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Pro Tools Pointers #16 |
Handy Tips from My Colleagues
by Dave Whittaker
I get the majority of my tips and shortcut ideas from my co-workers. I would love to be as computer-clever as some of my colleagues, but since these folks share with me what they discover, you and I get to benefit from their cleverness. This column is a collection of ideas that have proven their worth in the heat of battle.
A Workaround for the Infamous ‘Disappearing Fades’ Bug
Pro Tools 4.11 and 4.3 have a now-notorious bug that can lead to serious trouble with "broken" fades that fail to rebuild when using Skip All Fades to replace your fades. In addition, these broken fades will fail to play in a Tascam MMP, even though the fade appears in the session in Pro Tools.
The bug shows up when deleting unwanted material. Most commonly, it occurs when a selection is removed from the middle of a region by hitting the Delete key. Any existing fade-in at the beginning of the original region will "de-link" from the region in version 4.3; in 4.11 it’s fade-outs that break.
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de-linked from their parent regions. |
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The other manifestation of this bug occurs when removing material simultaneously from both ends of a desired selection using the Trim Region command (Command-T). This will break the fades that are nearest to the region you just made, both upstream and downstream.
A de-linked fade will only survive and play as long as the fade is never thrown out (or omitted in a track transfer). Once the fade’s file is gone the session will lose the knowledge about that fade.
The only way to make sure that all your fades are reliable is to methodically go through the session using the Grabber tool to highlight each region that has an adjoining fade. If the fade is broken it will fail to highlight along with the adjoining region. The solution is to select the broken fade with the Grabber, hit delete, then trim out the region and remake the fade.
Avoiding the problem is simple. When removing anything from a larger region, always make a new defined region of the material you wish to remove before you hit Delete. And never use the Trim Region command in a track that already contains finished work (once again, a strong argument for doing all editing only in dedicated working tracks).
The good news about this bug is that it seems to have been fixed in Pro Tools 5.
As Always, the Option Key is Your Friend
This tip is actually a Macintosh text trick that can be very useful when you need to squeeze lots of text into the 31-character pop-up box used for naming regions. Holding down the Option key and typing a semicolon (;) will yield the ellipsis character: "…". This allows you to use just one ASCII character to produce the equivalent of three. This is a big help when typing dialogue and effect descriptions – just picking up two more characters can often make the difference between incomprehensibility and real usefulness on the cue sheet.
To find other useful characters use the Keycaps program, which comes with every Mac. You’ll find it under the Apple menu at the top left of your screen. The program opens with a standard keyboard layout. But press Option, Control, or Shift-Control, and you will discover a whole world of exotic characters readily available to you. Simply experiment until you see the character you need and take note of the keys needed to produce it. Note that while these characters are perfectly legitimate in Pro Tools and other applications, some of them are Mac-specific and can get changed and confused when used in e-mail text.
"Where Is" That Darn File?!
Have you ever tried to open a session, only to be hit with the message, "Where is…?" and been unable to find the missing audio file(s)? Did you simply give up and skip those files in order to pry the session open? Have you ever wished for a way to actually find out something about the content of those "missing" regions once you opened the session?
Howell Gibbons recently showed me a clever solution to this problem. It takes advantage of the fact that you can trick Pro Tools into accepting a substitute file when the desired file is unavailable or when it suits your needs. This is done by double-clicking on the desired substitute file when Pro Tools asks "Where is…?". As long as the substitute file is at least as long as the file being replaced, Pro Tools will never know the difference.
Here’s Howell’s procedure. Record a silent audio file (no input at all) that is at least as long as the longest audio file in your project. Name this file "MISSING". Keep a copy of it handy on your desktop. Copy this file onto every drive in your project.
When you get hit with a "Where is…?" that you simply cannot answer, force Pro Tools to open using the "MISSING" file in place of the file being requested by double-clicking on "MISSING". This will get the session open. Turn on Show File Names (at the bottom of the Audio menu). Locate the regions on the Playlist that have "MISSING" as their parent audio file name, and select the topmost one. This will highlight that region in the Editing area; hit a Left or Right Arrow key and the displayed part of the session will shift up (or down) the timeline so the selected region is in the middle of your screen.
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"MISSING" for each region. The waveform has no modulation because "MISSING" is pure silence. |
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You now have some context around this region, and this should help you figure out what you need to do to replace the missing piece. Repeat the process for each "MISSING" region in the Playlist. You might even find that some of the "MISSING" regions were unneeded and you can go ahead and blow them out using the Select Unused and Clear Selected commands from the Audio menu.
The word from Digidesign is that Pro Tools version 5.01 will include a "Find" feature within the "Where Is…?" window. At long last you will not have to close the session and go hunting for that file you know is on the drive.
Thanks to Marvin Walowitz, Howell Gibbons and Eric Lindemann for their
contributions to this column. Your tips and feedback are most welcome.
Contact Dave Whittaker at (818) 980-1506 or via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 21, No. 3 - MayJune 2000
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