What uses a voice?

- 1 voice is used per channel of an audio track.

- Aux tracks DO NOT use voices, unless you are using an RTAS insert across them.  Here are some examples:

• 5.1 Aux Track – 0 voices
• 5.1 Aux Track -with RTAS plugin – 12 Voices (6 to the pluigin, 6 back from the plugin)
• 5.1 aux track – with RTAS, TDM, then another RTAS Plugin – 24 voices (6 out, 6 back, 6 out again, 6 back again

- Audio Tracks with RTAS plugins mixed with TDM plugins.  For example:

• Mono Audio Track with no plugins – 1 voice
• Mono Audio track with an RTAS plugin – 1 voice
• Mono Audio Track with a TDM, then an RTAS plugin – 3 voices (1 to the track, 1 out, 1 back)
• Mono Audio Track With RTAS, RTAS, TDM, RTAS – 3 voices (Same as above, doesn’t matter how many RTAS plugins you have before your first TDM plugin.)

Questions… Comments… Glaring omissions?

- Print tone fast!

- EQ fast!

- Slip fast!

To use this shortcut, in the “open session” window, or the “import session data” window shift+click on the “open” button and the session will open with all plug-ins inactive.

To enter into combination modes, you can shift click on grid mode when you are in another mode. You can also hit both function keys at the same time (for example F1+F4 for Shuffle-Grid mode) Or if you are in an edit mode and press Shift+F4 you can add grid mode to it.

Add the grid clutch to these edit modes to enhance your workflow even more!

Note: Slip-Grid mode has been broken after 8.0.0 cs3 and is still not working in 8.0.1 cs1

To use this command: View the automation you want to copy, highlight it, and copy in the normal manner (Command+C or just C).  Now view the automation that you want to paste it to (on the same track or a different track)  highlight a selection, and hit Control+Command+V and there you have it!

Note: With this command you cannot mix on/off type data (such as mutes and bypasses) with variable control data such as volume automation automation.

Very useful for pasting volume automation onto sends for a routing change or other unexpected occurrences throughout a project (not as useful is force pasting your “mid band Q” automation to your “center %”… but it’s nice to know that you can…)

Much to my surprise, Pro Tools seems to be working without a hitch. Well, that’s not entirely true, and it beach balled and froze when i first tried to launch it, but I think that was because I was messing around with a lot of other stuff and just launched it and continued to do other things. When I force quit and re-launched, it popped right up. I couldn’t produce a crash, except for a case that I believe had nothing to do with Snow Leopard involving trying to import multiple video files in a session without DV Toolkit.

I performed several tests with the equipment I have here at home and everything seems to be Peachy Keen. Here’s a video (our first!) of me Making a new session, and opening an old session.

Even though everything seems fine, I’m sure we’ll run into some issues (especially for TDM users) So, if you only have one Pro Tools workstation, and depend on it for your livelihood, it goes without saying that regardless of any of these tests, it’s probably best to wait for official compatibility statements from Digidesign. Until then, have fun!

To do this, make a selection containing more than one region, and hit Command-Option-G. This will create a region group. To ungroup the region group, select the region group, or multiple region groups, and press Command-Option-U. Something handy about this command is if you ungroup a region group, and edit the contents, you can re-group the region with Command-Option-R. And this will regoup the regions with your changes intact, instead of having to make a new region group.

Before

After

So what are region groups good for? Making easy edits to a large number of regions spead across many tracks. I’ve found this particularly valuable in post-production for making edits to large sessions if the project changes edits when it is already in sound post. You would normally have to select a large portion of the session, make a small edit, and then playback to check the sync, and then reselect another large portion. You can instead just make a region group out of the whole session (or whichever part needs to be changed) and then quickly and easily make a large number of edits. You’ll also have the edit points in the region groups to go back to so you can easily check fades / automation on those edits.

Another handy feature of region groups are the export/import feature. For Example: You have 2 sessions with identical audio files. You’ve made edit changes in one session, but need to return to previous version of the edit. You can open the old session, make a region group of the section in question, export the region group, import it into the newer session, and you will have your old edit without having to import the entire track, or specially create a transfer session with just that section in it.

