Here’s another quick video to demonstrate a key automation feature from the PTHD7.2 release. Its called Preview mode. Many clients want to audition a change in their automation from region to region, scene to scene, before committing to “Writing” it. The most common way of doing that pre-7.2 was to suspend your automation, find the sweet spot for your settings, then Write them to your selection and re-engage automation.
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.
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.
With the release of PT8, DCommand users can now open plug ins on the channel strips, just like DControl owners. This cool not only for general work in the “Mix window” state, but gives enormous customisation power when you start to map things inside a custom group. Check out the video:
There are a bunch of powerful automation features on ICON that came in with PTHD 7.2, some of which I still haven’t covered. So I’m going to revisit a few of those.
Firstly, lets have a look at the basics of using the Snapshot section on the board. This can be used powerfully with Latch Prime in Stop enabled in your prefs, and there are also modifiers when taking snapshots for different workflows. Take a look:
In this video we take a look at how the new Assign Matrix works on ICON surfaces with PT8.
At first, the matrix may seem complicated but that passes fairly quickly with a little bit of use. One of the key differences and advantages of this method of assignment compared to the legacy behaviour is you no longer have to move your hand around to see the scribble strip while turning the pot…now the menu is laid out across a panel of pots and you simply hit the select buttons as required, speeding up the process enormously. Secondly, we are now assigning busses, plugs and I/O in a consistant fashion, making ICON easier to learn for folks new to the surfaces.
There is also lots of info in the D-Control v8.0 guide Chapter 12 titled “Assigning Inserts, Sends and I/O with the Assign Matrix” and similarly in the D-Control v8.0 guide for the 2 encoder version, but the behaviour is largely the same.
Sorry it’s hard to read the scribble strips in the video, but hopefully with your own ICON in front of you and this video it will all make sense!
Sorry for the delay getting this recent video onto the site. Ive been travelling the last few weeks throughout Australia and NZ with Scott Wood of Digidesign in LA presenting clinics on HD picture workflow and the transition to file based workflows.
Last video I went into detail with Custom Fader “Plug in” mode and how to map your plugs onto the fader the way you like them. Due to a few client requests, this video goes back to the beginning and explains the other 3 Custom Fader Modes:
Custom Groups
Pro Tools Groups
Track type/Masters
Ive also started to upload an awful lot of material from last year’s Workflow tour with Scott, going into A LOT of detail about file based workflows and also looking at Field Recorder workflows. Having a fw technical difficulties currently, I suspect due to the durations, but hope to overcome that this week. Stay tuned!
Before we look at plug in mapping – a reminder, the HD Workflow tour starts on Monday in Adelaide! If you havent RSVP’ed for the Adelaide, Sydney, Auckland or Wellington events, please do so!
OK, first, here’s a video explaining what Plug in maps is about….
Now you’ve watched the video, a few extra notes. The “maps” that you create of plug ins all get added into a file kept on your CPU. Thats a *.PIO file, and they can be imported and exported from your ICON from the soft key section.
Why would you want to do this? Well, there are alot of plugs out there that aren’t EQ or Dyn and consequently wont map to your centre section. As a result, all your other plugs will come up slightly differently when you focus them into the custom fader section. why not map them for some consistency? Input and output levels always in the same spot? Reverbs mapped down similarly, so its only the character/timbre of them that changes, but you drive them the same…there are alot of options here.
SO, you have your pio file, and its how you access your plugs, put it on a thumb drive and take it with you to another ICON studio and there you go! You can import it and youre driving their system the way you like to!
If you dont move around alot, then I guess its not a big deal, apart from backing it up for redundancy – last thing you want is to have a fantastic detailed map file for hundreds of plugs lost because you had to reinstall your OS…
Last thought on the topic, when a pio file is made, it seems to take a snapshot of all the installed plugs on your system. Consequenty its not representative of your map of a single plug in, but rather of ALL plugs on your rig. Why is this important? Well, what if you want to find a map that you used to use…so you import that old pio file into your current rig, and you have your old map for that plug in…problem is, you may have created new maps since that file was backed up, and on those plug ins that previously had no map, the default state will have copied over on top of your maps, putting EVERY installed plugin back to its state…
So its NOT incremental, its a system state file – so beware if you intend to tinker with it! If you think of these files as system snapshots taken in series, getting more complex over time, then you should be fine.
To import and export the files, its in your preferences menu, 4 or 5 pages deep.
Pro Tools HD 7.2 introduced so many new automation features that they almost deserve a name all of there own, ala SSL or Euphonix or Neve automation systems. In this blog I want to concentrate on one of those many features, a button called “AutoJoin” – you can see this mode when you open your Automation Enable window, down the bottom above AutoMatch.
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…
The idea of stem mixing is as old as film sound, but in recent years its taken off in the music industry to the point where mastering engineers are often being supplied with stems (or requesting them) instead of the traditional 2-track.
If you adopt a stem based workflow, one of the most effective ways of saving time is setting up a mixing template.
In ProTools that may consist of two parts, both a *.ptf file (write protected/stationary pad) and an io Setup file – so your busses are labelled the way you like and your outputs are set up for either stereo or 5.1 mixing. Be sure to keep a backup of these files somewhere safe!
Going down the path of setting up your ptf file, if you adopt a template there are two killer features you should be using, markers and window configs…
Picture this: you are mixing the project, diving down, working on backing vox or ambience tracks or SFX or the drum kit and you want to change the overall balance of your stems. So what do you do? You simply hit “.”, “2″, “.” to recall memory locate 2 and what happens?
Potentially, all of this: in the edit window, the track list gets hidden, the region bin closes, the io view and inserts views disappear, all your tracks disappear except the buss masters, in volume view, which blow up to take up a quarter of the window each (red lines drawing as you mix in latch mode), on the right hand side, your favourite buss master compressor plug in window opens and maybe Signal tools, showing you the current level in Peak and RMS and you are now in the sweetest place to mix your stems – all the info you want, maximised on screen at the press of a memory locate.
So how? Well, create a memory locate, tied to no “Selection” but with track show hide/track height and a window config attached…
This is the point – combining windows configs and memory locates in your template gives you alot of power when it comes to everyday tasks, navigating your session as a power user who can anticipate the every day tasks of crafting your mix.
Ive seen some power users with templates that include windows configs that open/close a tonne of info in both their edit windows and mix windows saved to common sense buttons on their numeric keypad like 4 and 5 to open and close the edit window, 7 and 8 to do similar with the mix window, 1,2,3, 5 and 9 for project specific views – seeing it in action is definately a “penny drop” moment.
ICON Power feature:
Taking this idea a step further – dig into your ICON preferences to enable “Track Show/Hide: ShowHdn”
This means that tracks that are hidden in the edit window are still accessible on the control surface using your custom fader groups! So you can now mix on tracks on the console, independent of what is visible in the Pro Tools GUI.
Next Blog: An ICON automation feature called AutoJoin, how to mix effortlessly without reaching for the stop button and a mouse when you make a mistake!
