum maybe a little bit more towards hum because you can't see it in the footage itself but there was a refrigerator right next to the door that he's walking out of for the next few outdoor scenes I think I'll use something from the forest preset because we filmed this in the backyard of an Airbnb that was sort of like a farmhouse location and I think this preset would match I'll get rid of the Stream sound because I don't want to hear any water and I'll also get rid of the animals because I just want to keep the wind and the birds and then for the final two shots of him running I'll change it up a bit so I'll still keep this Forest preset going but I'll try to use something in the weather category as well maybe like wind trees and then I'm going to ramp up the wind a bit because the forest path that he ended up running down was kind of like a wind tunnel so I think that's going to fit pretty well then I'll go back and add stuff like Foley footsteps and any additional small sounds like his clothes moving and that sort of stuff so like sounds for a wooden door opening maybe in the Foley category and the bedroom door preset there is literally a wooden door preset but I think the bedroom one sounds a bit better here for the Footsteps in the first shot I'll use the socks preset in the footsteps category probably somewhere in between Hollow and solid wood on the control panel maybe a little bit closer to to the solid wood then for the footsteps outside first I'll use the sneaker Urban preset while he's on the stairs and the concrete path and then I'll switch to either shoes forest and click around in the leaves part of the control panel because he's on grass and leaves while warming up and I might try to combine it with sneakers Forest around the gravel corner and just like layer them together and then finally for the shots where he's running I'll go back to the shoes forest and I'll just click around between mud sand and leaves and I'll probably just increase the pitch for the footsteps a bit so that they kind of sound lighter and then I'm going to go back to the start one more time and add some sound effects for him picking up the shoes from the Foley category and basic cloth preset by just trying out different moves as he's doing the actions and pretty much the same thing goes for when he's stretching and warming up and his clothes are moving so now I'll go ahead and do all of that and we'll have a listen to check out what it sounds like and hopefully I do a good job so that you have something nice to listen to a few minutes later now here's what it all sounds like together with the sound effects straight out of Coto Studio but but usually for a sequence like this I would also go in and add a few finishing touches to the sound design with low pass filters ducking and little fine adjustments like adding Reverb so after those this is what the final sequence would sound like for so feel free to let me know what you thought about those in the comments how did they sound to you did they sound good believable that sort of stuff now hopefully at this point you're starting to see why this can be super useful when you're working on videos but there's one more thing that I want to talk about that I think is really important I guess with a piece of software like this there's always going to be the question of is this better than other sound design workflows and my honest answer is no not exactly there are going to be moments when using Coto studio is going to be by far the easiest way to get the exact sound effect that you need for a project but that doesn't necessarily mean it completely eliminates the need for stuff like recording sounds on location or platforms that offer sound effect libraries I don't think that this replaces any of those instead it's just one more amazing tool that you can use in combination with them that being said from what I know they're working on on a potential feature that would let you import your own sound effects and use them kind of like with the presets that are already in here so when and if that happens maybe then you can make the argument that this is all you need finally I want to talk about a few reasons why I think this is a tool that every filmmaker and editor should be using I've said a few times that as a filmmaker I always try to record sound effects for my videos on location whether it's at the same time as whatever I'm filming or by taking Tak the time after I'm done getting my Clips to separately record any sound effects that I need that's the best way that I can make sure I've got audio that sounds natural and true to life but that's not always what the project needs or sometimes I'll end up forgetting something and then I might try to pull sounds from some platform but those don't work either because the tempo doesn't match or I straight up just can't find a sound effect that fits so in those cases having something like Coto Studio where I can just play back my clip and perform the exact combination of sound effects I need with the exact Tempo and timing that I need can be a lifesaver or maybe your only editing a project that someone else shot and all you're given is footage with scratch audio that's completely unusable in that case again using this software can save you a ton of headaches so yeah this is definitely a tool that I plan on using for all of my future projects hopefully you found this video interesting and I was able to explain how this works well enough but if you do have any questions make sure to drop them Below in any case feel free to go give Coto Studio a shot from the link in the description maybe try out the free version first and if you decide it's something that can help you when editing you can upgrade to the premium one as always thank you for watching until the end and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: George Kamenov

Views: 17,195

Keywords: UCl1kCtZgfMu84qoANgMgpPw, davinci resolve, sound design, resolve tutorial, davinci resolve guide, sound design tutorial, davinci resolve sound design, krotos studio, davinci resolve plugin, editing videos, filmmaking, sound design workflow, adding sound effects to videos

Id: bK2Nnx9ZlRE

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023