Basic Pro Tools Post Production Workflow

in this video I thought we'd have a look at an audio post-production workflow from start to finish so we've got three things to begin with a quick time of the video itself and then we've got a Pro Tools session which has a voiceover recording in it we'll come to that shortly and we've also got a folder which contains several audio files and an AAF so whenever a video editor exports something for audio post production from Media Composer Premiere Final Cut Pro they're going to want to export it either as an AAF or as an om F file and what this allows you to do is essentially open and reconstruct the audio timeline from the video editing software in Pro Tools now you can see that this AF in terms of file size is actually very small and that's because it's what you call a non embedded AF file and what that means is all of the accompanying audio comes with it but isn't actually built into the file itself so you have a small AF with a whole batch of audio files if you have one which is embedded then you have a very large AF you know it could be a gig maybe even larger and all the audio will be built into it but in this case we just got a batch of files that go with it so the first thing to do is to open this with Pro Tools now you can double click it and Pro Tools will open it as though as a session you could also just use file open session so I'm just going to double click it and the first thing that we see is the new session dialog so the settings which it comes up with here by default should be the ones which is picked up from the actual file and the accompanying audio so in this case 48 kilohertz which is the sample rate that you're going to work in in the majority of cases for most post-production jobs and the bit-depth well this is 16-bit but because I might want to record some new stuff into the session I think I'm going to change that to 24-bit just so we get the benefit of the improved dynamic range so click OK then it prompts you where you want to put the session and when you click Save it's going to bring up the import session data window so we won't worry too much about the specifics of this in this video but essentially this will tell you information about timecode framerate sample rate bit depth and so on and it will also give you a list of the tracks which are incorporated into this AF or OMF file so these are the ones which have come over from the editing software so you just need to make sure that all of the destinations are set to new track and I'll click OK and then what we'll see is Pro Tools will start to reconstruct the timeline as it was in the editing software and the tracks have retained the name that they were exported with and all the audio is spotted to the correct location so obviously the larger the session the larger the project the longer this is going to take this is a really short one so it shouldn't take too long once that's happening I can bring the video in so I'm just going to drag and drop this quick time into the tracklist and then in the video import options I'll just choose new track and I'll put it at the session start if you wanted to you could also bring in the audio from the file in this case I'm not going to bother because we've got the audio separately so I'll just click OK ok and there you can see that the video track is at the top and we'll just give it a few more seconds you'll know when both of these red indicators go green you'll know that everything is not only imported but is also online and available so there you go so at this point I usually just save it and first thing to do is to just check that we've got synchronization because there's no point in progressing unless the audio is actually in sync so I'm just going to solo one of these tracks these look look like dialogue tracks and you know the name suggests that so I'll solo this zoom in a little bit stavros heritage that'll listen to this it's tradition it's bespoke it's designer care that looks like it's in sync I'll check another bit you got international designer collections done this you've got the right tool and bam you got Boateng and usually I'll also check something towards the end of the project just to make sure that it hasn't drifted by the time we get you know further into it so check this bit and just the handwriting the Richard James brings prices we're asking okay so that looks okay I mean you know you could spend time watching it through for the sake of speed on this video we'll just let's just assume it's going to be okay this video is actually quite long and so it's going to get a bit tedious if we try and work through the whole thing so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to trash everything from from about this point onwards I think so we'll mix the first about four and a half minutes or so I think so let's just select all that and then we extend that selection down a little bit incidentally if you want to extend the selection down if you hold down the shift key and press the colon key on the keyboard it will extend it down if you wanted to extend it up it would be shift and the letter P so I'll just select all that and then delete it or you can actually in Pro Tools HD also divide and delete part of the video track you can't do that in the non HD software at least not yet but I'm sure Abid will no doubt add it in at some point soon so first things first let's just have a quick look at exactly what we've got here we know we've got dialogue there I think this is a guide voiceover London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring okay so in this particular project that's actually going to be replaced this was purely an editing guide for the editor at the time of putting the video together but it was subsequently rerecorded and so that's why we've also been given this voiceover export and we need to bring this into the current project so I could drag and drop that session file onto this one and it