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Find and Replace / Fine and Enhance

– December 9, 2008Posted in: ProTools HD tips

In this blog entry I want to share an old feature that’s had some embellishments thrown at it over the last few years. Video below:

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!

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Elastic Music beds (pt2)

– November 24, 2008Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

Following on from my last blog topic on changing tempo of elastic music, this video shows a simpler way of creating dynamic changes, without resorting to tick based audio and the tempo ruler.

Each have their benefits. Using the tempo ruler, you can effect multiple tracks at once. Using the warp marker function shown is super quick if its just a single track you need to adjust visually.

Elastic Music Beds pt2 from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

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Elastic Music beds (pt1)

– November 19, 2008Posted in: General Topics

Hi all,

The video below outlines two possible ways of manipulating the tempo of a piece of production music to easily fit it better to picture. I’ve since thought of another way of doing this and will follow on with a second video on this topic shortly.

Elastic Music Beds from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

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Elastic Dialogue

– October 20, 2008Posted in: General Topics

Hi all, Sorry for the hiatus between videos!

Before Pro Tools 8 takes over, I felt it would be good to look over the elastic audio features in 7.4 and how they apply in post production. I see a lot of facilities upgrading to 7.4 for bug fixes or increased stability but still many engineers aren’t adopting elastic audio features into their everyday workflows.

The video below is an introduction into the 7.4 Elastic audio feature set, specifically how to use warp markers to clean up sync on dialogue.

Elastic Dialogue from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

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What are the “Custom Fader” modes?

– October 1, 2008Posted in: ICON Videos

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.


Introduction to Custom Faders from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

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!

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Custom Fader Plug in Maps

– September 11, 2008Posted in: ICON Videos

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.

More “Custom Fader” goodness coming soon…

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New machine – sorry for the delay

– September 7, 2008Posted in: Thoughts

Hi all,

Just wanted to apologise for the gaps between the last few blog posts. Ive had some work trips recently, keeping me away from the office studio and getting videos finished…

Ive also just taken delivery of a new CPU for the office, switching from XP to OSX and need to find new screencasting software (Camtasia that I normally use isnt compatible with OSX unfortunately).

Should be back on “the air” within the week.

Ive also managed to swap out the local DCommand unit from Blue to a new ES black unit, which should help visiblity on videos in the future.

Big thanks to Brad Watts and the crew at Audio Technology magazine for their recent news item about this blog. I appreciate any help in letting folks know about the work I’m putting into the topics here and hope you’re all finding the videos and tips and tricks useful.

Lastly, if you’re in Adelaide, Sydney, Auckland or Wellington, hopefully I’ll see you at the up coming workflow clinics with Scott Wood and myself. Seats are limited, so be sure to register, by clicking HERE

Mapping on ICON blog coming up soon, promise!

2

Copying and Pasting Automation

– August 10, 2008Posted in: ProTools HD tips

Hi there!
Have a look over the video below, the notes will be under it:

OK – so what were the shortcuts?
There unfortunately aren’t any for the Copy Special commands, however they can be easily accessed on an ICON from the Edit Function buttons (Func 1, pages 2 & 3)

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!

9

You want me to Write automation to WHERE??

– August 1, 2008Posted in: ProTools HD tips

If you’re working on Pro Tools HD, then you’re probably aware that it does some automation. You’re probably aware that you can craft a mix and have the software remember your moves. What you may not realise is that you can write those moves in real time and push them pretty much anywhere you like, in time…

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!

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Mixing it up in the Mix window

– July 25, 2008Posted in: General Topics

The Pro Tools Mix window is a pretty straight forward place for engineers with a good grasp of signal flow, but there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts that make it even more flexible than you may at first believe. In this entry I’ll go through some of the more commonly used techniques to get the most comprehensive control of your mix.

Do to all – holding the Option key when you do something in the mix window is the old “Global modifier”, so if you want to change the master outputs to your interface, hold option and change one track, and all the outputs will switch.

