Having gone through the Pro-Tools Linked in Learning I am now more familiarised with working and mixing for film within Pro-tools. Some useful tips and techniques I have come away with include, but are not limited to:
- Changing the editing mode in the top right of the Pro-tools browser to Grid will allow me to keep my cursor accurate to the frame boundaries – Then we can change the grid value to reference frames instead of seconds – this way we can also make the background grid accurate to the frame and not the seconds.
- Going to slip mode will allow me to go to a finer resolution when needed
- It is useful and time-saving to separate the different elements of a film sound and route them to different outputs for ease of use in a later stage of work – these elements can refer to dialogue, music and sound effects
- We can achieve this by sending each elemental group of tracks into an auxiliary track which acts as a bus. – essentially an auxiliary track acts as a pathway to route audio from one place to another.
- This is done by redirecting the output of all the different tracks in a certain element/ group into the auxiliary track and changing the input of the auxiliary track to bus 1.
- Its a good idea to colour code stems to keep track
- Using these techniques we can make and save a working template which can act as a starting template for all my projects.
- Using timecode and markers, that are labelled clearly, are also useful to set up before a recording session in order to identify the key scenes/ cuts for fx and atmosphere as well as sync points for image and sound.