How do you clean up the audio of a final PT recording session for mixing?

[RiF]

How do you clean up all the audio regions, playlists and whatnot in a PT session after recording?
The result of this clean up should be a session file with all the audible tracks (and only those!), all audio files start at bar 0/beat 0 and the session file does not reference any unused audio files.
I know about consolidation of audio regions into a single file, but how to you get rid of all the unused stuff without accidently deleting things you shouldn't?

[Dorian Green]

heya!
Tough time, isn't it ?
First of all I assume you've recorded everything you needed for your sessions and created alternate playlists here and there.
First of all, go thru all you playlists and keep the one you need to make you final decisions.Write their name on a paper.

Delete unused playlists clicking on the little arrow next to the track name on the edit window.A pop up window appear with all Active playlists on your session.

Now you need to edit your tracks, stripping silences, applying fades, fix little gain issues, fix peaks ( because of some pops and click during tracking).

You should do that on all your audio tracks and on the playlists aswell.

At this point you should Save Copy In...as a backup, you must include all audio. You can there after save this on a spare drive as Archive, just in case you need to re edit original files.

Now it's time to consolidate.Do it track by track, including alternate playlist.

Now the most important part of the job...Cleaning up regions list (and audio files).
Go at the top of the region window on the left hand side of the edit window.Open the pop up menu and go to Clear>Unused Files.
Then you're asked if you want to Remove or Delete the files.Remove will only...remove the link beyween your audio drive and your session. Delete will Erase the file on the HD.
As you have back up of you full session, you can Delete them.Little trick to avoid Warning pop up; Are you sure you want to delete this file! AT EaCh FIle, Press Ctrl-Alt- Start while pressing the Delete Button on screen.

Now your session is clean, check the region list... much better...

That's it !

[RiF]

Hey Dorian Green! Thanx for the excellent explanation.

But isn't there anything easier/quicker? I don't think that cleanup up a session file before moving it over to the mixing engineer is such an exotic scenario...

[Dorian Green]

I know...The editiing part is the "heaviest".
But you have to do it if you want to provide the mix engineer the best material.He doesn't have to fix the file he has to focus only on mixing.
This workflow avoid loadza mistakes (I've done few during past years!)
Edition will make a huge difference on the final product.

[RiF]

It's not the editing. It's part of the recording process but it's more the fact that I have to walk through all tracks and clean up the playlists. I thought of something like a function that does: "Keep everything you hear and delete everything you don't hear".

[Mr. Kelly]

I keep everything... playlists, regions, etc.. I don't delete anything, nor do I consolidate. My brain likes to have everything saved, just in case...

Not sure why one would feel the need to delete stuff.

You never know what the future might hold for that "alternate playlist"!

[barters81]

Originally Posted by RiF

It's not the editing. It's part of the recording process but it's more the fact that I have to walk through all tracks and clean up the playlists. I thought of something like a function that does: "Keep everything you hear and delete everything you don't hear".

Simply select unused tracks on the right hand sied of your mix window, and clear. This will delte anything that you're not hearing upon playback. Hence the "Unused" selection option. Of course, the method above uses this too, however the a workflow has been supplied in oreder to prevent any mistakes you may make by deleting all unused.

[shtik]

My advice would be:

Try not to leave all cleaning, fades etc. to the last session before you send it to mixing. Just do it as you record, edit, comp or whatever. When you've finished working on a track - vocals or guitar for instance, make sure these tracks are cleaned before you close the session, so next time, when you record a new instrument, you will do it on a clean track. That way, the only thing you will need to do before you send the session to mixing, is delete all unused files and playlists and consolidate.

Make a habit of cleaning tracks as you go.

Hope that helped..

[AfterJohn]

Cleaning up the session greatly reduces UL/DL time to FTP for us as well.

[Dorian Green]

I agree about keeping everything, however you have to take some decisions at some points, what to keep, what to throw away!
You can keep everything it's fair but on a... Back up drive!
Your session should be as clean as possible.
It really can improve the performances of your Audio Drive.Imagine your have a session with 30 tracks and on few of them you have made some editions like stripping silence and FADES, at the end of the day you have hundreds of small files and the computer will place them wherever it can on your drive. It's so logical to understand your sessions will work better with some "session length" audio files.It also reduces the risks of files corruptions (great number probability theory!).
You're session will also load faster as there are less allocations.
I won't tell consolidating will save some space as it doesn't.

The mixing engineer must receive the cleanest session + footnotes for the alternates playlists (at least he has a couple of spare tracks only from technical issues!)