Pro Tools doing weird things.... any ideas?

[Dan T]

Heya!

Right, theres two things about Pro Tools that really confuse me and I wonder if anyone can help me with them?

1. We have 3 different Lacie Hard Disks, and sometimes when recording or editing in a Tools session - Pro Tools randomly places the Audio Files & Fade Files folders on various other drives..... sometimes its all the audio & fade files and sometimes half are in a random place and half are in the session folder. Ive checked the disk allocation and it seems ok, any ideas?

2. This one is very strange…. sometimes when we’ve recorded any audio - the Pro Tools session seems to be about double the size it should be. For example, we record about 90mins from one stereo audio track and the file size should be about 900 MB, however sometimes it comes out as 1.4GB or even more like 2GBs! Ive tried clearing all the unused files from the session but this makes no difference. I have found though (and this is strange) that if you export all the audio files, clear the session, and then re-import the audio files back, it actually becomes the right size! We also normalise the audio before editing... could this have anything to do with it?

Does anyone have any idea why either of these are happening?

Thanks! Dan

[Rail Jon Rogut]

How did you format your drives? Follow the instructions on how to format drives for Pro Tools in the sticky Troubleshooting thread.

Rail

[Stu Windle]

Hello

When you normalise audio files (or indeed perform most other Audiosuite processing) Protools creates a new audio file with the processing applied. If you look in your regions list you will see (for example)

Audio - 01 and also
Audio NORM - 01

These are the original and processed files respectively. Try to avoid normalising unless completely necessary anyway...

[Icabod]

At what bitrate are you recording?

16bit files require 5megs of space per track minute (stereo=2 tracks, so 10 megs per minute).
90 minutes x 10mb = 900 megs

24bit files require 7.5 megs of space pre track minute, or 15 megs per stereo minute.
90 minutes x 15mb = 1350 megs, or 1.31 gigabites of hard drive space (1024 megs per gig).

Sounds to me like you might be recording 24 bit files. If you bounced those to 16 bit files, they would drop to 2/3 the size of the original.

Also, this is all at 44.1kHz (sampling frequency).

Does this only happen when you normalize? Check the file size before and after. Nomalizing creates another file of equal size, and that would double your file size (more like 1.8 or 2 gigs).

One other thing, check the size of the actual files. At one time, I had an issue that was causing my machine to crash frequently. If it crashed while I was recording, the file in PT would grab all of the disk space I had alocated for it. I had 3 minute sessions that were 10 gigs!!! All of the files created when it crashed were huge, and unusable. I haven't ever seen this happen except when I crashed in the middle of recording, but you may be experiencing something similar.

Good luck as always,

Geoff

[Thresholdproductions]

I also think that protools works with dual mono files untill you bounce and export as stereo interleaved. Thus, the dual mono files would be double what you'd expect. Not really sure but when I record a 90min session and I look in the audio folder, there are two files, L & R and they are each the size you'd expect them both to be when you bounce them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is one reason I can come up with on top of the other two.

J

[BookSix]

As for the file allocation, make sure you don't have Round Robin turned on...

[Dan T]

Great - thanks for the information and ideas..... ill check it out and get back to you! I do know however that we definately are recording at 16bit, and 44.1, so it wont be that, but ill have a look at it!

Thanks!