Preview mode allows you to skip the “suspend automation” step, and “dynamically suspends” only the parameters of your mix that you touch. So you can hear your changes in the context of your mix, without turning off global automation families like Inserts or volume.

Preview mode and Latch Prime in Stop

“ICON Bootcamp” up next…

These two videos explore the two sides of an ICON suite, the Pro Tools HD system’s preferences and the ICON console’s preferences. Key components of the PTHD prefs are your choices on the “Mixing” page amongst others. On your ICON you can completely customise how the unit behaves, where your custom fader groups go, how many faders they steal, what automation commands you want in your user pages…all these and more allow you to make the console jump to your commands, rather than fitting yourself into the “default” box.

Tweaking your Pro Tools HD Preferences

Customising your ICON Preferences and User menus

Until next time!

Paul Neyrinck Interview Part 1

Import Session Data from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

Back in the early days of TDM, there was a particularly convoluted shortcut that would allow you to select a region in the edit window, thenhold the modifier and click and drag a second region from the region bin on top of the 1st region and a very powerful Find and Replace function window would appear. In my experience back then, it was such a complicated task that I just put it off as a non-event and got on with using other tools to get the job done.

Since 7.2 and all the right click enhancements, this feature is back “in vogue”.

In order to find and replace a region on the timeline, all you now need do is simply highlight the region and then right click on the replacement region in the region bin and in your context pop up you now have the Find Replace function ready to go!

Find Replace allows you to selectively choose what file to replace, what instances of that region to replace (just one or all) on what tracks to replace it (just one or all) and the duration of the replaced region (original or replacement length). Its extremely powerful to replace kick drum samples, gun shots, and all those sorts of impulse sounds we use constantly.

The double whammy comes when you use Find Replace in combination with the newish Duplicate track function. Right click on a track name in the edit window, choose to duplicate it, including all automation and the current playlist. Now you have two tracks, identical. Use Find Replace on the duplicate track and you can now easily automate a mix between the new and old sounds.

Ive seen this used in both post and music. Add a 60Hz “kicker” underneath the kick drum only takes a few mouse clicks. Bulking up a gun shot with a small explosion underneath it, the options are only as limited as your lateral thinking!

Paste Special – Repeat to Fill Selection is simply Ctrl+Command+V (or Ctrl+Win+V on XP)

Viewing your plug in automation is Ctrl+command+ either touching a parameter on the surface of your ICON or clicking on a parameter in the plug in window.

When I was opening and closing plug ins I used a few shortcuts: Opt click on close to close all open plug in windows, Ctrl+Opt+Command+W to show/hide all floating windows and Shit+clicking to open multiple plug ins for comparison – obviously windows configs come in handy here also (see my second blog entry)

Copying plug in settings from one channel on the ICON to another – view in inserts mode, then Ctrl+shift+Select button under the plug in you wish to copy from
Ctrl+Shift+BMP button under the matching plug in on another channel that you wish to paste to

Gliding automation can take a bit of getting used to.
Seems the easiest keyboard driven workflow (as demoed in the video) is writing the “To” setting, clicking inside that area, Suspending automation and then moving your Selection’s in point to the place where you wish to glide From. Then press Option+Shift+Forward Slash(/) or Alt+Shift+Forward Slash(/) on XP to Glide All enabled automation parameters. Remove your Automation suspend, hit back and play and voila!

On an ICON it’s easier (as you’d expect) – simply highlight your selection whilst in Latch mode (with Latch Prime in stop pref ticked) flick over your plug in setting (or copy paste it from the insert view on your channel) and hit glide to all enabled and you’re done.

So those are few of the Automation functions that help manage things when playback is stopped. If you’ve got any other tips or tricks regarding these ideas (maybe some alternative glide workflows?) PLEASE log in and drop us a comment!

Open the Automation window. You’ll see two sets of 5 buttons that look like arrows. These are the Automation Write To commands. They are some of the most powerful buttons in Pro Tools HD, but they look pretty unassuming don’t they? So how do they work?

