Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 Tutorials
Sessions / Creating a Session
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Subtitles of the Movie (Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 / Sessions / Creating a Session)
In this movie tutorial, we will be creating a new session in Pro Tools LE. To do this, I can either go to the File menu and choose new session or even easier type Command +N on the Macintosh or Control + N on the Pc. We are then presented with the new session dialogue box. And we have some important decisions to make about session parameters. The first choice you have to make is about how you are going to store the digital audio within your session. We have three audio file types available from this pop-up menu right here. The currently selected one AIFF stands for Audio Image File Format. This is the native high quality format for the Mac OS for years now. We have SD2 which is Sound Designer 2 format, the high quality audio format developed by Digidesign years ago and which is available only in the Mac version of Pro Tools. And we have BWF which is Broadcast Wave Format or a .wav file that you have seen a lot on Pcs. Which one of these do you choose? It depends on two things. Do you want cross-platform compatibility between Mac and Pc, if so use the Broadcast Wave Format and click in force Mac Pc compatibility. This is the audio file type settings that I use for my projects because I want maximum compatibility. However, there is one caveat. And that is you can't save any file names with Japanese characters or non-ASCII characters. So keep that in mind if you are a Mac user and you choose this setting. The other factor that affects audio file type selection is sample rate. Higher sample rates are not savable in the Sound Designer 2 format. If I want to reuse the IO settings from my previous session that I created, I could just leave IO settings on last used. If however, I want to choose stereo mix, that will reset all the IO settings to the Pro Tools default. We will look at IO settings in a later movie. The nice thing about this is we can change these inner session while we are working. With version 6.4, Digidesign has added a plus 12-db fader gain setting. This is helpful if your audio tracks have been recorded at a very low volume. With this setting, you will have an extra 6 decibels of fader gain which will allow you make those quite tracks twice as loud as you could otherwise simply using the faders. I suggest you use plus 12 db one possible as it gives you some extra flexibility in your mixing. When it comes to sample rate and bit-depth, things become a little bit more complicated. 16-bit audio has been in the mainstream since the introduction of the compact disc. This is the bit-depth used on compact discs still today. 24-bit is a recent development becoming mainstream only in the last several years. There are really only two advantages to choosing 16-bit over 24-bit. 16-bit recordings require only two-thirds of the storage requirements of a 24-bit recording. There's also a lower processor overhead, which typically means you can run more tracks or more effects on those tracks. Those are really the only two advantages. Everything else about this bit rate is a minus. If we choose 24-bit, yes we have some higher processing demands and it takes fifty percent more disk space to store these files. However, you get much better sound quality. You get a much wider dynamic range which is the distance between the quietest parts and the loudest parts and because of this wider dynamic range, you have increased head room and a lower noise floor. If your processor and your disk space allow it, always choose 24 bits over 16 bits. Especially when you start using DigiRack and third party plug-ins, it's far more likely that the accumulated quantization noise of your 24-bit recording will stay well below the noise floor. Now we come to our last and very significant setting which is sample rate. Just like your decision about which bit-depth to use, your decision of sample rate is essentially an engineering trade-off. The lower sample rates give you smaller audio files and lower your processor overhead. However, they do suffer somewhat in sound quality. This is probably due to the steep analogue filtering requirements for 44.1 kilohertz and 48 kilohertz. If you have a beefy processor and lots of storage and you have the options available, I would choose 88.2 kilohertz or 96 kilohertz. These higher sample rates are available if you own the Digi 002 or the 002 Rack. If you choose 44.1 kilohertz, you will actually be recording your audio at compact disc sampling rate which means you won't need to perform a sample rate conversion in order to put your music on a compact disc. 48 kilohertz is a professional standard sample rate which is commonly used for digital video, many dv and even music and audio recorded for a DVD based movie. 88.2 kilohertz exists because it's twice the compact disc sample rate and some believe that it gives you a slightly better quality than 96 kilohertz if your ultimate goal is creating a compact disc with this recording. Others believe that it doesn't really make any difference between these two higher rates; they both sound pretty doggone good no matter which of these lower sample rates you convert to. I am in the latter camp; I stick with 96 kilohertz for all of my recordings. Yes, it takes twice as much space to store my audio files than if I had chosen one of these lower rates and yes it does tax my processor a bit. But I have a fast machine and I think it can handle it. If I didn't, I probably would settle on 48 kilohertz or 44.1 kilohertz depending on what I was gearing for. And now, you see a snapshot of the session parameters that I typically use for all of my projects. Now it's just a matter of saving it. So we will give it a name and now I need to choose where I am going to save this session. I don't want to save it to my desktop because that's essentially on my bootup volume and that's kind of a no-no when it comes to an audio project like this. You get much better results and much better throughput if you choose a different physical disk than what your operating system is on. In this case, I am going to choose either Media B or Media C because they are actually separate physical disk drives. Media A on my system is just a partition that is on the same physical disk as panther. So I don't want to use either panther or Media A. So I will go ahead and save this to Media B and Pro Tools will go ahead and create my session.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 |
| Author: | Nathan Dickson |
| SKU: | 33599 |
| ISBN: | 1-932808-46-9 |
| Release Date: | 2005-02-25 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 101 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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