Archive for the 'tips' Category

Audio region labelling techniques for large speech recording projects

Published on July 18, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

More and more of our work can revolve around games audio where there is a need to reliably and accurately label audio files with the correct file name. This thread came up on the Digidesign User Conference recently. ‘JamesSosound’ asked…

The company I work for are embarking on a project recording Speech for a AAA computer game for the first time. We will need to be able to label audio regions in between takes during recording as efficiently as possible. Pausing recording, then double clicking a region, copying from a script then pasting the text back in to Pro Tools would be quite time consuming for thousands of files. Is there a more straightforward solution using a plugiin or feature of Pro Tools I am currently unaware of that will ease this process. Would anybody be happy to shed light on standard industry practice for this type of process.

‘nucelar’ came back with this suggestion….

Take a look at voXover. It is not Pro Tools-based but it fits these kind of jobs perfectly. Once the recording session is done, you can of course import the files to PT for further tweaking.

‘clusterer’ suggested a workflow that uses Excel, Pro Tools and Quickeys…..

The excel-sheet had titles for each cue/take BELOW each other. so I recorded a few work steps with quickeys..:

  1. In the excel-sheet – I recorded the double click of the first title/cue, then command+c,
  2. Record the “down arrow key” to select the next title (the titles of course have to be below each other).
  3. The next recording was command+tab (to change to Pro Tools). there I hit “enter” (set marker); then command+v (to paste the name of the first title/cue); then enter again; then I recorded the PT-short-cut to move the curser forward/NUDGE for 30 seconds (nudge must be changed to 10 seconds or anything you prefer) .
  4. next step was change over to excel (command+tab)again. the next/following title in the sheet should be selected now.


so with that – you have got a “loop”. Save this as a Quickey and a shortcut.. and let it work for you. When you’ve finished the recordings you have to record a quickey that allows you to copy the marker-names into the regions regarding to the markers..

‘mjryder1′ suggested another workflow using Strip Silence….

I’ve done a bit of this before using the strip silence function on Pro Tools in the edit drop down menu.
This allows you to duplicate and name lots of regions in 1 go but is only useful if they need sequential names. (eg: VO1, VO2, VO3, etc)
Don’t know if that’s any use? if you got them named like this though you could give a folder of them to someone to rename somewhere else therefore not clogging up you studio.

‘JamesSosound’ rounded up with a thank you….

Thank you all for your excellent suggestions. The voXover software fits the bill perfectly and is a very worthwhile investment for only £250. I have been using the trial version this morning, very straightforward and versatile. Problem solved. Thanks again.


Drive Settings in Workspace window

Published on June 22, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I have been getting a number of calls from clients asking what to do when they get this message…

Quite often it comes up when they have moved a session on a drive from one system to another, its fine on system one but this message comes up on system 2.

So what to do?

Go into the Workspace window which you find in the Window menu of Pro Tools and when it opens it will look something like this…

We are interested in the letters in the A (audio) and V (video) columns. The letters set the status of the drive.

Any drive that isn’t formatted correctly will be set to T (Transfer) drive as these drives can only be used to transfer sessions from one system to another. They cannot be used to host active Pro tools sessions. However it is my experience that these settings can ‘change’ on drives that can support Pro Tools sessions, so it is useful to know how to reset them.

You will notice from this screen shot that ‘Work Disk 2′ is set to T which is what caused the error message above.

Assuming the drive is correctly formatted, to reset it back to normal, click on the T and a little menu will appear.

Change it to R if you want to be able to Record onto this drive or if you want to prevent recording onto the drive you could set it to P so you can Playback a session from this drive.

Now that Work Disk 2 is set to R, the session will open and all will be fine.

Another way to solve this, especially if a drive repeatedly goes back to T or P on one system but is fine on another is to delete the Volumes folder in Unicode – Databases – Digidesign – Application Support – Library on the start up drive of the system that won’t play ball. Be careful though, not to delete the Catalogs folders though as this is where any catalogs you might have created are stored.

Once you have put the Volumes folder in the bin and emptied it, restart the computer and when you relaunch Pro Tools it will create a new Volumes folder.

You could of course use the excellent Pro Tools Prefs and Database Helper application to do this for you, just select the Volumes button from the options..

Vuvuzela fever from Waves and Prosoniq

Published on June 16, 2010 in tips. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

If you have Waves WNS Suppressor and their Q10 Waves have released a Processing Chain that you can download…

In response to the widely publicized complaints from TV viewers and broadcasters of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Waves is proud to unveil a solution which dramatically reduces the problematic sound of the omnipresent Vuvuzela trumpet favored by South African soccer fans.
Working in conjunction with a major television broadcaster, we’ve precision-crafted a preset processing chain which drastically decreases Vuvuzela noise: The WNS Waves Noise Suppressor and the Q10 Paragraphic Equalizer. Together, they not only minimize Vuvuzela noise, they increase the intelligibility of the game announcers’ play-by-play action and color commentary.
The processing chain for Vuvuzela noise reduction is now available as load-and-use sessions for Pro Tools, Waves MultiRack, and Cubase. Click here for more info.

