Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1501110
www.postmagazine.com 7 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 7 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 KROTOS STUDIO CONFIGURABLE SOUND EFFECTS BY HEATH FIRESTONE LAS VEGAS — If you're into sound design, you've probably heard of Krotos (www.krotosaudio.com), which makes some of the coolest tools for doing sound design for movies. Their tools have been used in tons of movies, and were used to create a lot of the creature sounds in Stranger Things. But as enticing as these tools are, they aren't something that resides in the toolbox of most independent editors or hobbyist sound designers. Their new software — Krotos Studio — may very well change that. Krotos Studio is a free, standalone application that gives you access to some really cool, configurable sound effects and a virtual Foley stage. The free ver- sion comes with configurable ambient sounds, including city, forest, starship and suburbs. Also included are boot footsteps on a variety of surfaces, as well as basic cloth movement sounds, and my favorite, whoosh effects, including hybrid, electrical, fire and airy. All of these are generated and are unique, and can change as you record them through the interface controls. Footsteps can be synced to action by clicking the mouse with each step, and cloth sounds can follow the action in realtime. If you upgrade to Genesis for $29, a bunch more sounds are added, including cool cinematic trailer-types of sounds, other types of footsteps, Foley sounds, and other sound design goodness. Additional sound packs will be added later, allowing you to expand your library. For someone who has spent way too much time scouring sound effects libraries to find anything even remotely close to what I have been looking for, and often having to record my own sounds and heavily process them just to get the right sounding whoosh I was looking for, this is a godsend. I shot a quick demo at NAB, where Matt Collings put together some great sound de- sign for a scene in just a few minutes, showing how powerful this product really is. You can watch the video on CinemaTechnica.com. I was so excited about this that one of the first things I did when I got back from NAB was install it, and my son and I played with it, creating epic trailer lead-in sounds, and finding just the right whoosh sounds. This was the very last booth I ran across before the NAB show floor closed, and I had no idea it was going to be one of the highlights of my trip. I will definitely be doing a review on this, so keep an eye out for that in the near future. CHROMALIGHT GREEN-SCREEN PAINT BY HEATH FIRESTONE LAS VEGAS — One of the first things that really drew my eye at NAB was the greenscreen at Zero Density's booth. It looked…different, but a good different that made me want to know what they were using? I've built a few green- screens in my day, and have done a lot of work on green screens, but the color of this one was just different, which intrigued me. It turns out that they were using a new chromakey paint from a company called ChromaLight (https:// chromalight.tv). So what is it that makes ChromaLight different? Well, they say it is the per- fect greenscreen, developed with a few things in mind. The first is durability. If you've ever had a green screen, you have probably had to really baby your floor, roping off sections and making people wear booties to keep from scuff- ing it because the paint isn't particularly durable. ChromaLight's solution is a two-part paint, with a durable base coat/seal- ant, and a matte topcoat. The result is a durable surface that, when scuffed, reveals the base coat, which looks similar, though not as matte, but should save your key. ChromaLight was designed to maximize chroma performance while min- imizing spill. The result is a green that, to the eye, looks a little darker than Rosco paint, and way less yellow than Pro Cyc. It just looks different, maybe shifted a little more to the blue side of the spectrum than Rosco, but it looks very green and certainly has much lower spill than with Pro Cyc. What this means in real-world applications and the ability to pull a good key easily, I still have to do further tests on, but I had no problems pulling a key in the intro to the CinemaTechnica ChromaLight demo video I shot at their booth. I was also given some sample paint and am very intrigued, so expect a proper review in the near future. They also demonstrated bubbles being keyed in front of it, which can be tricky because of transparencies, and I imagine green spill would give you challenges along the edges or lose some of the detail. I don't know, I've never tried to key bubbles before, but they looked good on the ChromaLight. Keep an eye out for the review. I'll definitely be testing bubbles.