Do to Selected tracks – this is a good one, hold Opt AND shift AND then do the task and it will multiply it across your selected tracks. This is very powerful when used with “Link Track and Edit Selection” enabled. Say you are editing your BVox group, highlight a quick swipe across their tracks, Command + = to switch to the mix window and then opt-shift and change their outputs to a buss. You now have all your BVox sent to a unique buss master, or maybe you want to instantiate a reverb send on those selected tracks…save yourself from…

Opt + click and drag to copy sends and inserts around the mix window

Ctrl click on SOLO buttons to enable Solo protect mode – this means that this track cannot be muted by another track’s solo state. Very useful with effects returns from post fader sends or sub group masters.

Command/Apple click on the up/down icon next to a send and it will change send view from “Assignment” mode (the default) to show the complete info for the first send on that block – a small fader, pan and meter. Its a useful view. In fact for quick turnaround work, I like to set up my main two sends on send A and F slots so they can both be viewed at the same time in this mode for quick visual feedback.

Ctrl clicking when you assign an output allows you to send the output of a track to multiple places, like hitting multiple outputs on the assign section on a console. This is EXTREMELY powerful once you can think about it transparently – for example, you have a buss master for your drum group, its currently assigned output is the mix buss. Ctrl click and assign a second output, to a buss. Now its going to both places. You can return the buss to an aux alongside it and throw a compressor on it and you’re now in a parallel compression configuration. Advertising engineers can use this to set up a buss master for a mix minus, so everything is sent to the buss master EXCEPT the voice over. They can now have multiple VOs on seperate tracks mixed in with the mix minus, tracking to seperate outputs at the same time.

When creating your mix groups, you have a choice of what letter they get assigned – I never thought much about this until I was shown a great workflow, where you choose the letter that starts the name of the group, and this enables the keyboard focus to switch that group on or off by simply hitting that letter (when the mix window is in the foreground and keyboard focus is on). So you’re mixing, you’ve made a drum group and assigned it to the letter “d” instead of the default “a” for your first group. Now, when you have the mix window open, you can simply hit “d” to turn that group on or off!

Speaking of groups, if you are not using a VCA, the normal group behaviour is to gang all your faders together when the mix group is enabled. This is mostly what you want, but what about fine tuning? Simply hold Ctrl and move the fader – this acts as the group clutch key and temporarily disengages the parameter you are touching/moving from the ganged group. (This saves you turning the group on and off)

Lastly, another groups tip. Since 7.2 we’ve had a lot more control in the Groups Window by adding two new tabs, Global and Attributes. These features allow us to do things like group our effects controls together independent of the fader controls, or send levels grouped independent of faders. These can be useful tools in some situations, so be sure to explore the hidden tabs in the group creation window!

Hopefully there are some useful tips there! If you’ve got any other great tips for the Mix window, please comment down below and share them!

NEXT BLOG: I’ll make another video, having a look at the Automation “Write to..” commands and how powerful they now are.

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Editing Music beds, the fast way

– July 22, 2008Posted in: General Topics

In the advertising industry (aka “churn and burn”!) an audio editor could find himself producing anywhere up to 200 x 15-30 second ads per week. Yes, its quite a few ads! The important skills in this sort of work are knowing your SFX library and having a solid music library readily edited into the right durations, at your beck and call.

The problem is…well…producers. You see, they often fall in love with a special piece of music that they “Really think would add a stronger message to this piece”…and well, YOU know its just a 15 second ad about sausages, but hey, its a gig and you have to oblige…

So they whip out their CD and here you are again, trying to cut down a 3min music bed into a 15 sec clip that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Its an art. You’re good at it.

However, if I’m guessing your background right, you’re probably looking at a Timecode or Mins:secs ruler and dont want to try playing with that “bars and beats stuff” as “thats for music guys, not us churn and burn guys, I dont have time to play with that!”.

In my opinion, you don’t have time NOT to! The trick is to know two features in the Events menu, and your whole style of music bed editing could change.

The time saving is all to do with identifying where the musical bars are. If you can find the first beat of each bar quickly you can slice it up and put it back together super quick, but how do you find the first beat of each bar? Well…you can listen for them and seperate your regions when you find it, and seperate, and seperate and so on and so on for every bar. OR you can let Pro Tools do half the work for you…

First thing: Find the first beat of your song. Let me clarify: this is the first beat of the first bar, not the first thing you hear! Alot of music will have a drum fill leading in to this beat, so you need to use your intuition – Im sure you know what I mean…

Put your cursor there, go up to the Event menu/Time operation/Move Song Start and you’ll get a floating window pop open. First time you use this, you’ll need to be sure to tick the box to “Renumber to bar 1″ and then you can simply click OK.

