How are YOU mixing in ProTools?

[feakerboo]

Funny that we all rap about the little things that bug us of how this or that doesn't work all the time. I was wondering what you guys are doing out as far as mixing with your Protools rig. PT has come a long way over the last couple years to make mixing for film, TV,ect.. a lot better, but lets face it, a lot of the bigger work doesn't stay on PT dub stages. My personal feeling on this is that it is such a new technology and as far as dubbing, it has not been totally fleshed out yet. (Although I think that ICON is a HUGE ENORMOUS step.)

We have all had to find work arounds. What is it that you do when dubbing that you think is unique? What workflow have you developed that makes you dubs faster/better/easier/ect...

I'll start with one that Larry Blake showed me, that I have expanded upon:

I have learned through experience with 100+ track counts that if you have that many mono tracks assigned to surround outputs you really start to see performance problems, particularly w/ automation writing.

To counter this I use 5.1 faders and add the trim plugin. When you ungang the automation on the plugin you still have the ability to raise and lower individual tracks in 5.1 track. very cool. But the coolness of trim goes on. We "map" the dialog rather often but a lot of the time we love the "map" but need to bring it up or down over all. Using a ProControl you will mangle all that hard work. So when mapping dialog, again use the trim plugin for all your mapping and then you will have an overall level on the fader.

Lets all learn something new on this post....

-brad

[Steve MacMillan]

Using the trim plug-in as a second tier of gain automation is a great idea and I use it alot. The frustrating thing is how poor the automation performace is on plug-ins. I limit my moves to simple overall level changes and leave the fancy stuff for the main fader.

I've often thought it would be cool to have two or more volume graphs for each fader that were summed into the actual fader moves. Then there could be a feature for combining all moves onto the same graph.

sm

[feakerboo]

bringing the boom channel back as an FX return.


I really don't like the way that the LFE send is configured in the pan window, and even worse on ProControl its a real pain to use. Instead I set up a mono send and bus all of those into a aux track. I then use an I/O insert across the aux channel for the DBX sub harmonic bass synth (or a maxx bass plugin) and a low pass filter to get all the garbage out of the boom channel. I have also been know to all a little eq. The filter will save you when it comes time to printmater to dolby and DTS as dolby will filter that suff out and DTS will put it in the surrounds.

-b