Prosoniq have gone for a different approach.Firstly they quickly produced a demo to show how their sonicWORX Isolate application could reduce the impact of the Vuvuzelas…

Using sonicWORX Isolate To Improve Dialog – No doubt sonicWORX Isolate has been recently used for a lot of creative work in the music business. But as this sound snippet demonstrates, it is far more than just a creative tool to extract and suppress instruments in a mix. This audio clip demonstrates our technologies’ ability to get rid of the annoying Vuvuzela noise from a Worldcup commentary and clearly demonstrates its use to improve dialog in cases where all other options have failed.
So don’t forget to check out our sonicWORX Isolate demo today

Then the next day they have produced a free application based on their Isolate product…

Prosoniq is proud to announce the world’s first realtime Vuvuzela filtering plug in based on sonicWORX’ audio de-mixing technology.  This technology does not use a notch filter or parametric EQ to remove the noise. VuvuX is a free Apple AudioUnit plug in that suppresses the noise created by the South African trumpet called “Vuvuzela” in realtime without affecting the audio commentary or the stadium atmosphere, allowing you to enjoy a noise-free World Cup 2010.

Contextual Menus or “If it moves, right click it” – part 3

Published on June 15, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here are some more details on using Right Click in Pro Tools. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here

Transport Window

There are contextual menus on four of the transport buttons accessible by right-clicking them. They work on the transport buttons on both the Transport window and the Edit window if you have the Transport function option selected from the View menu for the Edit Window.

Play

This shows the options for the Play button.

Half Speed – This is the same as Shift and Spacebar.

Prime for Playback – When playing back a large number of tracks,

Pro Tools can take a little while to actually start playing back audio. To avoid this delay you can put Pro Tools in Play Pause mode (Prime for Playback) so that when you do hit play you get an instant start.

Loop – This is the same as selecting Loop Playback in the Options menu and enables Pro Tools to play the same selection as a loop to help select a good loop point.

Dynamic Transport – This is the same as selecting Dynamic Transport from the Options menu. For more on the Dynamic Transport functionality see the Pro Tools workshop article in the May 2007 issue of SOS.

Record

This shows the options for the Record button and you can see that you can get to any of the record modes from the one contextual menu. As with most of the right-click menus there isn’t anything new but they bring together all the relevant options in one little menu. For more on QuickPunch and TrackPunch see the Pro Tools workshop article in the December 2006 issue of SOS and July 2008 for Destructive recording. Remember TrackPunch and Destructive Punch are HD only features.

Return to Zero & Go To End (HD only)

These show the options for these two buttons and they enable you to access automation commands that you would otherwise access from the Automation window.

Contextual Menus or “If it moves, right click it” – part 2

Published on May 30, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here are some more details on using Right Click in Pro Tools. Part 1 is here.

Adding modifier keys to right-click

Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) and right-clicking on a region brings up a slightly different contextual menu. The reason for this is so that you don’t loose your selection when accessing this version of the contextual menu.

The new elements are….

Rename – This brings up the Rename Region dialog box so you can rename the region. Why isn’t this one also in the normal right-click contextual menu?

Move Region …. To Selection Start

These, along with the Snap To options on the normal right-click menu, are really useful options and saves having to remember a series of complex shortcuts. In the example we can see what will happen to the ‘Vocal’ region when we use the ‘Pad’ region as the Selection. Of course the selection could be the cursor location instead.

Make your Selection first and then Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) and right-click on the ‘Vocal’ region, then choose the appropriate selection from the set of three options. This shows Move Region Start To Selection Start….

This shows Move Region Sync To Selection Start

and this shows Move Region End To Selection Start.

Elastic Audio

In Warp view you can Right-click anywhere in the region and select Add Warp Marker from the pop-up.  If there is an Edit selection, Warp markers will be added at the selection start and end.

To delete a Warp marker within a selection, Right-click and then select Remove Warp Marker from the pop-up menu.

Contextual Menus or “If it moves, right click it”!

Published on May 27, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

For along time it was debatable as to whether a two-button mouse was worth having when working with Pro Tools. However since Digidesign introduced v7.2HD and 7.3 LE right-click enhancements have appeared all over the place and now each new feature seems to be making full use of that second button on your mouse or trackball. So in this month’s workshop we are going to look at what you can do with that right hand mouse button. Remember that Control-Click in the Mac Pro Tools world was equivalent to right-clicking. This is now not the case. Control-clicking can do different things to right-clicking now.

Edit Window

Region

Right Clicking on a region now brings up a contextual menu. Most of these options are available to you elsewhere in Pro Tools but the great advantage of these right-click features is that they offer these options right under your fingertips.

Cut, Copy, Paste, & Clear – These all duplicate the functions in the Edit menu.

Matches - Alternatives

After recording multiple takes with loop or punch recording, you can replace the take currently on a track with one of the other takes. This only works if each region has an identical start time. You can select and audition alternate takes from the Matches popup menu whilst the session plays or loops.

