"Save Copy In..." Never Works Properly!

[reichman]

Hello DUC:

I'm on PTLE w/ DVTK2 7.4cs7, OS 10.4.11, and eSATA drives. And I'm totally fed up with a bug that has been with us for a long, long time:

We make big music to picture sessions. When a mix is ready for overdubs, we delete unnecessary tracks, use the "Select Unused" audio command, remove those audio files from the session (this takes a couple of times to really get everything, another smaller bug). And then we use "Save Copy In..." with audio.

EVERY time we do this, even if we re-open the session, the session doesn't forget the audio that we removed and insists on copying it into the new destination!

For speedy internet deliveries, we can't tolerate the extra data. So we cherry-pick through the audio files folder, and when the receiving studio opens the session it ALWAYS says that there's missing audio (when there isn't), and we have to make the phone call and say 'trust us, it's a bug, don't worry, hit Skip...'.

Apologies for the rant here, but this workflow was airtight back in Pro Tools 5.1.3cs11!

Best,

Nathaniel Reichman
www.nathanielreichman.com

[TVPostSound]

EVERY time we do this, even if we re-open the session, the session doesn't forget the audio that we removed and insists on copying it into the new destination!

I cant tell you if it's a 7.4 bug, but I've done this at least a dozen times in the last 3 weeks with no issues, on 7.4.2

[TheHenchman]

I've never, ever seen this happen to any of my "saved session in" sessions.

[Starcrash]

It's been a well known bug for some time now that removing large numbers of unused regions from the Regions List is unreliable. It usually takes several attempts and sometimes you have to close and reopen the session to get them all. I was hoping it was fixed by now. Guess not.

Nathaniel, are you saying that even after removing all the unused regions (using the workarounds), Save Copy In still includes the unused media? Weird. Is it saved in the clipboard or something like that?

[reichman]

Hello Starcrash:

Yes, "Save Copy In..." includes media that by all appearances, the session has no knowledge of. It's as though there's a separate "meta-bin" in the sky that keeps all media the session ever had (poetic, I know, I'm trying not to be too boring).

If other people really aren't seeing this, I'm beginning to wonder if the problem has something to do with the specific settings of my session template.

If Digi's reading, they should know that these sessions often (but not always) have a red 'Timeline' readout in addition to a red 'Session' readout. This is despite that fact that *all* the media in the timeline is online. And, yes, we deleted unused playlists, and yes, the audio from those unused playlists was tediously removed from the session.

Anyway, back to work. Thanks to everyone for their responses.

Best,

Nathaniel Reichman
www.nathanielreichman.com

[jimlongo]

Hidden playlists?

[reichman]

Nope, as I wrote above, we delete unused playlists before removing unused audio. And besides, the session wants to copy a lot of formerly used audio.

[Scott Goldberg]

Hi Nathaniel,

I think you want to delet them when you hit select unused, then you will get them. Just have backups of the original session. Good Luck.
Scott

[tj_davies]

Have you got View auto-created regions turned on? If not - maybe try to turn it on, at least when deleting unused regions. Best is to hit Command+Shift+D before deleting unused and check that you are not filtering any views (such as Audio/MIDI/Video/Groups).

Have you tried closing the session. Reopen the session and then delete unused files again. That seemed to help here. But actually Save Copy In is working flawless here.

Hope you get it sorted.
Best,
Timothy

[Premo]

I've never seen this 'bug' either. I do save session copy daily and have used Pro Tools for years.

I don't have any useful suggestions other than stating that this sounds like a work flow error of some kind.

Then again, maybe the problem is I'm not using sessions in the thousands of files. How many files would you say you're removing at any one time? How large are these sessions and what file format, sample rate and system specs are you running?