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The MotorTrend team gets an inside look at the Formosa Group’s process of dubbing car audio into your favorite movies. The test car? The most famous 1957 Chevy of all time

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Transcript
00:00 Hi guys, this is Douglas Glad from Hot Rod and I'm here with Mark, Paul and Charlie from
00:17 Formosa Group.
00:18 These are the guys who put the sound to vehicles in movies.
00:22 What they do is they take burnouts and engine noises and they lay it onto the film.
00:25 So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're going to do today.
00:29 We are going to find where the car sounds the most interesting and put mics to record
00:33 it from the tailpipe to under the engine to inside the car and just various flavors that
00:38 we'll blend to make the sound of the car in the movie.
00:40 So in case you guys don't recognize this car, this is the '57 Chevy Project X.
00:45 It's the most popular '57 probably in the world.
00:48 These guys are going to mic it up.
00:50 We're going to drive around and create a sound library and then we're going to go back to
00:54 their studio and see how the magic works.
01:00 So when we first started the car and listened to it, it's got a great interesting whine
01:04 which is stereotypical for the car.
01:06 So basically there's going to be wires everywhere that get taped to the car.
01:10 We'll find a way to put another Omni mic close enough to be safe but at the same time capture
01:16 the sound.
01:17 You want to get the connector?
01:18 I think it's fine.
01:24 You might want to see this.
01:26 Making sure all the mics are hot.
01:33 So basically it's just a map of what mics are what.
01:36 What channels have what mics.
01:38 Because it's easy to lose track.
01:39 A lot of times you want to number them so when something's not working right you know
01:42 what to find to fix.
01:44 Right now Paul is setting up a microphone for the inside of the car.
01:48 A lot of times the insides of the cars don't sound all that interesting and not even that
01:52 useful but a car like this really will be.
01:56 Get it fired up?
01:59 Yeah.
02:00 In a perfect situation we would do everything that the car would do.
02:11 So we would start the car going as slow as possible.
02:15 Then you do 5 mile an hour increments and we'd eventually get up to however fast the
02:19 car can go.
02:20 100 miles an hour, 150 miles an hour.
02:22 You've got to cover the whole thing because you never know if you're going to get the
02:25 car back or not to record it again.
02:29 Okay we mic'd up the car.
02:30 We got some laps in.
02:32 Now we're going to go back to the studio in Santa Monica and put it all together.
02:52 So once we get the stuff recorded, get it into our DAW, we're able to look at it a little
02:58 closer and examine what the takes are.
03:01 The green files here represent the exterior recordings and the red files represent the
03:06 microphones that we had on board.
03:09 So my job primarily is to get these files and to cut them up so I would document that
03:16 as that and that becomes a clip for the library.
03:18 Normally we would do this for a whole day.
03:20 We'll have hours of the vehicle recorded and we can make a nice comprehensive library.
03:25 So we'll bring them, put them all together in one session and sort of line up all those
03:30 different sounds.
03:31 And then when you're putting the car together in a sequence, you want to be able to go find
03:34 quickly what you want to use.
03:36 So an old car that's as cool as that '57 Chevy, the tailpipe is pretty awesome so we try to
03:42 focus on that on any of the older cars and this is what we got for the same bike.
03:52 That's better.
03:53 If you add the engine, you get a lot more fidelity and the full bandwidth of the car
03:58 and that sounds something like this.
04:06 So you said you had eight different channels so you could take any part of that and make
04:10 it louder or quieter and then of course with the footage you can cut it in to the car approaching,
04:17 the car going by or even the car in a different place.
04:19 Exactly what we like to do, we will sync the inside sounds of the car with the outside
04:25 when someone's recording outside, we sync those sounds in the same timeline.
04:29 We'll have those perspectives already in time matching the performance so it sounds very
04:33 natural.
04:34 Super cool, really nice to meet you guys.
04:36 Thanks for putting the '57 Chevy noise on top of a Volkswagen four-door utility vehicle.
04:42 Thanks.
04:51 Thanks.
04:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]