Matches - Channels

When working with audio files imported from a field recorder, you can this feature to replace a mono region on a track with a matching segment of an alternate channel that was recorded simultaneously. Any fades performed on the original region are automatically recalculated against the replacement region, and any pre-existing automation on that track is left unchanged. The details of this feature are complex and if you want more information then I would suggest you start by reading the Field Recorders Workflow guide which you should find the Documentation folder in the Digidesign folder in your Applications folder.

Separate – This is the same as Separate Region in the Edit menu usually Command+E (Mac) or Control+E (Windows)

Delete Fades – This enables you to delete a fade region and becomes active when you have made a fade selection.

Snap to Next & Snap to Previous – These work in a similar way to Shuffle and are very useful especially when you don’t want to use Shuffle edit. Take a look at this screen shot, which shows a vocal track I am editing. 

If I right-click on the middle region and select Snap to Next you will see that it has snapped to the next region to the right, something you could never do with Shuffle! 

Conversely Snap to Previous will move the middle region to the region to the left, which is what you would expect to happen when moving a single region using Shuffle. Right-Clicking a region with the Selector Tool used to enable you to scrub with the cursor.  To do this now you must Control-click (Mac) or Start-Click (Windows).

Spot – This brings up the normal Spot Region dialog box.

Group Regions & Ungroup Regions – These enable you to create and undo region groups from a selection and are the same as Group and Ungroup in the Region menu.

Loop and Unloop – These enable you to create, remove, or flatten region loops and are the same as Loop and Unloop in the Region menu.

Expand to Tracks – This is another feature that comes into its own when you have multi-channel tracks acquired using a field recorder. Again for more info go to the Field Recorder Workflow guide.

Problems when copying Pro Tools sessions from drive to drive

Published on May 24, 2010 in problem and tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

‘MX582′ posted this question recently on the Digidesign User Conference having experienced some problems when copying Pro Tools sessions from one drive to another…

So we did a session the other day on our internal drive in our mac pro running pro tools 8 and some how it saved all but a few of the audio files created during that session into a separate external hard drive that was hooked up to the computer. It created a session folder in that external drive with the session name but the only thing that was in it was the audio files folder with just the new files we recorded. I’m completely puzzled how this would happen. We didn’t have round robin allocation set or anything like that as far as i know…

‘DigiTechSupt’ asked….

Were you using a template or a previously created session that would have used the other drives folder for it’s audio?

‘johnnyv’ added…

Digi, we just had the same issue. Here’s our situation: Brand new Harpertown 8-core, fresh internal drive, fresh Leopard install, fresh PT8 install. A client brought us a session from another city, we copied that session in its entirety onto our hard drive. It was a 7.4.x session, which we opened in PT8. We worked on the song for several hours. When we finished the session, we put a full copy back onto another hard drive owned by the client. When he got home, he said that many of the audio files were missing. We went into the audio folder on our drive, and many of the files were there (roughly half). We could open the session fine, and we could see all the files, but WHERE WERE THEY? We found them on another hard drive hooked to our computer…just as the guy described above. On that drive, there was a folder with the session name, and inside of that, there was a single “Audio Files” folder which contained JUST THE MISSING FILES. So, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SESSION, for some reason, the location of our recorded files started to be stored on another hard drive! I was totally stumped.

‘Rail Jon Rogut’ correctly pointed out…

Just a heads up – never copy sessions with the Finder when sending out a copy for a client on their drive.. Use Save Copy In… and select to copy all the audio files.

‘Howardk’ agreed with Rail…

You can’t go wrong if you follow Rail’s advice on this. . . and by the same token, anything someone brings in on a transfer hard drive, open it on the drive, and use Save Copy In to copy it over to your work drive. THere are other ways to do this, safely, but this is simplest.

‘johnnyv’ responded…

Rail – Yes, that is advice well taken. From now on, that’s what we’ll do.  However — I can also imagine us keeping backups for clients, and it’s troubling to know that PT is somehow switching up hard drive locations without anyone’s knowledge, so we should definitely get this sorted out. We also had no round robin allocation selected.

‘Rail Jon Rogut’ also suggested….

Make sure the drive in the Workspace was a “Record” drive.

‘johnnyv’ replied…

Well, that’s the weird thing, Rail. Half the audio files went where they should go…in the Audio Files folder in the ProTools Session Folder. The other files ended up on some random drive we have attached to our system; a drive having absolutely nothing to do with the session, PT8, the client’s files, etc. And this all happened within the span of one recording session over the course of about 8 hours. Totally weird.

‘Rail Jon Rogut’ asked the right question…

Can you open the session and check the disk allocation for the tracks which went to the wrong drive?

‘DigiTechSupt’ then asked…

And did you possibly have ‘Round Robin’ enabled in the Disk Allocation window?

