Video has become very prevalent in the past few years allowing for more capabilities across a wide range of products. Even the iPhone allows for basic video editing right on the phone, not to mention the many apps available for these devices. Bottom line, there are numerous ways to Capture video. The software engine enabling all of this goodness to happen is so radically different than any previous version of Pro Tools, and Avid has also taken into account the apprehension you might feel about jumping ship.
For the first time in Pro Tools history, you get 2 licenses: Pro Tools 11 and 10 as well. The PT11 license includes an additional license for PT You can even have both versions installed on your computer at once! One of the most professional-minded new features of Pro Tools 11 are the new Metering Scales and Ballistics.
To accommodate the wide range of professionals utilizing Pro Tools such as Broadcast, Post Production, Music Mixing, we now have up to 17 different metering types.
Yes, you read that right, 17! For the majority of us, we will probably never need to monitor our mixes in PPM Nordic, but in case you ever get work in Scandinavia, just know Pro Tools has you covered.
Lastly, the Pro Tools community saw the retirement of an old friend. Although production has stopped on the ICON, Avid will continue to support the system for many years to come as there will be many people like myself that will continue to use their ICON. Avid announced the new S6 console and will beginning shipping them soon. The S6 is the logical progression into the next phase of hands-on, immersive control.
It allows the user to custom build a console that best meets their production needs by being scalable and modular. The modules include, faders, switches, knobs, and display. Along with all the typical enhancements and scroll waveform displays, the true genius of the S6 is that it can control ANY audio or media application. Furthermore, the S6 can control up to 8 individual systems at once.
The sound seems more crisp and defined while the depth has increased significantly. To be honest, it sounds like there is more room and depth to the sound. The installation was a very smooth process, the system has ran reliably since I installed it, and the only crash I suffered was due to a plug-in acting up.
The reliability of this release seems to be very good compared to previous versions of the software. ProMedia Training is the premier authorized Avid Pro School since , having certified more students in Pro Tools than any other organization, preparing them for a Pro Tools career in audio engineering, recording, mixing and related multimedia training for musicians, producers, recording engineers, worship facilities and corporations.
ProMedia has been leading the way in short term, Pro Tools Immersion courses which focus in all areas from beginner to advanced Pro Tools Applications. Our beginners learn the software for music production, recording, editing, audio engineering, and mixing.
Our advanced users focus on cutting edge highly complex HDX systems, new concepts as well as workflow improvements. We also provide on-site training for corporations, Universities, Schools, and worship facilities where professionals can advance their skills while learning in their own working environment. Get great tips, tricks, free video tutorials and more by signing up for our newsletter. Pro Tools 10 in all its glory. Pro Tools 10 is a watershed release for Avid's industry-standard music and audio creation system.
And, if this wasn't already enough for existing users to consider, Avid are also taking the opportunity to encourage the adoption of various support and maintenance packages, both new and existing, alongside more traditional upgrade options. If the previous hardware transition from Mix to HD is any indication, HD systems will continue to be used in studios, both private and commercial, for at least the next three to five years, which means that Pro Tools 10 is a fairly important release for HD users.
However, with Pro Tools 9 having added support for completely native systems beyond those previously catered for by Pro Tools LE, there is now an increasing number of people running the software without any Avid hardware at all. This means that Pro Tools 10 is, arguably, a release that's going to represent something different depending on the hardware you're using. Given that Pro Tools exists as both a hardware and a software platform, we're going to split the review of Pro Tools 10 and the new HDX cards into two parts.
This article is going to focus on the software, while next month's follow-up will cover the new HDX hardware and AAX plug-in format. Fortunately, the application remains compatible with Snow Leopard Windows users need to be running Windows 7 SP1. Although the software will run on either or bit variants of Mac OS X and Windows, Pro Tools 10 is, to the dismay of many, still a bit application.
This is slightly surprising given the climate into which Pro Tools 10 is being released, where many competitors have already introduced bit support, and there is clearly demand from users, especially by those using large, sample-based instruments.
