Pro Tools 6 oddities

[sparkymixmadness]

Before we get into the rant proper, I would like to start out by saying that overall the product is simply outstanding and the upgrades well worth the money. But with that said, here are a few things that I have encountered in my adventures:

Fades - In fade window it shows the wrong fade most of the time - the small picture shows the right fade, but the large picture shows the wrong fade. Speaking of fades, you know what would be slamming? I would love to see an option to write only fade-outs or only fade-ins on. There are a number of scenarios where I would like a different length or shape fade on the fade in than on the fade out. I would almost always want a very short fade on the front end to preserve the attack and a longer fade on the out to minimize it sounding choked off, currently I end up doing all the fade outs manually and then batching the fade-ins, but this option would allow me to do it all with batch fades (albeit in two passes). A couple other fun options might be to select the shape of the fades and not affect the length, or to change the length and not affect the shape (alternates on the "modify existing fades" option.)

Nudging in the wrong direction - sometimes When you first hit + or - to nudge, it often looks like the region goes in the wrong direction first, before it heads in the right direction. I thought it was an optical illusion relating to screen redraws or something, but it's not, I measured it against a region that wasn't being moved - it most definitely does nudge in the wrong direction initially, sometimes.

I'm not going to get into some of the screen and mouse glitches, those have been around since version 5 - switching to the mix screen, clicking on something and switching back to the edit screen usually brings it back around. However the new version has a new glitch - Every time a session is opened the edit window is at reduced size and must be maximized - minor, yes - irritating, definitely. Is there maybe some sort of optimum screen resolution where this doesn't happen?

Relinking. Wow, what a brilliant idea. Now you don't have to pay any attention at all to intelligent file management. Now the shiney little box that can only count to 1 will do it all for you. Simply open up the session, wait 5-6 hours while the program searches every hard drive in the network and then tells you the files can't be found (Even if they are right there in the audio files folder.)


Or you can manually relink them by going through every single audio file, point to the directory where the file resides, compare the unique identifier to make sure that you have the right file, and then tell it to commit the links and the program will re-write all the unique identifiers so that you will have to go through this process again if you open up any previous session (of course you will then have to compare the file size and the little picture of the waveform to identify it). This usually takes only a couple hours. Also - the relink window often identifies fade files as audio files - so if you have a few thousand missing fades and one audio file you got a lot of waiting to do. Or you can select "skip all" and "regenerate fades" then when it is done thinking about that, close the session and re-open the session and start in on the audio files. Don't worry though, the sweating client and the tech challenged studio owner are usually very patient about things that take up lots of time, don't seem to accomplish anything, and can't be explained in a sentence using single syllable words.

This is so much better than the old days when you put the files in the audio files folder where they were supposed to be and PT looked for them during the loading process and prompted you when they weren't there so you could point to whatever folder they were in. Brilliant addition guys. Of course many people will never encounter this issue until they are under a massive deadline with edits dense as plutonium and several people editing the same material at different workstations (no network - yes that would have helped but it wasn't available, and it shouldn't have to be).

Another fun little twist is that even when you remove the missing audio files from the session clear selected/remove) sometimes the session will still look for the files despite the fact that the file is no longer listed in the region list. Try it sometime, you'll have hours of fun. Every time the session opens there will be a few audio files the the session wants to look for. One time I even saw some files listed in the region list on an empty session that I was using for a template. I tried to click on them, but they couldn't be selected - I double-clicked on one and the "change name" dialog popped up and when I escaped out the files disappeared. On rare occasions I have had some directories not show up in the relink window at all.

For the most part though, these are not isolated instances - this session was being tracked, edited and mixed on no less than 6 workstations running HD, HD Accell, MBox, Digi002 from Os 9.1, 9.2, 10.2.8, 10.3 and Windows XP. The situations I describe are unique to PT 6 and above (6.1, 6.1.1, 6.2). Although not all problems of these problems occur on all systems, many of them do.

While I'm on a roll with this rant I would like to just say that OS x is a virus with a smiley face pasted on it, which forced the only consistent workaround on us. We were forced to go with OS 9.2.2 on one Mac (a geriatric G4), which restricted us to version 5 PT which provided us with the work-around for dealing with the whole re-linking thing - just transfer the whole session to another drive and open it on G4 version 5PT to avoid the whole re-linking issue altogether - pain in the ass, yes; worth it?
YES!


