20/04/2026
🎬 Foley Recording vs. Editing
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I caught myself thinking about how much the time balance between recording and editing Foley has changed over the years.
Earlier, if I wanted to get recordings I was truly happy with, the recording itself would usually take me around 3x the time, while editing the same material would take 1x. Back then, recording felt like the hard part, and editing felt relatively easy — especially when your eye couldn’t catch a half-frame difference.
Now, a decade later, that balance feels almost reversed. Recording takes me three to four times less time than it used to, but editing still feels like it takes about as long as ever.
⚙️Objectively, some things and techniques have improved. My team’s hands are faster, our workflow is better, and there are more tools now that help increase output. But the overall editing time doesn’t really seem to shrink. If anything, it feels just as demanding because the tolerance has changed. A quarter-frame sync (especially on runs) is something I notice immediately now, and once you start seeing that level of inaccuracy, it becomes hard to ignore.
So even though the actual speed has improved, the expectations and the level of precision have changed too, which kind of cancels out the time savings.
Just an interesting observation.
And to be clear, I’m talking strictly about footsteps here. Props are a completely different story.
Have you had any shifts in your process over the years that surprised you?
