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Can I get away with using foley/drone audio from movies.
  • suresure123suresure123

    I know many will jump to discuss the legality of this even though there are tons of illegal stuff on here and this site grew out of probably illegal hacks.

    Ok, so do you think it would be possible to take some foley drone audio from hollywood movies, maybe put it through few filters and use it and not be traced back to the source? I watched Sicario today and there was some great ambient drone sounds, not really music but drone like sounds.

    Would you use it? Will I be arrested?

  • 10 Replies sorted by
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Can you make short video with some samples?

    Also, did you checked free or cheap sound effects libraries or tools?

  • suresure123suresure123

    Well I'm not saying I would use this, in al likelihood if i did use some foley or ambient sounds i would probably look at some older obscure possibly foreign movies, asian possibly.

    I know I would have to loop stuff like this cause you can only get a few seconds of clean audio here and there but imagine grabbing snippets of drone ambients stuff like this...Stuff that if you watch in big screen gets your heart pumping in a movie.

    I know royalty free ambient etc has come along a way but i still find almost all of it overpriced and awful. Most sounding like it was done with garageband loops. My only source of music which I would use is MUSOPEN cause I know its free and awesome music. 99% of made for movie music is awful unless its been done right with the big bucks imo.

  • donniewagnerdonniewagner

    Just my opinion: In short- no one will notice or care.

    The longer answer is it depends on what you will do with it. If you are making a creative short/indie film as a personal project and your going to put it on YouTube or Vimeo, no one is going to care. If you are making a movie or commercial for profit, and its release is through some distrobution channel that many people will see, then it would not be a good idea to take audio from another production.

  • lexiconlexicon

    I've written production music for several big publishers.Nobody I know is cool with you just lifting their music just like I guess you wouldn't be happy if someone took your film clips for their use without credit/payment.Decent production music is relatively inexpensive to use and sounds way better than royalty free (as you say Garage Band loops etc). I don't understand why people spend fortunes on their gear and sweat every last detail of the grade etc.only to lay a big turd on the final product with cheesy music. Much of the foley drones you reference are written for production music libraries here's a link with the costs:

    https://musicshop.prsformusic.com/lmgr/

    There are technologies being adopted and developed by companies like Kobalt TuneSat etc. which will enable unauthorised usages to be tracked now and retrospectively so it might come and bite you on the ass.

  • donniewagnerdonniewagner

    @Lexicon, You're right that no big publishers would allow their audio to be lifted without authorization. What I'm saying is that if he's a hobbyist, It's very unlikely that his work would be on the publishers radar, and I don't think its worth anyones time to give him shit about it, he's just having fun. If he's doing paid gigs, professional content that will be seen by many, then its not a good idea.

  • robertGLrobertGL

    Why risk the trouble? YOu can get many free sounds that are royalty-free if you search around.. I have about 10 gigs of sounds that are totally free. Otherwise you can buy sample packs.. Some are very expensive but some are very cheap, and you can modify them however you want. Better still, you can make your own samples and loops. If you are doing it for a hobby, make it fun....Well, that's what I keep telling myself

  • lexiconlexicon

    @donniewagner You're right that the publishers won't bother with stuff under the radar but if it's just a hobby film then why bother trying to hide it or filter it.

    I've noticed some of my tracks on people's home videos that they obviously don't have permission to use that I don't care about if it's just a few views. On the other hand I recently came across one that was a home video that was using my track that had 600000 views. It won't have made a fortune but it will have made something off the back of my track that they didn't pay for.

  • suresure123suresure123

    Well I wasn't planning on cut and pasting Gollums theme from Lord of the Rings....I was just thinking playing around with a few seconds of foley and looping it and putting it through some filters.

    personally I'm don't have any ethical problems with it but I don't want it to ruin me if there is software that detects even tiny audio sections. Who would know if it was from some 1980's Ninja movie anyway?

  • trafficartetrafficarte

    There is a ton of samples, Virtual Instrument that can be played inside DAW, from GarageBand up to ProTools, and it's a lot of fun, also for a non musician, to tweak and try with those sounds. Sound has a great role on the impact of moving images on viewer, don't underestimate this role using little snip of audio picked here and there and then looped...

  • goannagoanna

    We talked about stripping discrete tracks from 5.1 audio HERE.

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