‘mixboy’ added…

I have also experienced this. Disk allocation shows everything going to the correct place and round robin NOT selected. Yet files end up on some other drive – a drive on which that project has never resided before. Internal for me, as I only use externals for transfers/backups and they are powered off before I boot PT. But I have 5 internals in my G5. It’s literally like PT randomly decided to change disk allocation yet leaves no bread crumbs for finding out where they went.

‘johnnyv’ replied….

Digi, no Round Robin selected (checked it when this happened). It’s just like Mixboy Bob suggested…it’s like ALL OF A SUDDEN PT decides to put audio on some random drive without letting you know. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Rail, will have to get in front of the session again to answer your question 100% accurately. We were checking many things when we found the problem, and I want to answer your question accurately…which I will do later today…

‘carlos santana’ suggested a possible work round…

to not allow the system to have this error again you must set the recording drive to (R) and all of the others to transfer only (T) this way protools will only reccord & work on the one you want it to & not n the others

‘audiogeekzine’ suggested….

Also get to know the Copy and Relink function in the project browser

‘Howardk’ followed on….

Yes, the project browser is very handy for this. . . just sort the listing by drive/folder (click on the header way over on the right) and if anything is in a different drive or folder it is easy to see, and then you can right click on the filename to copy and relink. Everyone gets fooled by this and sometimes it can be very serious (when mistakes compound). . . I believe there really should be an indicator on the top of the edit window to goes red whenever there are files outside of the designated audio folder (ProTools really should have a dashboard with key information like this). . . .here is one thread on this topic.

DigiTechSupt then stated…

Pro Tools has never, in any test I’ve done, placed files randomly on a drive. I’ve heard this complaint on several occasions and have even gone to customers studios to witness it, only to find something in their workflow that’s causing the problem. I’m not saying it’s not possible – well, it really shouldn’t be – but I’ve yet to see concrete evidence that it’s putting files randomly on a drive.

‘johnnyv’ replied….

I’d be THRILLED to know that we have something set “wrong”. We haven’t been using PT8 for very long, so I hold it entirely possible that it is, in some fashion, “operator error”. BUT, in this case, I DON’T THINK THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
Rail, Digi and others, check this out…when I go to the session in question, the Disk Allocation shows NORMAL, it points all tracks to the proper Audio Files folder within the Session Folder. YET, only half the audio files (well, actually less than half) are actually there…the others are on a random drive ON WHICH WE HAVE NEVER EVER RECORDED AUDIO in a folder with the proper session name and inside of that, a single folder named “Audio Files” which contains the other files that we recorded ALL ON THE SAME DAY. So, SOMEWHERE DURING OUR 8-HOUR SESSION, somehow the files were directed elsewhere. I must say, having used PT for years now after starting on Sound Tools back in the 1990′s, and owning a D-Control, HD5 Accel, Waves Mercury, etc etc, this is a weird one, and I have no explanation for it. I totally appreciate everyone’s suggestions, and as Rail pointed out, I’ll never copy via the Finder ever again. And I’m going to learn about the things others have suggested upthread. But still, something had to make this happen, and I have NO idea what it is/was.

‘DigiTechSupt’ then asked….

If you drag and drop an audio file from a different drive and do not have ‘automatically copy on import’ preference enabled, it will keep the audio file at it’s original location and play it from there. Were all these files recorded in the session or were some imported? Now, is it possible that round robin was enabled at any point? What is the nature of this other drive – how do you know for certain that audio was never recorded to it? Was the drive ever used to move a session from one place to another, possibly to another computer? If you go to the Regions bin and ‘show full path names’ – do the audio files path indicate anything about how the audio might have ended up on that drive? Was the drive name ever changed?  Was there a session template used and, if so, does the template possibly have incorrect drive allocation?

‘johnnyv’ replied…

Digi, thanks for taking an interest. Let me check into your questions and try to answer them accurately (can’t do it right now, as I’m working at the moment). To be honest about Round Robin, I never even knew about that until this issue popped up and one of my assistants looked at the setting (it was not checked). We only installed PT8 about two weeks prior to that session, and perhaps you can answer whether or not RR is “ON” by default when installing PT8 fresh for the first time on a fresh drive with fresh system, etc. I can say that the drive that this went on is a backup drive which only holds my BFD (drum software) files, and some weeks back, I copied my entire PT7 system drive onto that drive just so I had a backup in case anything ever went wrong. But, as far as I know (and I’m the main one in that room), we have NEVER ON A SINGLE OCCASION used that drive as any sort of a PT recording drive…that’s just another weird element to this. I have a Mac 8-core Harpertown with 4 internals…we record PT onto two of those internals…this drive was an external drive which happened to be hooked to the system in case we needed BFD files. I’ll report more later…

‘smlworld’ suggested…

I cannot recommend these ‘videos’ highly enough. Browser relinking is covered and all prefs are discussed in detail. As a long time PT user (back to SD2) I really appreciate Kenny’s command of Pro Tools.

‘DigiTechSupt’ asked….

