Cloud Collaboration: who are the "contacts" I can collaborate with?

[amathie]

Apologies if this is a stupid post but I haven't been able to find the answer so far.

I've got Pro Tools, an AVID Cloud subscription and a Project I've created and uploaded to the Cloud.

I now want to collaborate with someone. With the Project open I've clicked the "Invite another user to the Project" icon and a pane has opened highlighting the open project in a column on the right and a log of activity related to uploading the project in the centre. Top right in this pane there is another icon and clicking this opens an "Invite Contacts to collaborate" dialog where I can "search contacts".

So who makes up the "users" and "contacts"? Where do they come from?

Obviously they have to have ProTools and presumably an AVID Master Account but which database are these users/contacts being drawn from? Is it membership of the "AVID PRO AUDIO COMMUNITY" which hosts this forum or is it just anyone with an AVID Master Account, or perhaps it is only people with an AVID cloud subscription?

Also, can you collaborate but not have your identify or presence broadcast over the internet?

ProTools support weren't able to help with any of this sadly!

Thanks in advance for any light you are able to shed.

[albee1952]

Not a stupid post at all, but(the great big BUT), using(or trying to use) the cloud collab feature is likely to cause more grief and hassle than you really want. Here is my 2 cents:

1-create "sessions" and NOT "projects". Projects live in the cloud, which is NOT reliable or trustworthy. Sessions live on your local hard drive(and by all means, back your sessions up to at least 1 other drive, whether internal or external...2 other locations is best).

2-to collaborate with others, share/upload files with dropbox, wetransfer.com or any other file sharing protocol. If you keep sessions lean, they can be zipped and uploaded easily. Another alternative is to simply send a rough mix as a wave file(or even MP3) so others can record additional parts and send those back to you for import into one "master" session.

3-if you send a mix, always do a couple of things;
A-always bounce from zero(so things are easy to place on the timeline).
B-have all parties work at the same settings(such as 24 bit/48K).
C-when sending a mix, rename it to include the tempo(such as "songname115bpm") so the other parties can all work at the exact same tempo

[amathie]

@albee1952: Thanks for the reply and the helpful advice. I do however want to give ProTools project collaboration a go as it may be able to improve on my current workflow and I won’t really know until I’ve got it up and running.

So, rephrasing the original questions on my first post: how does my colleague, who has a subscription to Pro Tools, make himself available to me as a contact for collaboration? Perhaps I’m missing something obvious!

[Darryl Ramm]

Getting it up and running ain't the problem. You won't really know how bad it is until you've been running on it for a while and it stops working and maybe eats your work. And you'll be back here being told nobody can help you.

Almost nobody uses this awful buggy cloud collaboration crapware. Almost everybody collaborates by sharing sessions. Zip up a session, upload to the cloud, collaborator downloads that fully to their computer (do not run from a cloud folder). Rinse and repeat. Been done that way my many many folks for many years.

Many of us just uninstall Avid Link and Cloud Collaboration, it's largely just bloatware and has been quite unstable, and security concerns alone leave me cold.

If you need real time collaboration (and most collaboration does not) there are more robust real time products you can purchase.

BTW if you do want to risk self harm, all the info you need to do that is in the Pro Tools Reference Guide, a good place to look since it's not just a matter of how to get started there is other good info there as well, *but* don't mistake pretty documentation with this working reliably or being a good idea to use.

[amathie]

Thanks Darryl,

I think your advice is sadly true from the experience I've had already!

At some stage, when I have more time to experiment I might look into it again.

[Basslice]

FWIIW I cannot even load past collab "Projects" I created. I am amazed Avid still offers/promotes this "feature" since I don't think it has ever worked.

[fasttraxx]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Not a stupid post at all, but(the great big BUT), using(or trying to use) the cloud collab feature is likely to cause more grief and hassle than you really want. Here is my 2 cents:

1-create "sessions" and NOT "projects". Projects live in the cloud, which is NOT reliable or trustworthy. Sessions live on your local hard drive(and by all means, back your sessions up to at least 1 other drive, whether internal or external...2 other locations is best).

2-to collaborate with others, share/upload files with dropbox, wetransfer.com or any other file sharing protocol. If you keep sessions lean, they can be zipped and uploaded easily. Another alternative is to simply send a rough mix as a wave file(or even MP3) so others can record additional parts and send those back to you for import into one "master" session.

3-if you send a mix, always do a couple of things;
A-always bounce from zero(so things are easy to place on the timeline).
B-have all parties work at the same settings(such as 24 bit/48K).
C-when sending a mix, rename it to include the tempo(such as "songname115bpm") so the other parties can all work at the exact same tempo

Good advice - ditto