Pro Tools Pointers #19 Showing the Region List Who is in Charge by Dave Whittaker The Power of "FIND" Until this last year I rarely used the FIND and DISPLAY ALL commands found in the AUDIO menu above the region list. Then a colleague showed me that I’d overlooked how useful these features can be. He uses them so much he wrote QuicKey macros for them. The FIND command (Shift-Command-F) yields a popup into which you type whatever you’re looking for in the region list. After hitting Return, the list will show only those regions that contain the word or number that was requested; all other regions will be hidden. Type in "car" and the list is restricted to regions containing that word. The search also finds other text containing it, such as "cart". The value of this kind of search is that it makes it easy to quickly locate sounds you cut earlier in a reel so that you can use them again. Use FIND and you will likely recognize them in the resultant list. Double-check by auditioning the file from the Region List: while pressing the Option key, click and hold on the region name and it will play through Output 1. If your desired region is part of a complex sound event that you wish to copy to another location, hit the Left or Right arrow keys once the region is selected in the Region List. That region and the whole session will snap to the middle of the screen. Now it’s easy to copy the whole event – and in order to find it, you only needed to remember the region name of one sound. Once you’re done with the results of your search, use the DISPLAY ALL (Shift-Command-D) command to return all regions to the Region List. Batch Imports and ‘Find’ Batch importing of audio files (dragging and dropping them at the Finder level onto a Pro Tools alias on your desktop) is a great way to import a lot of material into a session at once. But if you are importing a wide variety of filenames, they will end up alphabetized and thus scattered throughout the Region List, making them a pain to locate. Locating batch-imported files within the Region List can be simplified by using FIND to clear out as much as possible from the list before importing. Newly imported files will show up grouped together. One way to do this is to bring up the FIND popup from the AUDIO menu and type in the name of a region in the session that is uniquely named, such as ‘POP’. This will cause the Region List to look like this: Now when you do a batch import, everything new will be a snap to locate since they will be the only items in the list other than ‘POP’. These files would be scattered throughout a long Region List if almost everything else hadn’t been cleaned out of the display first. One further tip that’s useful when importing at the Finder level: you can drag and drop files from the search result window of Sherlock ("Items Found"), the Macintosh finder-level search engine (open it by hitting Command-F in the Finder). Making A Programming Gink Work For You You’ve likely discovered that Pro Tools will not batch import any file that is already in use in the session; you can only do this through the IMPORT AUDIO command. While mildly annoying, this quirk can be used to your advantage. For example, you are cutting a gun battle, are nearly done with the gunshots, have used nearly every gun in your kit, and are confronted with yet one more bad guy holding an altogether new and different gun. What do you do? Use FIND, of course. Clear everything you can from your Region List, then batch import all your gunshot effects. Whatever you have not used will appear in the list! You’ll find this trick handy in many situations. Another example: the director wants to hear all 14 takes on a line of ADR, but you’ve only got the two circled takes cut. Batch import all takes for that line (assuming they live as individual files). Only the unedited ones will newly appear in the Region List. You won’t even need to clear the list first to locate them since they will appear together. Avoiding the Accidental Renaming of Files With so many feature films turning into long-term projects now, it’s often helpful to keep mirror images of all the files for a show on the supervisor’s master drives. But when using an audio file full-length (meaning the region and file are one and the same), it is all too easy to accidentally rename the entire file when all the editor wishes to do is name the region for the cue sheet. Once that file is renamed, the concept of mirroring the files starts to fall apart. Here’s a working method that helps prevent such mistakes. It takes advantage of the fact that full-length files have appeared in bold in the Region List since Pro Tools version 4.3. Place your cursor anywhere within a file-length region and create a region boundary (Command-E). From the AUDIO menu, click on SELECT UNUSED and pick REGIONS. From the AUDIO menu click on CLEAR SELECTED, and again pick REGIONS. This will clear the bold full-length file from the list. Now select across that region boundary and heal it (Command-H); the region and file are one again. Note that when you go to rename that file/region, and the "Name the Region" popup appears, only the region name can be changed; the popup that can change both the file and region name will not appear. Pro Tools has been fooled into thinking the whole file is just a region of that file!   Thanks to Howell Gibbons for his contribution to this column. Tips and reader feedback are most welcome. Contact Dave Whittaker at (818) 980-1506 or via email   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine Vol. 22, No. 1 - March/April 2001   Guild Home | Magazine Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700