Swapping files. What are your strategies?
 

Hi all,

Thanks in advance for your help. I’m searching for different strategies on this.

Here’s what I’m doing: I’ve got a recurring project with a lot of heavy sound design and music supervision. I would like to use “preview” files from our music library services to build the initial draft and then swap them with the full licensed versions when the draft has been approved.

For the most recent project, I attempted to do this with the manual telling function in the workspace, but (for a number of reasons) it was very time consuming and a bit of a nightmare.

I’m wondering what other people do? Are there any silver bullet strategies I’m overlooking?

At the moment, I’m working in Pro Tools standard. Curious if moving up to Ultimate would provide better workflows for this.

Thanks!

C.

Re: Swapping files. What are your strategies?
 

If I understand you question correctly here's what I do all the time:
- Once your replacement music comes in: Import Session Data > New Track(s)
- on your Draft/temp music tracks create new empty playlists
- Drag your new music to the empty playlist on your old Temp music tracks. Make sure 'Automation follows events' is deselected.
- Adjust clip gain if overall loudness differs old vs new track
This way you retain any automation you've created on the temp music and can easily switch playlists between old/new music.

Re: Swapping files. What are your strategies?
 

Hi Vytis,

Thanks so much for your response. That's an interesting way of doing it. The hang up for me is that we often aren't using the exact files start to finish. Sometimes, we're looping sections to fit time. Sometimes, we're using the first 15 seconds and then cutting out some of the middle and crossfading into the last 15 seconds, etc.

So, I need to find a way to retain the edits, as well as the automation... It would be pretty cumbersome to try to transfer all that manually.

The "force relink" method actually works to a point. One hard lesson that I learned is that, if you're using the same music multiple times, you need to load it into the session once and then reference the same file each time.

This time around, I was dragging and dropping things from Finder. So, even though it actually was the same Parent file on the disk, every time I did that, Pro Tools assigned its own unique ID. Which meant that all the instances of that music had to be relinked individually...

The other issue I had was that the original editor had set the session to Dual Mono, as opposed to Interleaved. This meant that when we went to relink to the stereo files, we had to convert them to dual mono and then relink the Left and right channels separately. SUPER ANNOYING

Re: Swapping files. What are your strategies?
 

You can tell PT to relink just using the file name and not the unique id as well. The problem I have encountered is this work flow is if the preview file is an mp3 and the replacement is a full res wav or aiff.

Re: Swapping files. What are your strategies?
 

I've had this come up many times where video editors did some slicing and dicing using the watermarked demo version of the music, then sent me the purchased version separately from the AAF to insert into the final mix. If it's a full-pull track it's an easy replacement, but if there are edits that I don't want to try to re-create, I've found just overwriting the demo version with the final version in the Audio Files folder by using the same name works well.

Of course, the video editors' music edits are often sloppy, so I frequently opt to just re-do them anyway. :-)