If there’s some way we can get a concrete example of this occurring outside of user error, obviously we’d want to get it fixed. I’ve tried personally to make this occur on several occasions, replicating customer setups as closely as possible, but without success. If you see this occur, please note everything about the current state of your system, plus anything prior to the incident that you can recall, even if it seems irrelevant.

‘studiojimi’ posted their experiences….

I had an issue like this over the weekend and I thought I had lost my guitarist’s overdubs because they weren’t on the drive Ii was using and i had not noticed that my back up drive was online during the session and some of my templates tracks were still allocated to the BU drive because it used to be my internal. I recently purchased a terra drive and now that’s inside I was lucky that the session at least put the new info in fresh rogue folders– probably because the old backup sessions were in a project folder of their own…otherwise i would have been hosed because I had dragged and dropped to the BU drive in that project folder when backing up.  I usually manually back up the files by date and the fade files and the old sessions and backup sessions as well as the audio but as you guys know sometimes when you are tired or distracted…you do a walk away and …. hmmmm that could have been a disaster.
I feel very lucky cuz I had already called the client to tell him I had lost the files…then…miraculously I found them in those new rogue folders….and I named that a blessing immediately.

‘soundboy35′ asked….

So any ideas? I’m curious about this as well. While we’re on the topic of templates being the possible culprit, if I open a template and create a new session from drive A, then save it to drive B, and change the disk allocation to drive B, is this problem going to happen?

‘rinky’ added…

This weirdness also happened to me. I noticed that my sessions were gradually taking longer to process fades and audiosuite edits. Come to find out, my main system drive had some of the fade/audio files on it. I checked the disk allocation and sure enough, some files were being written on my system drive and some on my original 7200 rpm external drive! No idea when it started to do that since I hadn’t made any changes to prefs or to external drives… just snuck up on me! But ever since this problem my edits have been to a grind claiming that my my hard drive isn’t fast enough, etc. even after correcting the disk allocation issue. So guys, you are not alone on this.

‘DigiTechSupt’ asked…

For us to make any kind of real traction on this, we’re going to need details about the history of a session
Which drive it was created on?
How was the session created (File>New Session, from a template, etc)
Are you using the File>New Session>From a Template function, or opening a Pro Tools Session file (by double clicking or otherwise) as your template?
Did you use any custom disk allocation at any point
Was round robin ever enabled?
If you moved the session at any point how did you do it (drag and drop, backup utility, etc)?
Did you ever use Save Copy In to make a copy of the session and, if so, did you copy all audio files? Which drive did you save it to?
Is the preference to automatically import audio to the audio files folder enabled or disabled?
The more detail you can give, the easier it will be to determine what may be going wrong.

‘timragnur’ responded…

I’ve been talking with 3 colleagues of mine who has, like me, experienced this very problem. To be excact, it have occured with sessions that were made in one place, then moved (Finder, drag-and-drop) to another computer. Then, what you record/consolidate/audiosuite from this place will be put in another available harddiscs, sometimes the internal, sometimes the external. A session folder will be made in the root with the new audio files and fade files only. Obviously when you move the session, files will be missing. They were all originally made in PT HD 7.3 (new, not templates), but problems occured long after it was opened/saved with PT HD 8.0 No changes was made in the Disc Allocation, and all links appeared fine refering to the right folder. It doesn’t necessarily occur again within a troubled session. Save Copy In was not used. I know this might create a confusion, but like one wrote earlier in this thread, in the last 2-3 years using PT HD 7.3 i’ve had this problem maybe 5 times (with same kind of random choice harddisc allocation). Knowing the system very well, I think we are talking about a bug getting bigger with version 8.0.

‘Sean Russell’ also suggested this possible work round….

Change every drive you don’t need in the session to ‘T’. That solves the Disk Allocatin weirdness.

‘TimNielsen’ added….

I just want to chime in here too and say I have had this problem before as well. I have also had on many occassions, fade files that will regenerate in their ‘original’ location where they were first built, even though I have all my tracks set properly in Disk Allocation. Like, if I delete all my fades, then relaunch the session, a bunch of the fades will still redraw on the wrong drive. The only solution I found in those cases was to quit PT, take that drive off-line, delete all fades and open the session. When PT can’t find that drive it wants, then it would seem to follow disk allocation properly. I have also had the very wonky issue with PT8 where upon importing session data, tracks, and telling PT to ‘copy’ the audio, that PT will get some random part of the way through, and then just ‘reference’ the rest of them. If you aren’t watching the progress bar, and don’t see it ‘jump’ to the end, you would have never known. As far as I know, this is still present in PT8.03cs2. I now have to check upon every import that PT copied the audio. About 1 in 5 times, it will copy ‘some’ and reference the rest. It’s a disastrous bug that really screwed me several times until I realized what was going on. Save Copy In does seem to work, I haven’t had it miss any files so far. But importing session data seems still buggy. Just posting because maybe these are all somehow related.

