.png)
Company: Pro Sound Effects
Product: Odyssey Vehicles Basic
Price: $199
Our Rating: 4.8/5
Odyssey Vehicles Basic includes recordings from the most commonly used vehicles in Film and TV. Pro Sound Effects have teamed up with seminal Sound Designers Mark Mangini and Richard L. Anderson to bring you a library that every post sound professional should have in their arsenal.
Brum Brum
The Basic library has an included 25+ Vehicles, which have been handpicked from the larger 250+ available in the full version. They comprise of 21GB of data in 1500+ files. The selection is very useful, and it is clear that time was put into selecting the vehicles that most editors will search for first on a project - think Mustang, Focus, Harley Davidson and Impala.
Most of the effects are ‘workups’ a nickname for recordings of cars with multiple accelerations, movements and speeds, exactly what a Sound Editor needs to fill extended scenes.
The overall sound quality varies from car to car, but what we love about the recordings is that some dirt is left in, which always helps with worldizing a vehicle in a mix. The frequency response is natural, but the quality is exceptional. Care has been put into the mic positioning and editing of these effects. Some exterior mics have subtle wind noise that gives them an authentic sound, rather than an overly processed one. The included pass bys are excellent, as are the onboard mics and the variable interior speeds. A nice extra is the car horns, interior beeps and gravel noise often missing from comparable libraries. There are also some very useful slow ‘coasting’ sounds as a car moves without accelerating which are very welcome additions.
If you were to compare this library to those from heavy hitters Pole Position Production, this library is less polished, but arguably more useful in a film workflow, as it is priced at the same point as a single library of theirs, but includes 25x the vehicle choices. The advantage of Pole’s libraries is that they work great for mission critical uses such as game audio, where every track must be flawless and noise free.
The Bottom Line
A very, very usable product, that fills a lot of holes in general libraries and allows you to edit extended and complex car scenes with ease. It's by the legends Mangini and Anderson for god's sake. Try the Basic version at least, but it you edit cars all the time get the Full version.