"Write To All" mistake...

[cocamycola89]

Sup Avid,

I was working on this documentary where all my interviews where sorted into two tracks so of coarse ALLOT of automation goes into it. I have become fond of making a selection of what I want to automate, hitting preview, getting my initial setting right, and then hitting "manual - write to all". Towards the end of my session, I hit write to all for some settings on one of the dialogue tracks and it ended up writing these settings for the whole track. I was not aware of it at the time so when I went back I saw that all of my tracks had the same EQ settings

After doing this, I am a little scared of using this automation method again... What other options are there? Is there a fail safe way of avoiding this in future?

I do not have a console btw... I run everything with protools, a mouse and my automation window...

[Stig Eliassen]

Which automation mode are you using? I usually work in latch mode all the time, and touch mode for some tasks. Not touched - not written, and that's the way I like it. You can import session data from one of the backup session files to get your mix back.

[cocamycola89]

Yes Yes, its more or less always in latch mode with latch prime on stop enabled. I will use touch sometimes if i need my eq´s to dance but other than that its all latch. Should have mentioned that..

[Stig Eliassen]

I don't know of any fail safe ways to do automation work, but I always get a good static mix going (no automation), and then write automation where needed in latch mode. I use Write to all when I've made a selection, and Write to end/next or Automatch with no selection made.

Thinking about it, I really don't use Write to all that much, but I have a console here. Makes it easier to do multiple auto moves in one pass, and then Automatch out them all at once.

[lululu]

what plugins were you using? A similar thing happened to me once where an eq setting of Equality eq got accidentally written to about 20min worth of a track... really not sure how this was possible cos all the other plugins in the same channel were not wrecked, just one instance of Equality....

As has been mentioned in a previous post, I always do incremental backups every couple of hours, so I could restore with limited amount of hassle...

[cocamycola89]

I work allot of post so automation is an absolute must for me. I slipped up one time without realizing and the track I was automating got totally trashed. Its made me a little skeptical about working this way as you are one button away from screwing up everything you worked so hard for. I make it a habit of saving new versions all the time

"Session, Session a, Session b, Session c (dial restoration done) Session d, Session e....."

It was a real pain in the chops to fix everything however I realized later that I could have re-imported my old tracks and just re slotted them into the ones that had the incorrect processing... uggggg.

[cocamycola89]

Originally Posted by lululu

what plugins were you using?

Dial Tracks: EQ3 - WNS - SPL De-verb - Channel strip.

Dial buss: C4 (for mids and mud taming), de esser, Ren-Comp and then an L2.

I ended up regretting working on the documentary with the Dial bus because i had to constantly copy setting for once piece of dialogue over two different tracks... nightmare.

[MIKEROPHONICS]

I suspect what you inadvertently did was write to all, but with nothing selected- therefore blasting the entire timeline on those controls - avid - wake up and smell the coffee, this is a post disaster.

Cheers

[cocamycola89]

Originally Posted by MIKEROPHONICS

I suspect what you inadvertently did was write to all, but with nothing selected- therefore blasting the entire timeline on those controls - avid - wake up and smell the coffee, this is a post disaster.

Cheers

Yep,

I think what I did was make a selection, previewed, adjusted parameters and clicked somewhere else for some reason where I inadvertently un-selected the selection and then hit manual write to all... why oh why is it designed that way?!?!?

I know when you do this you get a dialogue box saying your about to write this info over the entire selection but it looks more or less exactly the same as the other dialogue box telling you your writing to the selection! And when your doing this several hundred times a session you don´t stop and read it every time right? It would be a great help if it was a red box or something... check that, maybe they could allow the user to choose how to handle situations like this in the preferences menu...

I am still open to anybody else who works differently that this though... would love to hear some other folks automation techniques.