However, Avid have at least planted the seed for bit support in Pro Tools 10, as we'll see in a moment. As is often the case with updates, many of the improvements are numeric, and Pro Tools 10 is no exception, with some users benefiting from increased numbers of voices, tracks and auxiliary input tracks.
Out of the box, Pro Tools 10 offers the same quantities as version 9 at However, with the addition of the Complete Production Toolkit, you now get voices up from , tracks up from , and aux input tracks up from Pro Tools HD users with an HD Core card get the same figures as with the Toolkit, except that the number of voices remains at , since this is hardware dependent — those with an HD Native card enjoy the same improvement of voices. Those with the new Pro Tools HDX hardware get further benefits in this department, which we'll be investigating next month.
The change that will have most impact is that regions are henceforth to be known as clips. So gone is the Regions menu: in its place, the Clips menu. Likewise, the Region List is now the Clips List. Lastly, Avid have taken the opportunity to finally expel all traces of the Digidesign name from Pro Tools, including file names and paths.
Fare thee well, Digidesign! While you might think it could require some effort to become aroused over Pro Tools 10 having a new disk engine, you would be wrong. All Pro Tools users will benefit from better performance when recording and playing back audio, but Pro Tools HD users and those with the Complete Production Toolkit are in for a particular treat.
In addition to support for Network and RAID storage systems, as well as enhanced support for Avid's own shared storage solutions, a new disk cache feature enables session audio files to be loaded into memory. This means that instead of the audio data being played back from disk, where it's stored, it is played back directly from memory. The advantage of playing back audio data from memory is speed. Playing back and locating different points within the session becomes perceptibly more responsive, since accessing the same data from disk will always be slower, even if you're using solid-state drives.
In fact, if all the audio in the current timeline is cached, playback and locating while playing back happens pretty much instantaneously. This will be particularly advantageous when working with large sessions, and especially useful for those running multiple Pro Tools systems in sync with each other, since the caching helps to reduce lock-up times.
To enable disk caching, you simply select a size for the cache in the Playback Engine Setup window. This size is set to 'Normal' by default, meaning that the disk playback basically works much as it did before, but you can activate disk caching by selecting an amount of memory to be used by the cache from the pop-up menu.
The amount of memory available for caching will be 3GB less than the memory installed in your Mac or 4GB less on Windows, due to differences in the OS , and can be set in 1GB increments after the initial and MB options. So if, like mine, your Mac has 16GB of memory, the maximum amount assignable for caching will be 13GB.
In practice, on my Mac, which was running Mac OS Since Pro Tools 10 is a bit application, you might be wondering how it's able to access memory beyond the usual bit boundaries. The answer is that it doesn't. Pretty neat. So if you need to free up some memory on your computer while using the disk cache, you'll need to reduce the amount of allocated memory. Once disk caching is active, the Activity section of the System Usage window will display two additional metrics: Disk Cache and Timeline Cached.
The Disk Cache meter shows how much of the cache is used, while Timeline Cached indicates how much of the audio in the current Timeline is stored in the cache.
In an ideal world, the Timeline Cached value should be percent, and the Disk Cache a little lower; but you will still see benefits even if you don't have enough memory to accommodate an entire session in the cache.
However, I think most people will be surprised by how little memory you actually need to store an entire Timeline in the cache. For example, the demo song supplied with Pro Tools 10 uses only four percent of a 12GB cache. A small improvement when setting up the disk cache would be if Pro Tools could tell you how much memory would be required to cache the current Timeline in the Playback Engine window. Even though it's a global setting, rather than session-specific, it would still be helpful, since Pro Tools only allows one session to be loaded at a time anyway.
Overall, though, disk caching is a brilliantly obvious way to improve the performance of audio playback in Pro Tools. We tend to forget that in the early days of audio software, the only reason for recording directly to disk was because computers didn't have the memory capacity to store enough audio to be useful. When Pro Tools was released in , for example, a Quadra typically shipped with 4MB memory — enough for less than one minute of mono, CD-quality audio.
