UVI Walker 2 foley instrument

[Guy Rowland]

For those among us doing sound work, this looks like a very good update. Some of these examples feel way OTT to me, but looking at the controls I think it will be fairly trivial to dial it back.





Lots of great additions to footsteps - clothing, accessories etc, plus animal stuff too.

$129 intro price, $59 for those with Walker 1.
https://www.uvi.net/walker-2

[soundbylaura]

This looks very interesting. I might rent it for next month as I have a short film gig on the way. Good use of the subscription model in this case, perhaps.

[Guy Rowland]

This looks very interesting. I might rent it for next month as I have a short film gig on the way. Good use of the subscription model in this case, perhaps.

Yes, agreed - 24 euros for a month is a great way to trial something by using it properly in anger. If it were just Walker you're interested in and you both like it and think you will use it ongoing, I guess it then makes sense to buy in a sale - currently it's 5 months worth of subscription to buy outright.

[Guy Rowland]

I've just got this - it's good. My main criticism is that everything by default sounds way too close. I think they mic everything 3 inches from the source. The trainers / sneakers all have a much too pronounced thud to them, for example, more like a dress shoe. There are two most obvious tools for compensating, the EQ and the distance controls. But it's still not entirely convincing, much like a close miced trumpet doesn't sound the same as one miced from a distance in a room.

Fortunately there are a boat load of other options, and here I was getting much better results. As well as all the shoe variations themselves (all recorded the same damn away) there are several slots for accessories, I found adding a lot of leather to the trainer and reducing the main sound was a lot more convincing, especially when eq and distance are used. A lot of these effects - clothes, guns, chains, cowbells for cows - are subtle by default, I enjoyed making them a lot less subtle by increasing the randomness amount greatly and the gain. Also the scuff sounds are sometimes more convincing than the main footfalls, even when used at footfalls.

I wish they'd recorded a distant mic at source and let us choose between the two - I mean, the ratio of very close shoe shots to distant in film and TV is about 0.1% - 99.9% at best. Nevertheless many of the other features do compensate to a significant degree, and with some care the product should work well in a mix.

[soundbylaura]

This looks very interesting. I might rent it for next month as I have a short film gig on the way. Good use of the subscription model in this case, perhaps.

Yes, agreed - 24 euros for a month is a great way to trial something by using it properly in anger. If it were just Walker you're interested in and you both like it and think you will use it ongoing, I guess it then makes sense to buy in a sale - currently it's 5 months worth of subscription to buy outright.

For Walker it's actually rent to own, so if I only did a month at least it would go toward that. Buying it is certainly an option, I just don't know if I'll ever need it again. This is my first short film, who knows if there will be more.

Edward, the other footsteps foley instrument, also has a sub model at $35/mo.

[Guy Rowland]

Anders, my issue with being too close is that you are dealing with something unnatural almost always, and all efforts to correct that using effects never quite get it to the right sonic place.

I don't know what others do these days, but I always found best ADR voice results would be when using a 416 or similar in the booth, with the speaker not super-close - 4-5 feet away, say. That immediately gets you into the right ballpark as it matches location audio, and is the sound of dialogue we're all used to. If you treat it like a voiceover, you have all that huge bass tip-up and ASMR type effects you have to do whatever you can to get rid of.

Now footsteps typically are further away from boom mics than mouths. So sonically we're used to a good 10-12 feet between them and a mic. Were I recording a foley library - I have zero intention of ever doing this of course - that's where I'd start. Any room effects would still come after that.

One effect I'd like to have seen in Walker is a basic envelope shaper. Blunting the attack is another tool that might help make things sound a little less crisp and close. You can use it afterwards of course, but then you'd be best adding all reverb afterwards too.

[wst3]

I do (or did anyway) use footsteps and the like frequently, and right about the time that Walker was released so was Cinema Sound/Impact Soundworks Foley library. I really wrestled with that choice, and ultimately I found that the Cinema Sound library fit my workflow better. If I could I'd own both.