Well I must agree that I have experienced situations when folders with some audio files or fade files folders have started to appear on other drives, but I have always found it to be due to Disk Allocation to be set to ‘the other drive’ Even for fade files. I completely agree with ‘DigiTechSupt’ that you must be very careful when moving sessions from one drive to another especially when using the Finder. The safest way to move sessions is to use the Save Session Copy, but who wants to boot up Pro Tools to move a session from one drive to another when you can drag and drop from the Finder?

The workround that ‘Sean Russell’ and ‘carlos santana’ should work but I would find it very difficult to keep switching drives from R to T in the Workspace Browser depending on what session I was working on.

The suggestion from ‘audiogeekzine’ to get to know the Copy and Relink feature is very well made and one that I have posted about here too.

I agree with ‘smlworld’ and cannot recommend Kenny’s videos highly enough.

Plug-in to make LtRt??

Published on May 19, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , .

‘Mark 66′ asked recently on the Digidesign User Conference….

I am looking to make an LtRt from a 5.1, is there a plugin that will do this?

‘TimNielsen’ replied with….

This will encode, but I’m not sure it will go directly from a 5.1, normally you feed the LtRt input L, C, R, and a mono Surround channel to make the LtRt.  It would be fairly easy to take your 5.1 tracks and bus them appropriately to the input.
If you just want to make a stereo from the 5.1, and not a true LtRt, then you normally bus your 5.1 tracks to a stereo bus, and then drop the center channel -3dB, drop the surrounds -6 and pan the Ls to L, and the Rs to R, and either drop the Subwoofer -10 or lose it altogether. I usually then run all those through an aux track, and take the oveall level of the stereo down a couple of dB before recording too, since adding in the center and surrounds to the L and R, even dropped as they are, can and will probably still overload the channels at times.
But for doing a true LtRt, the Dolby Surround Tools is the only thing I know of, since it’s a Dolby matrix that needs to be created, not sure anything else can make you one.

‘strangeLoop’ added…..

Here is the one from Neyrinck Audio.

‘JFreak’ agreed…

Neyrinck is the one to choose, even though Dolby is Dolby, it is not that good.

‘bad jitter’ added….

Hmm… I have Dolby and the GUI is PITA, agreed. But are you saying that Neyrinck sounds better?

‘Frank Kruse’ pointed out…

The neyrink doesn´t have a decoder so you won´t be able to hear what you’re doing.

‘JFreak’ suggested….

Maybe it’s just me, but I get better end results using Neyricnk’s. That said, I don’t own either, I just trash an extra iLok key when I need those plugs :)
IMO encoder is enough, I always use a hardware decoder (home theater consumer stuff) to listen to the mix as that is what the customer is also using.

‘dr sound’ commented about Neyrinck’s lack of a decoder….

I talked with Paul Neyrink at NAB and he told me he is very close to releasing the decoder with the PLII . I will purchase one as soon as that happens.

‘laki’ suggested a different route…

SRS Labs make a plug too. It’s decent but I prefer the Neyrinck. Not that it sounds better, but it is adjustable. My only gripe with the Neyrinck is that every instance eats up a whole DSP chip!
If you’re doing an involved 5.1 mix and need to do multiple fold-downs for stems etc, you may run out of DSP. The SRS plug is less DSP hungry.

But ‘Stylin’ Audio’ pointed out….

SRS left us owners for dead – they are not supporting/developing their plug anymore.

‘Postman’ said…

Please, let’s not confuse the terms LtRt and LoRo. In PT you can route the surround mix to LoRo, a.k.a. good old stereo. Yes, Dolby decoder will play it just like any other stereo recording can be played, but what emerges from the surround speakers is not the same as when the surround mix is encoded into an LtRt by an actual encoder. LtRt and LoRo/stereo are not the same thing.

‘TimNielsen’ apologised…

Yes, sorry if I confused anyone, the method I listed will NOT make an LtRt, which is a Dolby Specific ‘encoded’ system of merging L, C, R and a Mono Surround channel into a stereo stream. I was simply listing a fold-down method to make an LoRo, as was noted, which is simply a normal stereo stream that won’t lose information, like would happen if you just took the L and R of a 5.1, obviously you’d lose your center and anything in the surrounds. So what I was listing was a crash-down, just in case the person posting wasn’t talking about a true LtRt. Sometimes I hear people refer to a stereo mix as an LtRt, when in fact they’re simple talking about a crashdown, which as was noted. So I didn’t mean to imply I was listing a formula to make an LtRt without a plugin or hardware encoder, it can’t be done. You have to use either the Dolby or the other one (which I didn’t even know existed).

‘Postman’ replied…

Hi Yes, that was my main point. Thank you for clarifying. I’m seeing regular intermingling of the terms because some people (not you, but some others) do not know any better. It is a regular mistake in the Post forum too.

‘gsilbers’ commented…

we do the “crashdown” (foldown) to make LTRT and we go through a dolby E encoder to layback 5.1+LTRT. it passes QC fine but maybe its different than ltrt for a dvd. Although we send tons of foldown ltrt to dvd houses/blueray and never have had any problems.so maybe they do something else to it. so now im a bit curious on the plugin route and why would it be different.  btw we do this we many many movies and tv shows for fox , univ, disney etc.

