Pro Tools has many features aimed at post‑production. Could they help you with music production too?
Pro Tools stands out as a DAW that is widely used in both music and post‑production. While some workflows and features might seem exclusive to the latter, the line between these two disciplines is often blurred, and features aimed at post can prove useful for music projects too. This was illustrated by a recent project I worked on, which involved creating promotional video material for social media. The brief was to capture a band’s live performance, and although there was a single full‑length video track in the session, multiple camera angles and B‑roll footage were also available for the video edit. Once the video was sync’ed with the multitrack audio, the mix itself was essentially a straightforward music mix. However, many of the tasks and techniques I used owed something to post‑production workflows.
Post‑production projects can throw up organisational challenges because they often combine material gathered by different people at different times on different devices, and all of this needs to come together at some stage. In this project, audio was captured by the band’s regular sound person using a Soundcraft digital mixer and recorded into Reaper over USB. Since this was effectively ‘location audio’ recorded on a separate device rather than directly into the DAW, there was an extra step of ingesting the audio into Pro Tools, a common task in post‑production.
Importing Audio
The Import Audio dialogue: better than drag and drop.To ensure consistency between sessions, I created a bespoke template, as I wanted to import audio for each track into identical sessions. Consistent sound across multiple sessions was critical, as extracts of each performance were going to be cut into a single showreel. The files I received were neatly organised: stereo files with track names and sequential suffix numbers, which made it easy to identify which files belonged to which song. While many post‑production users might rely on AAF imports through the Import Session Data window, in this case, the Import Audio window was more suitable. This approach allowed me to audition audio files and decide whether to copy them into the session or reference them directly from their original location.
While dragging and dropping files into the session is an option, I find the Import Audio window much more versatile. It provides better control over how files are handled, especially when working with larger projects or organising multiple sessions. To access this window quickly, use the shortcut Command+Shift+I on a Mac or Control+Shift+I on Windows.
Stereo Versus...
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