Hi all,

I've just been contacted about mixing a CD for an a cappella group
that's already done tracking in a PT studio. I don't have any Digi
equipment, so I do most of my work in Digital Performer 5. Does anyone
have any experience in these sorts of situations? Is my best bet to ask
the tracking studio to export to OMF and send me DVD(s) or a hard
drive? Does OMF retain multiple "takes" in PT, overlapping clips, etc?
If the tracking people don't have the DigiTranslator upgrade or
whatever it is that allows OMF export, is there another good bet for
this sort of transfer from tracking studio to mixing studio?

I'm sure I'll get in contact with the tracking engineer and talk it
over with him, but I just wanted to get a bit of a head start so I know
the right things to discuss, since I haven't mixed on PT since v5.

Thanks
-Todd

Does anyone
have any experience in these sorts of situations?

Pretty common here, although usually it's going the other way, from my
DP tracking session to PT for somebody else to mix at home, off the
clock.

Is my best bet to ask
the tracking studio to export to OMF and send me DVD(s) or a hard
drive?

If the PT studio has shelled out for the $500-ish Digitranslator II,
which is included free with DP, you could do it that way. I find OMF to
be fairly iffy, sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Digidesign has no
great investment in the concept of making PT sessions available to
other platforms, & OMF is just plain hit or miss as to whether it will
truly carry everything over, or even be able to open in DP.

Does OMF retain multiple "takes" in PT, overlapping clips, etc?

Theoretically.

If the tracking people don't have the DigiTranslator upgrade or
whatever it is that allows OMF export, is there another good bet for
this sort of transfer from tracking studio to mixing studio?

Most people just commit to their edits & merge tracks, with all merged
tracks having the same start location, & import/export the raw files &
leave all the session data behind.

I'm sure I'll get in contact with the tracking engineer and talk it
over with him, but I just wanted to get a bit of a head start so I know
the right things to discuss, since I haven't mixed on PT since v5.
Thanks
-Todd

Personally I would just have them do the merge track thing, unless the
client wants to have you fine tune edits. If there's any question about
the competency of the punches & edits in the original session, maybe
you can sit in on the merge/render process & review all the cross fades
to make sure you can live with the result, since it will be
unchangeable when you get to mixing in DP.

BTW I really like your stereo phase scope, stereo displayed the way it
used to be in a completely comprehendable format. Well done.

Scott Fraser

Scott Fraser wrote:

BTW I really like your stereo phase scope, stereo displayed the way it
used to be in a completely comprehendable format. Well done.

Thanks for the info on OMF/DP/PT. I'll get in contact with the tracking
studio and see what they've got. I don't know if this is a more
traditional a cappella CD or one in which they expect to be able to
pull out old takes for chorus effects, etc.

And glad to hear you like PScope. It's funny, I put it online over a
year ago, and didn't hear any comments until another user just emailed
me yesterday with some suggestions. And now 2 in 24 hours! Maybe I'll
pull together the effort this fall to polish it up with a nicer looking
interface and a couple more features.

(for anyone who doesn't know what Scott is referring to:
http://cs.brown.edu/~tl/software.shtml -- it's free, too)

-Todd

Maybe I'll pull together the effort this fall to polish it up with a
nicer looking interface and a couple more features.

The interface looks good to me. Can't think of any features it lacks.
Maybe a resizable window.

Scott Fraser

Todd Lipcon wrote:
Hi all,

I've just been contacted about mixing a CD for an a cappella group
that's already done tracking in a PT studio. I don't have any Digi
equipment, so I do most of my work in Digital Performer 5. Does anyone
have any experience in these sorts of situations? Is my best bet to ask
the tracking studio to export to OMF and send me DVD(s) or a hard
drive? Does OMF retain multiple "takes" in PT, overlapping clips, etc?
If the tracking people don't have the DigiTranslator upgrade or
whatever it is that allows OMF export, is there another good bet for
this sort of transfer from tracking studio to mixing studio?

I'm sure I'll get in contact with the tracking engineer and talk it
over with him, but I just wanted to get a bit of a head start so I know
the right things to discuss, since I haven't mixed on PT since v5.

Have no fear. If you don't need his PT plug ins, automation, or
any of that crap, just the raw tracks, this is really a dead easy thing
to do.. As long as the audio on every track begins at 00:00:00:000 and
is contiguous to the end of the piece (or where that part is over), you
should have no problem importing the raw tracks of from Protools into
any of the major sequencers, as it's a lot faster and easier than
futzing with OMF. OMFG doesn't let you import much anyway, and this
sounds like the kind of session where it doesn't matter.

If there are tracks made of pieces that overlap on a track (like a
comped solo for example) , the engineer just bounces them into a single
file that starts at zero and ends at the end of the song. I just
played guitar on a project this way being produced by an old friend, an
English Keyboard player I used to work with. First time either of us
had done things this way, but it worked great, very very painlessly.
Alistair just created stem tracks in Protools for a few songs, of
drums, bass, piano, organ, background and lead vocals, and uploaded
them into the public folder of his Dot.mac account, where he has 2 Gigs
of storage available. I downloaded them, imported them into my "Pool"
in Nuendo, and lined them up to zero on tracks. Worked perfectly, and
I overdubbed all the guitar parts, comped solo tracks, bounced them all
into files contiguous from the beginning to the end of the songs, and
uploaded all the finished tracks with session comments back to his
Dot.Mac account.

The only hangup was Alistair sometimes had trouble accessing his
dot.mac public folder when he was logged on normally. But when he
logged on as a guest - the way I had to - we had no problems, so we
made that our standard OP (and the public folder *is* still password
protected.) Sometimes in OSX you can be working on your Dot.mac
account mirrored on your computer, and not actually be connected
online, I think the problem had something to do with that, but anyway
we worked around it.

And when he got back to NY he brought me a great raspberry
cheesecake baked just for me by the artist... g

Hope this helps.

Will Miho
NY TV/Audio Post/Music/Live Sound Guy
"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away..." Tom Waits