Prepping Audio Tracks For Mixing in Another Studio

[John J.]

Looking for help,

I've got a 10 song album I need to transfer to data DVD to mix in a studio out of town (non PTools). All tracks are mono, some with a few RTAS plugs running in realtime I would like to "affect" the corresponding tracks with, then output each track to be saved to DVD. I've been instructed of course as part of the prep to consolidate tracks and be sure they all start exactly at the same time at the top of the track so as to line them up easily in the other studio.

I've noticed in the past if I save my RTAS settings then launch the same Audiosuite plug and load the settings, the effect be it EQ, comp whatever oftern doesn't sound the same as the RTAS version. So now I'm thinking, do I actually need to create new tracks and record the RTAS tracks through these plugs in realtime to have a final affected track?

Any suggestions the quickest/best way the affect the tracks and output them properly to data DVDs? Thanks.

[P Mackey]

Couldn't you just use Audio Suite? Then after you select the plugin and parameters to your liking, press process. I believe that should work, but I am pretty new to Pro Tools, and I could be wrong.

-PatrickM

[foxlemieux]

This is a pretty tedious way of doing things, but it definatly gets the right results. For each song make a selection that contains the maximum lenght of the longest track from start to finish. Go through and bounce each track soloed. The result is each track processed with the RTAS plugins and all with the same length. The down side to all of this is if you have a 5 minute long song and 10 tracks it takes 50 minutes to bounce it all out. Muliply that by ten songs and you've lost a day to bouncing.

If the system you are going to mix on supports OMF files it might be worth your while to buy DigiTranslator. You can export the whole session as an OMF quickly and open it in the mixing program. The downside to this is the fact that the RTAS plugins will have to be replaced on the mix system with a comparable plugin. Generally I prefer to work that way in any event. I like to do all my effects and mixing on one machine if I can.

[Naagzh]

Even though you want to have processing on some of these tracks, isn't that the job of the studio where the album is to be mixed? If a client of mine wanted to mix somewhere else, I'd give 'em the raw tracks, the tracking notes, and a rough mix of each song, just for reference, unless the client was willing to spend the extra money to cover the cost of getting the processed tracks.

But since it appears that you want to keep some of your processing ideas, then I'd just "print" the processed tracks. Audiosuite shouldn't sound any different than RTAS (you can do a inverted phase test to check this), but printing (i.e. recording to a new track within PT) is probably quicker and I'd be surprised if you or anyone else noticed any degradation at all compared to BTD.

So, basically you will change the output of each track whose processing you want to retain to an available buss, and record it to a new track with that same buss, for the length of the song exactly. You can of course do this to many different tracks at the same time (if you don't have enough tracks available, inactivate some of the tracks whose processing you don't need to save). You can do this same thing with delays and reverbs (they'll probably need to be printed to a stereo track or two). Label the new tracks something like "PROC_Snare Top" so that you don't have to re-label the newly-printed regions, and the future mix engineer can easily distinguish them from the original, unprocessed tracks. Make sure you get a nice, tall waveform on the printed tracks.

Should take you about 20 min of the first song, quicker once you get the hang of it.