With Krotos Studio, you can perform and manipulate sound effects in real time while you watch back your footage…let me tell you, it's super cool.
Here I have this mockup scene that we edited together of some teens playing football. Playing it back, it's kind of boring without sound. So, let's open up Krotos Studio. On the left, we have a bunch of sound presets that you can play around with.
Let's go to footsteps, scroll down & pick ‘Barefoot’ to match our footage.
Here on the right is where we can perform. Starting with this XY pad, there's a name for which type of ground that we're stepping on. If I click near ‘Sand’, it sounds like we're walking on sand.
If I click multiple times here, you'll hear a different footstep for each click.
Let's try clicking near ‘Wood’. This is really cool because it blends the sound of the two materials together. These audio files change each time I press, and remember, this is just from one preset.
So, let's go back to the performance tab. Once I start playing sounds, Krotos Studio will automatically start recording what I do. When I stop, it will give me an audio file to drag and drop into Premiere Pro, Just like that!
So, I can hit play in Premiere, and in Krotos I'll play the footstep sound effects in real time, trying to match the visuals. Then I'll just drag it in. And of course, if the sound doesn't match perfectly, you can simply cut and shift it over.
For the soccer sounds we have an AI-powered search bar that will help us quickly find what we want. There's a bunch of soccer presets and other sports as well. Let's pick the ‘Soccer Simple’ preset.
Here we have a bunch of different triggers for each type of ball kick. And of course, each trigger is loaded with multiple sounds, so we can click it multiple times and get a different sound each time.
In my sequence, I have a small buildup before they kick the ball. To make it more dramatic, I show the kick from two different camera angles.
We don't always have to perform sound effects in sync with the footage like we just did. We could also just use Krotos to customize and get the sounds that we want. Let's just click on the ‘Hard Kick’ button a few times until I hear one that I like. Then I can drag this audio file down to the timeline and line it up with the kick.
For the wide-angle kick, I want the sound to sound more distant, because of the camera's position. So in Krotos Studio, down here we have this quick FX menu. Let's enable it and then we can pick ‘Distance’. We have a bunch of presets here for different types of spaces. So for this let's pick the ‘park open space’ preset.
Now, this works, but let's try something a little bit more exciting and dramatic. Let's go back to Krotos and change the effects preset.
“I just want to note that it's crazy to think that we've only used two sound effects presets so far and there's so much variety within those two presets. There's still so much more to explore.”
As you can see, some of these presets have an AI symbol on it. And that means that the presets were made with AI. But the good news is that Krotos Studio trains their AI based on their own library that their own sound designers made. So kudos to them!
Okay, here's something even more fun, the whooshes. Let's pick the 'Hybrid' preset. On the XY preset here, I can move this little circle back and forth to create my own custom whoosh sound. So on the right, we can also change the texture of our whoosh. For example, we can make it sound more like fire, or a tiger.
For our scene, I'm going to place it between 'Air' and 'Cloth'. We do a little performance, stop here and drop in the audio file. So, here when our character runs up to kick the ball, I want the whoosh to sound more like a cloth. So, you feel like you can hear that the clothes are moving.
If you're working with a lot of sound effects and you start piling them up in your timeline, you can see it can be hard to stay organized. So I recommend color labeling them. Doing that helps you visually sort through your sound effect so you can find it in the future faster. It's also important to mention that the Krotos sound library is royalty-free and unlimited use, so you can focus on being creative and having fun.
So, now let's go into the ambiences. Right now, our scene still sounds too quiet and that's because we don't have any ambience inside of it. Krotos Studio has a ton of ambience presets to choose from. Let's try out ‘City’ here. You can customise it with more or less traffic. Or if your scene was shot in a busy city like LA or New York City, then we can bump up the sirens way up!
What if you don't have time to go through all these presets or you can't find one that matches your scene? Well, you can click the AI button. Here we can generate an ambience preset just with a text prompt. Or if you click this image icon here, we can upload a still image from our scene and Krotos will come up with a prompt based on that image.
Since this is recorded in real time, if the character in your scene walks in and out of rain, you can move this control here to sync up with the visuals.
The last thing we need to make our scene complete is some music. Now, of course, you could grab a music track from whatever library that you use, but you'd be missing out on some fun. So, check this one.
I'll choose a music preset called ‘The Chase’.
In here, we can customize the volume of each instrument and also the intensity. We can also adjust the pitch and speed of the whole song. Now that we know what each control does, let's hit play in Premiere Pro, and it's time to perform.
Once happy, drag and drop it into the timeline and it's golden. I added a few more sounds off-camera to complete the scene.
Kroto Studio is a tool that saves you from having to go into your timeline and manipulate and key frame. So, go out there and make something that you're proud of!