Non-comprehensive notes on how to get up and running with the fundamentals of ProTools. Using TDM version 6.4.1 for these purposes in PT suites 3 & 4.
Online help
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When you’re finished, press STOP on your playback device and on the transport window. Your audio has come in as one huge segment. You’ll eventually want to separate it into smaller segments and put different sounds on different tracks in order to edit more efficiently. See directions that follow.
Importing other audio sources
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You may also want to use some spot effects from the sound effects libraries. See handout on how to log on stock for that process.
An audio table of contents
On the right hand side of the session window, you’ll see all the pieces of audio you’ve inputted into your session. You may want to name these more accurately for organizational purposes. You also should remember where to find what, as you can always retrieve the original input from this list when all else fails.
Track Properties
You already know that tracks can either RECORD or READ audio. In the same area under the track name, you can also choose to MUTE certain tracks if you don’t want to hear them, or you can SOLO them, meaning hear only that track, muting everything else. You can also choose what size the track can be under the waveform arrow, but that’s getting too fancy for our down and dirty usage. On to more important things…
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Use the transport console to play through your tracks. The play, fast forward, stop, rewind buttons all move you through your timeline. The space bar actually works as both a play and stop button as well.
Zooming in and out on the timeline
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There are two basic modes of moving things around in PT. You select which one you want in the upper left hand corner. SHUFFLE locks segments to in-points, allowing you to move segments only to certain areas. SLIP allows you to move segments anywhere. You can see why slip is typically more useful. Use slip. And don’t worry about grid and spot. They’re basically un-useful too.
Showing parts of audio
There are tools I’ve ignored so far: one is the parentheses-like tool (sorry I can’t come up with a more clever name for it), between the highlighting tool and zoom- the one with the arrows. When you select it, you are able to show parts of a track, like extending it from the original track. For example, if you broke your original track into parts on different tracks, you could actually use this tool to show the entire original track, if you extended it out far enough.
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You may have noticed by now that PT does not have many levels of undo as you might be used to having in FCP or Avid. This means you should consider carefully what you’re doing here, and decide pretty darn quickly if what you just did isn’t what you want. Of course, PT is a program where it’s pretty easy to get something back, recreate what you did, so it’s not as big a deal as it initially might seem. Remember that you can always get your original tracks/imports back from the audio list at the right-hand side of the timeline and drag them into the timeline for a fresh copy.
AudioSuite
Under the AudioSuite menu, there are all sorts of little bells and whistles that you can put on your segments. I’m not going to describe them all, or any of them, for that matter, because if you want to experiment with what they do, then you’ll figure it out easily on your own.
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