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?

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.