TimNielsen came back…

Please be clear on the terminology here. If you say you are using ‘crashdown’ method to make your LtRt, then you are NOT making an LtRt, you are making an LoRo! There is a HUGE difference. All you are doing is making a stereo version of your mix. It has no information for the center channel, or surround channel. Now the dolby DECODER might still stear some information to those channels when you play it back, but what you have made is mostly certainly not an LtRt. The term LtRt (Left Total, Right Total) only applies to a 4 channel stream (L, C, R, S) that has been specifically encoded through the Dolby Matrixing scheme, to embed the C and S information into the L and R channels, so that a decoder can properly find them, extract them, and steer them to the C and S channels.
Hence it is, and must be a two part process. You must specifically encode, and decode an LtRt. You absolutely cannot make a true LtRt any other way. What you are making is fine, we make them all the times as well, a simple stereo version, for instance for the editors to drop into their Avid. But it is NOT an LtRt, which is a very specific thing for a film print or DVD. The nice thing about an LtRt is that it can play just fine as stereo, it doesn’t need to be decoded, if you don’t decode, you just hear stereo. So this is used on the stereo track on a DVD. Then if a person at home has a Dolby Surround decoder in their receiver, it will extract the channels and give surround. Of course nowadays, I can’t imagine there are many left using Dolby Surround decoders, everything is Dolby Digital and now moving towards Dolby True HD, but anyway…  So really, what you are doing, you should call it an LoRo (Left Only, Right Only), and not an LtRt. Hope that clears up any confusion. If you’re not encoding it via a hardware of plugin, you are not making an LtRt.

‘CCash’ agreed…

Right. That is not an LtRt, even if you label it that way. You are getting away with it because it is usually very difficult to determine if someone has given you stereo or an encoded LtRt, even when decoding it to LCRS. That’s because the decoders do a pretty good job of steering things to the correct speakers… but you will be at the mercy of the decoder’s speaker steering, and it will not retain any of the rear-front panning decisions you made in the 5.1.

‘MixMonster’ chipped in…

I use SurCode by Minnetonka Audio. It’s both encoder and decoder, easy to use and I’ve never had any problems with it.

‘The Missile Silo’ added….

Having worked in DVD/Audio Restoration for a number of years we used Neyrinck (specifically the Sound.Code for Dolby Digital version for our AC3′s.). I did a shootout once between or Dolby plug-in encoder and the Neyrinck, hands down Neyrinck was the obvious choice.

‘TimNielsen’ mussed…

Curious, obviously the decoding matrix will usually steer dialog to the center correctly, since it’s perfectly in phase on the L and R. But will a decoder street ‘anything’ the surround channel from an LoRo? Never tried, but that’s the part I assume would just go missing, and instead you’d get a usable LCR out of it. Which, as you said, is what makes it hard to know from listening to a file if you have a real LtRt or not.

‘Postman’ replied…

Absolutely! The less phase coherent is left-right, the more it will be drawn to the surround channel(s). With Pro Logic 1 and 2, stereo reverb gravitates toward surround always. With Pro Logic 2, there are different modes that alter its behaviors, but it tends to “bend” hard left and hard right toward the surrounds. Some music modes make the effect really great, but at the same time do not give the center channel a firm anchor, which can really screw with dialog. I’ve taken a liberty to turn your remark into a question. Sound that is out of phase between left and right will head into the surrounds, so if you hear some things like ambiences and specific panning stuff like fly overs or pass-bys sounding very out of phase ,between left and right, you are likely hearing an LtRt. But, as you point out, there is no simple way to tell for certain. Anyone can make out of phase information. The trick with true LtRt is there is a 90 degree “all pass” type of phase shift on all the surround material. THAT is not as easy to do as simple routing and 180 degree phase shift. But that is what allows a mixer to pan a mono sound partially front to back without it being pulled toward left or right. Sorry, I’m talking geek speek.

‘TimNielsen’ came back…

No, it’s good. I’m learning stuff. LtRt’s have always been a bit of a mystery to me. We always make them, but the mixers monitor it coming back from the magic device, and make adjustments based on what they hear, mostly capping volume and maybe riding the dialog a bit! So it’s good to get a better understanding of what is happening. It’s another one of those technologies that was genius in it’s day, but I wish we didn’t have now, like Dolby Digital. The most exciting thing for me about Digital Cinema, is 16 available tracks of 24, 48k uncompressed audio!

The best way to export/bounce to movie

Published on May 4, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ian Palmer asked about this on the Digidesign User Conference recently. He asked…

I’ve been exporting mixes for review as a QT for years now. We’ve just upgraded my mix studio to PT8 HD.
Before you would export the QT, set the audio settings and it would stitch the audio onto whichever QT was online in the session. Easy and quick.
Now it’s taking a bloody age as PT is re-encoding the H264 QT into another H264 QT instead of simply copying it. Am I missing something here? The new options window is identical to QTPro (which I have QTPro7 installed).
I’m not using the H264 QT in my session, other than to export to as it’s then uploaded via FTP. Can’t be doing that with a 5Gb DVPAL version.

