Advice for creating Cloth Track

[Smallbudgetguru]

An experienced Foley artist will always surpass any sfx library for something of this nature.

If your doing it yourself, you will need an extremely quiet and well treated room, a nd a clean recording chain with good quiet pre amps.

I would suggest breaking it down by character and passing through the film with a main char at a time as focus. It may help to go through and spot your cues , make markers foe each char and what major material you will need. Then you can export and organize your markers by name to allow you to focus and jump around per char. Gl

[royalxvi]

Would you recommend a shotgun Mic for this or can you recommend any cheap mic? Ill rent one if need be however hopefully I can avoid that. I have an Audio Technica 4030 (which I doubt can be used for this).

What type of cloth should I look for?

[Tom Fleischman]

Originally Posted by Smallbudgetguru

If your doing it yourself, you will need an extremely quiet and well treated room, a nd a clean recording chain with good quiet pre amps.

This can't be stressed enough. A noisy cloth track is worse than useless.

Just FYI. I rarely put any of the cloth track into a domestic mix unless there is missing movement that hasn't been cut. Then I might dip into the cloth track if it contains anything appropriate. Otherwise it is saved for the M&E and then just kind of smeared in there at a very low level. I've never really understood why M&E people demand that we add this track, it doesn't really make much sense to me, but they seem to like it, so we do it.

[Bill@AudioVision]

For foreign distribution, it's a must have. If you are delivering a fully filled M&E, then it had better be there. And yes, ultra quiet mic, room, and Pres.
For cloth: I like a terry cloth towel or two, a piece of leather - fairly supple, some canvas pieces, something made of nylon - gym bag for instance, and some cloth covered furniture - a chair or two to rub against. Keep the cloth pieces small enough to handle in one hand. 18" x 24" is a good target.
Rubbing two different kinds together or against a chair worked well for us. Leather jackets were easy, Angora sweaters... not so much...
It really helped to have a crew - a couple friends that worked the cloth, and someone with 'ears' to make the call on how it was working with the scene. And kill everything in the monitor mix except for the cloth track.

[celticrogues]

Quiet room, and quiet signal chain is an absolute must - the cloth noise is so low level anyway that any noise there will render it useless. We use a Neumann KMR81 shotgun mic for the work - sounds great.

We generally use a pair of blue jeans as the base, and then a starchy dress shirt or a blazer on top, sometimes mixing in some softer cottons if needed.

Cheers!
-Mike