Well, you’ve got two choices. The top set of arrows work in real time during playback. So you can be riding the faders, get to a level you like and then push the button for the direction you want to write that level and it happens immediately, and you’ll see a red line in track volume view update to show you what you’ve done.

The second set of buttons do the same task, but they kick in when the transport stops. So they are buttons for “anticipation”. A slightly different workflow. Most engineers Ive met have found these functions and started here, with the second option.

So what are my choices? Well, the simple ones are write from where you are now, to either the start or end of the session. Then you’ve got the write to all button in between – this is a tricky one, as its actually TWO buttons in one. If you have a selection on screen, then it will write your automation to all of your selection, constrained by the in and out points. If you are playing and writing automation from the cursor with no selection then it will write it to all of your session, from the start to the very end.

The lower two are new, cooler ones…Write to Punch and Write to next. Write to next is to write your current level down the timeline to the next piece of automation, protecting what is downstream if you will. A safe way to work when you are in the middle of a job doing fix ups. Write to Punch is Digi-speak for “lets get the level right before committing to it” – write to punch writes your current level back in time to where you touched the parameter. Say you are finding a level for a vocal, you get it sitting well and write to punch, then you see a red line go back to where you grabbed the fader and a 90 degree breakpoint is written there, at the start!

In my last video we had a super quick look at AutoMatch, the ability to drop back to Read from writing automation in latch mode. Automatch works very powerfully with the write to punch function, have a play with them together!

The only other thing worth throwing into the mix (pardon the pun) are the buttons above the auto write-to commands, the automation enables…This allows us to almost slice and dice our mix by enabling and disabling as we write to all, write to end or write to punch etc

The features really came into their own in PT HD 7.2 when they became much more real time and you could see the red line on screen to give you confidence in what you are writing.

There’s also a great new preference that came into play in 7.2, on the Mixing tab, “Suppress automation write to warnings”, be sure to tick that on before using these features, it will save you alot of pop ups!

Next blog I hope to write up some tips for gliding automation and applying automation from the mouse and keyboard – for those of you without ICONs!

How many of you reading this feel you know Pro Tools automation inside out? On the flip side, how many are comfortable with Touch mode and leave it at that? Hopefully this post will encourage the touch mode ops out there to experiment with Latch mode…

So, you are using Latch mode, writing automation from the point when you grab a fader or pot, writing it at the level last touched as the transport continues forwards, until you have potentially engaged up to a hundred different parameters, all latched and writing automation, a MIX moving forwards down the timeline…

THEN, it happens… you miss a cue. Maybe you should have grabbed the BVox and pulled them up earlier to prepare for the chorus, or maybe the FX buss came in too loud, either way, it just happened, you’re in the zone, and you can fix it. Hit the “Back and Play” button above your transport controls on the DCommand or DControl.

The transport drops back in time (by the Back/Forward amount in your preferences) and you get a second shot at the cue, and you nail it. Transport hasn’t stopped but a disaster has happened – when you dropped back, all your 100 parameters dropped out of auto record and now you have hard breakpoints and you’ve lost your mix – you would need to touch all the 100 parameters during the back amount to get back to where you were!! Impossible!

This is where AutoJoin comes to the rescue – with Autojoin enabled, when you hit Back and Play, a red line appears on screen clearly showing where you hit it, and you are now approaching it from your back amount. You can fix your cue, but when you pass the red line, ALL your previously engaged automation re-latches and you continue with the mix, as if nothing ever went wrong!

You can go back and play as many times as you like, the trick is to always let it pass the red line before hitting back a second time or you will lose your record enabled cache.

Ive seen music guys using this to great effect, mixing all their BVox or drums in a single (sort of!) pass or post guys doing a doco, cranking through a mix on the first pass – only needing a little bit of trim at the end to tidy it up for broadcast.

There’s a video below showing the behaviour WITHOUT autojoin and WITH autojoin enabled. Hopefully this is a pretty clear description of the workflow and you can see the power of AutoJoin and add it to your quiver for those times when you need to mix super fast on your ICON.

Next Blog: We’ll be looking at a quick way to edit music tracks when they weren’t recorded by you and aren’t locked to your bars and beats ruler…