‘FajitaTone’ replied suggesting the flowing alternative workflow….

  1. bounce to .wav
  2. close Pro Tools Session
  3. open QuickTime with QT Pro
  4. open .wav with QuickTime
  5. select all, and copy to clipboard (from the .wav file)
  6. switch to movie, type (cmd-J) to open the movie properties window
  7. select the audio track and delete it.
  8. then press opt-cmd-V to past the bounced .wav into the movie
  9. cmd-shift-S to save as self contained.

    10. this will save the QT you used in your PT session with bounced audio from the session. Bounce to QuickTime takes too long.
    I hope that was clear.

Audio_Vision added…

+1 to the method explained above. Fast and easy. Only issue is when picture has a leader or slate. I usually trim the picture first so the FFOA is the same for picture and exported/bounced .wav files.

‘nucelar’ responded…

Hmm, in my case bounce to QuickTime takes just as long as bounce to wav, real time that is. It just replaces the audio in the movie without reencoding.
UNLESS you choose Bounce to QuickTime with cmd-alt-ctrl pressed. Then you can specify the codec.
Fajita’s workflow is also very useful, specially when you only need to consolidate rather than bounce. The only thing I may add is that you must make sure that the consolidated or bounced audio is the exact same length as the movie, or at least starts at the same point.

mikevarela added…

Yes, bounce to QT is a BOUNCE (real time), benefits of course are that the audio chain runs through your automation and plug-ins. But, if you’ve already bounced the audio, then the tip above will work fine. Keep in mind though that it’s not always sync accurate, as you’re matching audio to video via command, not by eyes. If the video AND audio are EXACT same length, then you’re good.
(read).. there is also a way to nudge audio in the tip above, but it’s not as easy and accurate as in PT

Plug-in equivalents of DBX 128 sub harmonic synthesizer

Published on April 28, 2010 in tips. 0 Comments Tags: , .

There was an interesting post on the Digidesign User Conference recently about plug-ins that wok like the DBX 128 box. ‘Acacia’ asked…

Anyone know of a way to create a subharmonic synthesizer for a bass vocal support like with a DBX 128? I’m working with a producer and a take6 type vocal group and the producer just brought this up. I’ve never done what he’s talking about ITB. Any suggestions or plugs out that do this? LoAir? any others?

‘Delta Music Belgium’ responded..

Aphex Big Bottom Pro
BBE Sonic Suite

Or you could duplicate the track, use a pitch plug-in, pitch the sound 1 octave (-1200 cents) down and mix it with the original track (that’s basically what the DBX 128 did, pitch down 1 octave)

‘Rich Breen’ added…

LoAir is good. Also Lowender from Refuse software.

‘JFreak’ agreed…

LoAir is good. +1
Much better than Aphex 204 emulation…

‘GeneOuse’ suggested…

Waves MaxxBass and RBass is doing the same thing and is very useful on a lot of material.

‘Rich Breen’ replied…

Totally different processes and goals – MaxxBass attempts to enhance low end perception on a wide array of playback systems by generating upper harmonics (in addition to some dynamics processing, etc…). LoAir, Lowender, DBX120x, etc… all generate subharmonics – usually (though not always) intended for extended low frequency playback systems. Both are useful effects, but they are very different sounding.

‘acacia’ who orginally asked thequestion came back and said…

You guys are amazing! Thanks! I’m favoring Lo Air. I have the Aphex and Waves stuff. I’m not seeing a way to blend / mix the Lo Air unless I double the track and remove the direct. Any other ways you’ve worked it?

‘Rich Breen’ responded…

usually done as a send to an aux return with subharmonic generator instantiated on the aux, all direct muted.

‘blairl’ added…

Recti-Fi is part of a free plug-in suite from Digidesign called D-Fi and has a subharmonic generator.

‘acacia’ replied…

Thanks Rich! I didn’t realize that about recti-fi. I’ll mess with it. Thanks all!

‘JMDNYC’ suggested..

If you’re on PT 8 then you have the AIR Enhancer. Preset 04 is called “Bass Boost.” That’s what I’m currently using on an LFE aux.

‘scottgreiner’ chipped in with…

Lowender was great. Seems that Pluggo doesn’t work for me anymore, so no more Lowender. Hope Leigh gets the RTAS version done soon…

‘digidesigner’ added…

still at least RenBass generates an octave below original too… I can hear it and see it on my RTA

‘scottgreiner’ misses his hardware box…

Had one, sold it. Missed it, and bought a Furman Punch-10. Sold it after using Lowender for a while. Now Lowender isn’t working… Ah good ol’ hardware – why did I sell ye…

An interesting debate with quite a few plug-ins to try and I would agree about wanting to get LowEnder back now Pluggo has gone away.

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