In our continuing series we have been featuring tips in audio post production in Pro Tools from Marcelo Cyro from the Oscar nominated animation - 'The Boy And The World' as well as other other films Marcelo and the team have been working on.  In this video Marcelo shows how he uses the Sonnox Envolution plugin to enhance the foley without having to lift the gain. Over to you Marcelo...

Foley is a very important part for any feature film, it gives truth and movement to the scenes. But how to make them appear in their dense mixes with dialog, music and sound effects?

For me, the best way is to accentuate its transients. This enables me to get them to cut through the mix without having to lift the gain and I find that this works well even in dense mixes with lots of effects.

Another advantage of this technique is that the enhanced transients allow you to better identify the foley elements without disturbing the dialogue, which is the most important thing in the movies, 

In this video I'll show you what I do with an animation called the show Luna TV Penguin, which is the most watched program on the Discovery Kids channel in Brazil.

There are a good number of transient design plugins now but for me the Sonnox Envolution has a lot of great features enabling me to isolate certain frequencies and accentuate them and you can see how in this video.

I have in an instance of Envolution on an Aux track - my foley stem. Clicking on the frequency button, enables me to accentuate the middle frequencies a little more and so bring the foley elements to life. Notice that as I turn up the transient button a bit more you can see in the Envelope Display what we are accentuating with the Transients displayed with the yellow line.

There is also a very useful button that enables you to hear only what you are adding to the sound..

We then have a set of more conventional dynamics control in the Attack, Hold and Release and you can hear how these impact the sound in the video but for me, especially in cartoons I prefer to use fast Attack, no Hold and fast Release. The sensitivity button will determine how many lower transients will be accented or not.

Watch the video and hear how the Sonnox Envolution plugin helps the transients cut through the full mix.