-Ejecting Drives

One of the most basic and most often used features of the workspace is the ability to eject drives while Pro Tools is running.  Simply open the workspace (option + ; ) and right-click on the drive you want to eject.  Then select “Unmount”  This will release you’re drive from the clutches of Pro Tools and unmount it for safe removal from teh system.

-Setting Drive Permissions

In the workspace is also where you can set a drive to “Record, Playback, or Transfer”  Usually you won’t have to mess with this, but if you want to make sure you don’t record to a certain drive, or if a drive was set to “Transfer” and you need to record onto it, this is the place to do it.  Simply click and hold on the columns next to the drive with the headers “A” or “V” (audio and video respectively) and you will get a pop-up menu that will allow you to change the drive permissions.

-Copy and Re-Link

This powerful feature is essential for session data management.  Say you have a session with audio you recorded, plus you have gathered some sfx and other elements from different sources.  When it’s time to move the session to another machine you find that you have audio on 3 different drives, buried in folders that contain much more audio than you really need (It’s best to avoid this situation and keep your sessions lean and mean, but file management gets out of control sometimes)

Save session copy is one solution, but another more elegant solution is Copy and Re-Link.  In the project window (option + o) open the audio files folder and sort them by “Path”  Select the ones that are not where they should be, right-click and select “Copy and Re-Link” Pro Tools then prompts you with where to put them.  Once you select the proper location, Pro Tools goes to work copying and re-linking all you’re misbehaving audio.

That’s all for Part 1 of “Pro Tools: Under the Hood”  Next time we’ll explore the database functions of the workspace, and take a look some more file managment.

If you aren’t familiar with playlists, they function as a space for keeping an alternate version of the contents of your track (regions and automation), while maintaining all the other common elements of the track. You access them with the small arrow to the right of the track name in the edit window

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A common use for playlists is for keeping alternate takes of a section. Two things have been changed about playlists in version 8. For one, you can now view all of your playlists on a track at once. To do this, either just select “playlists” from your track view selector (below blocks), or command-ctrl click on the playlist button (the small arrow). You can, of course, still just toggle between playlists as you always could using the playlist arrow.

This view allows us to easily manage and audition multiple playlists. The playlists are indented from the track so things don’t get confusing. Notice the arrow next to the solo button on the playlists, when you have a region selected on a playlist, click the arrow to copy that region to the main playlist of your track, or press Control+Option-V (Mac) or Alt+Start+V (PC).

In conjunction with this feature, the new region rating system also provides an easy way to keep track of which regions contain takes that you liked, or that your producer/director liked. You can rate regions 0-5 using the shortcut Command+Option+Control+[0-5] (Mac) and Alt+Start+Command+[0-5] (PC). To view these ratings, enable ‘rating’ in the view-regions menu, or create a shortcut for toggling rating view in your regions using this post.

You can also filter your playlists using the ratings you set, if you right-click or Control Click on the track name, and select filter playlists, you can only view playlists with a rating of 4 and above for example.

Another great new added functionality of playlists is the ability to have Pro Tools automatically generate new playlists when you are in loop record mode. To do this, make sure you have the preference “Automatically create new playlists while loop recording” checked.

The other new feature I want to talk about is the automation lanes. Other DAWs have had something similar to this for a long time, but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the new Pro Tools. On the bottom left of a track in the edit window, there is a new arrow. Click this arrow to open an automation lane. The first automation lane defaults to volume automation. This alone is a nice feature, not having to view the volume over the waveform view. If you click the view toggle you can switch this to any automation you’d like, as well as add as many different automation lanes as you want using the plus arrow on the bottom of the last automation lane visible on your track. Your automation lanes indent just like the playlist views.

Automation lanes in Pro Tools 8

1. If you Control+Click on the name of a multi-channel track there is an option to split out the track into several mono track. Very handy!

2. In the preferences window, under the ‘display’ tab there is an option to color code regions by marker. With this preference checked, the regions change color after every marker location.  A great way to visually see scene changes, or sections of a song, even with markers hidden!

3. When using elastic audio you can shift+click on a warp marker when dragging, to lock the markers on either side of it.  Saves you three click, thus tripling your productivity!