Machine control

[groundcontrol]

[Pete Gates]

Keep thinking - "this is the year of tapeless" but unfortunately I'm still having to deal with Machine Control.

It's an embarrassment, I think people that have grown up with only Pro Tools just accept it and assume that 9 pin control generically just isn't very good. I'm another ex-Fairlight user and Pro Tools machine control is laughable compared to that. There are very good reasons that I, and most of the other ex-Fairlighters, moved to Pro Tools but machine control isn't one of them. Why can we still not with one button push drop in on the machine and Pro Tools, yes I know some of the rubbish clunky ways round that.

Pete

[Brandonx1]

Machine control in pro tools is bad but not that bad. It's very workable, just extremely clunky with a few bugs thrown in.

[Pete Gates]

Originally Posted by Brandonx1

Machine control in pro tools is bad but not that bad. It's very workable, just extremely clunky with a few bugs thrown in.

Sounds pretty bad to me! 😊

[groundcontrol]

You'd make a good used car salesman...

[Chief Technician]

I never used a Fairlight. I work with some people who used to use a Fairlight. One of them worked on a DREAM. The tech who had to support that system called it the NIGHTMARE.

The people who used the Fairlight said that its machine control was superior to Pro Tools. I have used the MicroLynx. The MicroLynx was easier to use than Pro Tools' machine control.

Someone here wrote that you get used to it. It's true. I became the king of machine control and even distributed some machine profiles back in the days of yore. Some Avid techs even asked me for my profiles. Machine control did get better between v7.4 and v9.

I am not sure which company bears more of the blame for the debacle that is the SRW-5500 when working with Pro Tools. All I know is I had some bad experiences with that deck and machine control. It wasn't until I went to NAB 2009 and cornered a Sony engineer that he showed me the super-secret deck settings I needed in order to layoff in sync without a problem. By then it was too late with regards to my bad experiences. At least I did not have to relive them.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by philip_purcell

5. Make sure the deck is looking at stable black, has video ref and is not in EE.

Your deck should always be set to external reference with the proper video ref connected. You do not need stable black at the video input of the deck when your deck is set to external reference.

Originally Posted by philip_purcell

7. Try to remember is it "Auto Record" or "Punch in/out" that works, because one of them surely doesn't.

The only time I have seen auto record not work was with a system whose SYNC I/O eventually died. If auto record does not work for you, this may be the first symptom of your SYNC peripheral dying.

Originally Posted by philip_purcell

9. Oh, and another thing. Hope you don't have to SCRUB WITH FRAME ACCURACY while locked up to the deck, because you can't.

That's a problem with any of these HD decks. You cannot accurately scrub an SRW-5500 or an AJ-HD3700B (D-5). You can scrub it back and forth over a time code point a few times and see if you get what you want at a particular time code often enough. Those decks cannot be scrubbed in the same manner as a DVW-A500.

[TVPostSound]

Originally Posted by philip_purcell

You haven't really used Pro Tools until you've had a truly horrible and humiliating experience with Machine Control in front of an impatient and unsympathetic client. That is all.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

First rule, dont layback in front of a client.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with machine control. I have been doing my own laybacks twice a week for the last 5 years on a SRW 5800.

There are menu settings you need to be aware of to do a proper in sync layback. (Do a search here and on Gearslutz)
I print stems and layback through stem track input with no issues.

You CAN NOT view the tape while listening to Protools, while the deck is track armed.
You must listen through the deck's output due to a 4 frame time code pre-read.

We are finally delivering digital files! But thats a nightmare for the online editor now!!

[Pete Gates]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

I never used a Fairlight. I work with some people who used to use a Fairlight. One of them worked on a DREAM. The tech who had to support that system called it the NIGHTMARE.

As I said, there are very good reasons that we are ex-Fairlighters - I'm now an HDX2/32 fader D-Control-er!

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

The people who used the Fairlight said that its machine control was superior to Pro Tools. I have used the MicroLynx. The MicroLynx was easier to use than Pro Tools' machine control.

Fairlight was quicker and easier than MicroLynx (though the MicroLynx could do more).

Pete

[Pete Gates]

Originally Posted by TVPostSound

First rule, dont layback in front of a client.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with machine control. I have been doing my own laybacks twice a week for the last 5 years on a SRW 5800.

There are menu settings you need to be aware of to do a proper in sync layback. (Do a search here and on Gearslutz)
I print stems and layback through stem track input with no issues.

You CAN NOT view the tape while listening to Protools, while the deck is track armed.
You must listen through the deck's output due to a 4 frame time code pre-read.

We are finally delivering digital files! But thats a nightmare for the online editor now!!

I don't personally have any 'problems' occurring as such with laybacks but can you honestly say it's slick?! Totally happy with Pro Tools on the whole but using machine control is like going back into the dark ages - on Fairlight all the deck/sync/setup stuff - push the M1 button, that was it. Arm tracks - blu+Digi I think, been 10 years now! Want to drop on the machine and the Fairlight simultaneously, fine.

You categorically can't say that Pro Tools is as easy as that. I do dozens of laybacks myself all the time (DigiBeta (still occasionally!)/HDCAM/HDCAMSR) on Pro Tools and I can do it fine and it works and I don't have problems but it's unnecessarily fiddly and I have to check a lot more things than I used to have to, yes it becomes part of your routine but it's a bore!

As to your first point, in 32 years I've rarely had the say as to when I'm doing the layback, perhaps I'm not assertive enough!

As to your last point, yes! Recently had something fail QC due to the files being sent out as dual mono, I had supplied stereo to the online.

Pete