Whew. Much better now. Thanks for listening.
Unofficial beta tester Sparky

[jimlongo]

Fades - In fade window it shows the wrong fade most of the time - the small picture shows the right fade, but the large picture shows the wrong fade. Speaking of fades, you know what would be slamming? I would love to see an option to write only fade-outs or only fade-ins on. There are a number of scenarios where I would like a different length or shape fade on the fade in than on the fade out. I would almost always want a very short fade on the front end to preserve the attack and a longer fade on the out to minimize it sounding choked off, currently I end up doing all the fade outs manually and then batching the fade-ins, but this option would allow me to do it all with batch fades (albeit in two passes). A couple other fun options might be to select the shape of the fades and not affect the length, or to change the length and not affect the shape (alternates on the "modify existing fades" option.)

I don't know about using this in a batch situation but is unlinked fades what you're looking for?

Nudging in the wrong direction - sometimes When you first hit + or - to nudge, it often looks like the region goes in the wrong direction first, before it heads in the right direction. I thought it was an optical illusion relating to screen redraws or something, but it's not, I measured it against a region that wasn't being moved - it most definitely does nudge in the wrong direction initially, sometimes.

Have never seen that.

Every time a session is opened the edit window is at reduced size and must be maximized - minor, yes - irritating, definitely. Is there maybe some sort of optimum screen resolution where this doesn't happen?

Also have never seen this one, the windows are always the size they were last saved at.

Note- I'm sure these things aren't happening to you, I'm only saying they are not typical and possibly indicate some other problem.

[sean shannon]

I will also gripe about the window resizing. It always has to be maximized manually. I also like the way PT 5 puts the mouse over the "save" button for you. Minor, yes.

[webnuts4u2]

Have you tried the 6.4 upgrade?

[sparkymixmadness]

Thanks for verifying that for me Sean. I got confirmation on all of this stuff by others on the team before I wrote this post. The jury is still out on my sanity, but my eyesight is accurate.

I think Jim must be using Mac exclusively, on a Mac the window still basically fills the screen so you wouldn't notice that it isn't maximized. As I said in the original post, we had several workstations going; different manufacturers, owned and configured by different people - these are not isolated quirks, they happened on all of the workstations, but most of these oddities happen only on version 6 and above.

By the way - the unlinked fades idea that Jim proposed is clever, and I'm all about finding clever workarounds to the limitations that are, to a degree, unavoidable. Unfortunately it doesn't really work for what I'm looking for. As an example of what I mean, think of tom tom tracks, where you need to trim out all the cymbals and such. After the trimming you want an extremely short fade in (a millisec is the shortest a batch-fade will let you go, so I use that) and a rather long fade out (200-300 msec probably - I don't know the exact length since I end up drawing these by hand and batching the fade-ins) - this preserves the attack and keeps the end as natural as possible, but it takes time. Time that I could use doing that horizontal thing with the eyes closed that I can no longer remember the word for.

As far as the nudging in the wrong direction goes, it most assuredly does happen - among the witnesses was a Pro Tools certification instructor who also had never noticed it before - but hey, these are among the wacky things you notice when you're staring at a monitor for months on end. I know there are others out there who have seen it. I've even seen blurry pictures of a Yeti hitting the + key and scratching his shaggy head.

Confirmation anyone?

... and no, I have not tried version 6.4 yet - will try that ASAP - but unless they've scrapped the relinking thing it's kind of a moot point - everything else is only minor irritation at worst, but relinking is a major SNAFU.

[sparkymixmadness]

Actually - relinking would not need to be scrapped entirely - but an option to turn it off is absolutely necessary

[mike connelly]

"I also like the way PT 5 puts the mouse over the "save" button for you"

PT never did that, if your machine did it's probably because you have an extra extension for it or a custom mouse driver.


I agree about the relinking, had one file I had renamed and it took forever to find it, finally gave up and relinked it myself.
Here's an idea, since it takes PT forever to relink, how about having it look in the "audio files" folder FIRST instead of just searching the whole hard drive from the root directory? Bad implementation so far.