In your Tempo ruler, you’ll see the red diamond of your song start is now aligned with Bar 1 Beat 1 and if you switch over to the bar:beat ruler you can see it clearly when you play through. The problem is, nothing else is in sync!

So, listen for the first beat of bar two, place your cursor there and go to the Event menu and choose “Identify Beat”, enter 2 on the numeric keypad, hit return and you should see a new tempo marker put in place, and the tempo ruler will show a change in tempo take place.

Repeat this step, Identifying the beat (Command-I or CTRL-I) for a few beats until your tempo map is locked in tight – this is an art in itself, but it shouldnt take too long – particularly if you use “Tab to transients”.

OK – onto the fun part. Switch to Grid mode, your ruler should be bars and beats, and now, change your grid to a whole bar. Now, everywhere you click, you will have your cursor on the start or end of a bar. Make a selection and loop it, it should loop freely on the bar no matter where you click!

Last trick – highlight your whole music bed, go to the Edit menu and move down to “Seperate selection” – and choose “on the grid”. Your music bed is now cut up into 1 bar chunks for you – saving a lot of seperating!

Switch to Shuffle mode, cut out what you dont need and rearrange as necessary. Opt-drag bars around when you need to copy them, until you are close to the duration you want. Highlight it all again, Batch Fades and you’re done!

This workflow really depends on metronomic music – things that have very rigid and easily identifiable tempo, but that is pretty good description of an awful lot of production music, so hopefully this helps you speed up your music editing!

PS Correction for the video: I said “go to the Event menu” at the end of this video when I meant “go to the EDIT menu” to find “Seperate region – On the grid”. Sorry for any confusion there!

NEXT BLOG I’ll be drafting up a comprehensive list of shortcuts to make the most of the Mix window. Check back later this week if you haven’t subscribed.

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AutoJoin, AutoMatch, Autowhat??

– July 17, 2008Posted in: ICON Videos, ProTools HD tips

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…

7

Indiana Mix and the Template of Doom

– July 10, 2008Posted in: General Topics

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!

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The Beginning: Why Blog?

– July 7, 2008Posted in: Thoughts

So, why Blog?

For some time now, I’ve been working for Digidesign in Australia and New Zealand, demonstrating Pro Tools and helping train our clients. What I see, mostly, are engineers with tighter and tighter deadlines, long working hours and the relatively thankless task of polishing “product” for mass consumption. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, those few lucky individuals who get to craft something they believe in, that they enjoy and that they have time to create but they have the rare gigs not the usual ones!

So, my priority is and has always been, to evangelize the methods, workflows, tips and tricks that enable our pro users to save time. Time saved gives you two choices, either do more work or craft your existing work to a higher quality. Both options are vitally important goals in both the creative and “churn and burn” market sectors.

On this blog, I not only hope to impart some of that information that I’ve gleaned over the years, but also learn from you, the readers – hopefully we can have some stimulating discussion on here and I can pass on that vital feedback to Digidesign.

This blog would not be possible without a few people however. Mentors like SImon Leadley, Andy Stewart, Charles Tetaz, Bruce Emery, Gerry Nixon, Jason DeWilde, Peter Thomas and Chris McKeith amongst many others. At the end of the day, every time I have a meeting with clients, its a two way street – I learn as much from them as they hopefully get from me.

Also, I have to thank my partner Stephanie for being so supportive, patient and understanding of my ongoing problem with being a big geek.

Anyways, so where to start?? Well firstly I’d love to have folks comment here about what they would like to see. My intention was to create some videos, using screen caps and show specific features alongside discussion about how those features can help in day to day professional work. The first idea that came to mind was a feature introduced in 7.3 – Windows configs. We have a pretty good Digi video for that feature (cop out!) so I’ll just post about my experiences in the field and how people are using this feature alongside the old Memory locates, in my next blog entry.

Talk soon,

Brent

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