But with modern systems having between 4GB and 64 GB of memory, redressing the balance between memory and disk usage seems like a sensible way forward. Another apparently humble feature that may nevertheless have users reaching for the Champagne is that you can now change the gain of individual regions — sorry, I mean clips — without having to resort to automation, which is tremendously useful. By making the Clip Gain Info visible, the gain of a clip can be adjusted with a click on the fader icon that appears in the bottom left of a clip.
As you adjust the gain from the default 0dB, a handy decibel label appears next to the fader icon, reporting the gain change that's been non-destructively applied.
Better still, right-clicking the fader icon provides a series of related options, where you can clear or bypass the clip gain, or even render it to an audio file. Both static and dynamic gain adjustments can now be made to clips. The upper clip has dynamic gain applied, while the lower clip has a static In addition to what Avid describe as 'static' clip gain, Pro Tools 10 also offers 'dynamic' clip gain.
As you might be able to guess, dynamic clip gain allows you to have what is, in effect, gain automation within a specific clip. This automation can be seen and edited by making the Clip Gain Line visible, whereupon you can use the pencil tool to create gain breakpoints, either by clicking to create single points, or dragging to draw multiple points.
Once you've created additional points on the Clip Gain Line, the decibel label disappears from the clip. However, what's particularly neat is that you can then click the clip's fader icon to trim the entire Gain Line. And, as well as using the on-screen fader, you can also 'nudge' the clip gain by a value specified in the Editing Preferences, using key commands, your mouse's scroll wheel, or a EUCON-compatible controller.
If Avid had stopped there, clip gain would already be pretty indispensable, but the company's developers have gone a few steps further. Not only is it possible to cut, copy, and paste clip gain settings between different clips, but Pro Tools HD and Complete Production Toolkit users can convert between clip gain settings and track volume automation.
While competing applications have had the ability to apply per-clip gain settings for some time Nuendo had this feature on its release 10 years ago, for example , Avid's implementation is incredibly thorough, and should be welcomed by anyone who edits audio in Pro Tools. To complement the new clip gain functionality and the new disk engine, clip fades in Pro Tools 10 are now calculated in real time, rather than having to be written and played back from disk.
This is another welcome improvement, since it renders — no pun intended — the regeneration of fade files when you forget to copy the Fades folder a thing of the past. When Avid acquired Euphonix in , the company gained a great deal of expertise and technology relating to mixing consoles and control surfaces. Although it had previously been possible to use Euphonix's products with Pro Tools, users had to resort to clunky workarounds involving Mackie's HUI protocol. So it was perhaps no surprise that Pro Tools 9, released towards the end of , incorporated native support for Euphonix's EUCON control surface protocol, making it much easier to control Pro Tools' mixer from Euphonix's Artist and Pro series products.
EUCON support has been further enhanced in Pro Tools 10, so that almost every Pro Tools command, such as those normally accessed via menus or keyboard shortcuts, can be assigned to the Soft Keys on your Euphonix surface.
Over commands are exposed, so you can now create and manage groups, for example, or adjust the edit selection without having to touch a keyboard or mouse. Another Euphonix-related improvement in Pro Tools 10 is the new Avid Channel Strip plug-in, which is based on the EQ and dynamics algorithms from the System 5 console's channel strip.
For those unfamiliar with the System 5 console, it's a high-end, modular digital console now sold by Avid, but originally released by Euphonix in Although the System 5 is popular in a many different fields, it has become a particular favourite for post-production work, being used to mix both the music and the final dub for major Hollywood feature films. If you've watched a film in the last 10 years or listened to a film soundtrack , there's a good chance you'll have heard audio signals that have passed through a System 5 console.
This may well be the last channel strip plug-in you'll ever need. Channel Strip comprises four sections — EQ, Filter, Dynamics and Volume — which can be arranged in almost any order you like, except that the filter always follows the EQ. Each effect has its own section in the interface, which can be collapsed if you don't wish to see certain settings that might not be in use. The interface for the EQ and dynamics sections comprises tabs for each of the components of the given section, whether bands of EQ or specific dynamic processes.
However, the dynamic section also offers an 'All' tab, so you can see all dynamics parameters on one page numerically, which is really handy.
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