My most-used editing tool (besides Premiere)

Seven years ago I was spending my days working as a staff editor at an ad agency in Los Angeles, and working on my own films at night.

Pretty soon I became the go-to editor there for sound design. I wish I could say it was because I was clearly the best at it, but a bigger factor was that I was the only editor who actually enjoyed doing it.

The part I didn’t enjoy was spending half my time hunting down sound effects. So I started looking for something that integrated with Premiere, where I could find the sounds I needed without constantly bouncing between Chrome, Finder, and my editing timeline.

That’s when I discovered a tool called Soundly. I signed up on my own dime, and became so obsessed with it that I convinced my boss to buy subscriptions for our entire editing team.

The other editors weren’t particularly enthusiastic about using it. They already had their favorite websites for finding sound effects, and nobody wants to change their workflow in the middle of a busy week. But after demo-ing it for them, they saw the light. A couple days later, they were hooked.

Since then, I’ve used Soundly on just about every film and video I’ve edited. In fact, outside of Adobe Premiere, it’s easily my most-used piece of editing software.

So I figured it’s about time I dedicated an issue of Friday Film Notes to it.

And the timing couldn’t be better, because Soundly recently invited me to become one of their first affiliates, and arranged a special deal for Friday Film Notes readers: two months free on any annual Soundly plan!

I don’t believe there’s anywhere else you can get that deal. And if you sign up through my link, I’ll earn a commission that helps support my channel and newsletter, at no extra cost to you.

Check out Soundly + get two months free

But first, let me show you why I’ve been so obsessed with this thing for the last seven years.

Making Sound Design FUN

It’s amazing how much more immersive (and expensive!) a film can feel when you put some real effort into the sound.

But as much as I enjoy the creative side of sound design, the endless searching, downloading, importing, and organizing of sound effects used to drive me crazy.

Soundly makes it almost effortless.

Instead of all that tedious back-and-forth, I just open Soundly alongside Premiere, search for what I need, audition the results, and drag the exact portion of the sound I want directly onto my timeline.

Here’s how quickly I can find a sound, grab exactly the part I want, and drop it straight into Premiere:

That’s it. And Soundly even takes care of saving and organizing the audio files into my project’s SFX folder automatically. By the way, Soundly works with just about every editing app.

It might seem like a small improvement, but when you’re doing this hundreds of times throughout an edit, it makes a massive difference.

When playing with a new sound effect only takes a few seconds, you’re much more likely to actually experiment. Try a few different sounds, layer them together, play around with the timing. Maybe that ordinary punch sound could sound meatier with a low thud underneath it. A subtle bone crunch. A quick airy swish before the impact.

This is what I love most about Soundly. It gets all the tedious stuff out of my way so I can spend more time being creative.

And over the years they’ve continued adding some pretty amazing features: an enormous, high-quality sound library, natural-language searching for those times when you can’t figure out how to describe a sound, and a tool I love called Place It that can make audio sound like it’s coming through a wall, playing on a TV, or echoing around a cave. Really useful stuff.

Oh, and if you’ve already accumulated a giant library of sound effects on your computer, you can import that straight into Soundly. So you don’t even have to abandon the sound library you’ve spent years building.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Soundly can do here, so I made a quick 60-second video showing you a little more of what makes it so useful.

I’m constantly trying out new cameras, lights, plugins, and other filmmaking tools, but Soundly is one of the few that has become a permanent fixture in my workflow. Seven years later, I really can’t imagine editing a film without it.

If you haven’t given it a shot yet, I think you’ll get a ton out of it. And now you can get two months free on an annual plan using my link below.

Watch my 60-second demo + get two months free

In other news…

My office is blue, and now, I am not.

I said I’d do it, and damn it, I did it.

Well, Toni did a lot of it.

Either way, my new office has now been painted the exact same shade of blue as the old one

I’m excited for a new era of Standard Story Company to kick off in here.

Quote

There are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they overthought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.

-James Cameron

Let’s make some movies.

-Kent