clip based eq and comp

[electone]

say you have a session with a dialog track, an fx track and a music track and your dialog track has 100 clips all needing their own eq and comp. putting each clip on its own track is rediculous and audiosuite is no good because you can't easily make changes or trim out clips after. so we automate our eq and comp parameters across the track but what a pain and to audition quick eq changes is not possible unless you suspend automation which will affect the other tracks. clip based eq and comp like audiovision is needed or individual track automation suspension.


thank you

[Richard Fairbanks]

You CAN turn the automation off on a track by track basis, there is a little pop-up button on each track that does it. If you really want to, there is a way to suspend an individual parameter on a single track. Check the manual for those things.

Still, manipulating a bunch of dissimilar clips can be hard. If there is so much automation playing that turning off a single track's automation is unsatisfactory, there is another method I've used that is only slightly more complicated. Set up a duplicate track for the dialog clips, but turn the automation off on that track. Now for each clip (or range of clips) you want to work on, drag it to the duplicate track and adjust everything so it sounds good against the other automated materials. Highlite the range. Make sure all automation parameters you are interested in are enabled for recording (volume, plugin, sends, whatever) and press command-option-/, which is the shortcut to write automation to all enabled parameters. Now, while the range is still highlighted, use the grabber to move everything highlighted back to the real track. The automation you've just written will now do it's job. You never have to turn automation on or off, just leave it off on your worktrack. As long as the worktrack is a duplicate (i.e. identical plugins, send, and bussing), you are golden.

It ain't pretty, but at least you can work on new material without suspending automation on the other dialog.

[spigots]

Great tip

[electone]

alright! thanks for the tip. try this one. how do you normalize a whole omf, handles and all? thanks again, forrest

[Richard Fairbanks]

There is no easy way to do that. I can think of a number of reasons why you would NOT want to normalize everything, and only one reason you WOULD. A raw Pro Tools track does not have enough gain to work with low level recordings, and for that reason I can see why you might think to normalize clips. Instead, I suggest you put a short Time Adjuster plugin at the head of those tracks that need gain. That way you can get up to +-24 db of automatable gain, which will be more than enough for any but the very worst problems. The gain is in 1db steps, so it's no good for volume rides, but great for what you need.