Of late, Ive seen quite a few clients get themselves into corners, with poor system performance due to track count issues and large sessions. There seems to be an assumption out there that you can run 100+ tracks off the average 5200rpm Firewire drive…that is simply not the case! In this video I show how easy it is to manage the process of spanning your session across multiple hard drives, explain a few caveats, and show how to bring it back to one volume for backups etc
This topic relates to the Expand tracks by timecode feature, that was introduced in PTHD7.4cs5.
It allows you to automatically “conform” your tracklay session (large contiguous files recorded at once) to an edit made by someone else – in the demonstration, a video editor (Media Composer).
So, you have recorded the discrete tracks of a concert, plus a 2-mix. The mix gets given to a video editor along with all the video material. They do a cut of the concert, and hand you back the cut of your original mix file.
With the Expand tracks by Timecode feature, you can now expand out all the discrete tracks, matching the edit to the 2mix given to you…So you can say, bring the bass to the front of the mix when the camera is on the bass player, bring the guitar up front similarly etc rather than a static mix throughout the clip.
As Venue and PTHD systems are used in the field to record more and more concerts, this workflow is a powerful addition to the options for post production of those projects.
Caveats:
1.I handed an embedded AAF over to the video guys with my mix files in them
2.They handed me back a referenced AAF – which I then relinked to the original Mix files in my audio files folder of the concert recording.
3. All files in the session must share an identical “Creation date” in the Project browser. If you have extra files in your session, addition overdubs etc, they may well be expanded as well, giving you many extra tracks that are probably undesirable. It just looks for any region with matching timecode and puts it onto a new track, that’s all. That could encompass alot of material in your session if you are not working with a pure tracklay of the concert.
Hope that’s useful!
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay between vids, there’s been alot of changes at Avid of late and Ive had to travel quite a bit to keep up with it all!
You’ll find a video below that explains the new comp edit workflow in PT8, how to rate a take and how to filter your takes in the new playlist view. Hope its useful!