brings up the import session data dialog or I could just go to the file menu import session data and then I have to find the file okay so it's on this hard drive and I think it's in here and then there is click open and it'll give me a list of tracks and it's really simple because there is only one track let's just put on a new track it's just quickly check in the timecode the timecode in this case is correct our session I probably didn't make it apparent earlier but our session starts at one hour and the timecode in this one does so at least we know that it should be where it's supposed to be and we're quite looking in this case because somebody has taken the time to actually edit this voiceover and spot it to the right location a lot of the time you'll be doing this quite manually but this has been done partly for us so click OK and then what you'll see is the audio start to appear let's just move it underneath this one and it looks like it's broadly in the right place so this should roughly correlate with the roof guide voiceover so we'll just play them at the same time and they should be roughly in line with a real life or the individual ah I forgot to send this to the output so let's do that with a real real live in the individual and Families famous if expenses okay that's fine and I could now just delete the guide voiceover but I usually just hide it and make it inactive because you never know when you might want to go back to it and because we're only doing the first four and a half minutes I'll just get rid of that okay now the next thing to do this music is on dual mono tracks let me just move all these up so that they're all together and that's not very practical so we might as well create a couple of new stereo audio tracks and then let's I use the object grabber a lot of time for this select that if I hold down the ctrl key I can actually constrain the horizontal movement so hold down ctrl and if I drag it and what it means is that I can't accidentally drag it left or right so it means it's a essentially locked in terms of its timeline position now I'm going to select these previous tracks right click delete those these music tracks I can rename them music one press command + right arrow key tune in the next one music - next I noticed that the panning position is set to the middle on this track and so I like to just view a panning and typically you'll get breakpoints on there which you don't need so we'll delete the pan break point for the left and delete the pan break points for the right that just gives us free control now to planet as we need it's possible that we might also have volume automation but in this case we don't if there was volume automation by all means have a listen through it just to get an idea of what the editors intent was but at some point you probably just going to want to wipe that out because you'll want to do the mix properly as we say next thing I can see that these sound effects are also on a pair of mono tracks so the same thing again I'm just going to create two new stereo tracks namely sound effects one and sound effects - okay although I'll have to give that a different name just because the tracks already called that and now I'm going to bring the audio down off the original ones again I'm holding down control and this one and the reason why these are on two tracks rather than one is because there's a little bit of overlap on on that particular sound effect and then we'll delete the other tracks delete those delete those so all this work that we're doing at the moment is basically a major time saver if you just start trying to mix something when you've got stuff all over the place then it's actually going to slow you down so the time spent now will save more time than this further down the line I've created a master fader because we want to of course monitor the overall level of this next these two tracks of dialogue are actually two separate microphones but are the same recording so in in the case where we've got interviews with people and see if we can find one where it's actually visible okay we've got two mics so this one tailored product especially is is is complicated you know you start with the concept and you work it and I've got this tailored product especially is is is complicated so the bottom one sounds a little bit thinner and I can't exactly remember which one was which I suspect that the thinner sounding one is probably the tie clip mic and the other one is the shotgun mic let's just check it another little bit further back the same sort of thing play this bit so bottom one we've done this you've got the light stool and bam you got Boateng got hardly a misses it top one done this you've got your light stool and bam you got Boateng got Hardy Amos oh there that there are really traditional and well established brands little okay this is really open to your own decision as to which one you use I'm going to go with the top one but again it's a bad idea to delete tracks at this point so even though I'm almost certainly going to be using mostly the top one I'm just going to hide the one below it in case I need to revert back to it let's just double check that we have no stray volume automation there that's going to throw anything we don't okay and we're almost ready to start mixing and typically in my workflow I start with the dialog and I get that consistent before I do anything else let's put on this track a high-pass filter so let's just use the standard stock one band EQ switch it's a high pass there's not watching dialogue below you know 100 Hertz or so but I don't know let's go with 90 hit so that's just cutting out any low-frequency rumbles that we don't need and the next thing to do is if we're working on something to the current broadcast specification then we're going to need metering which supports that Pro Tools comes with a variety of different metering options which are all fine but generally in post-production this old ppm BBC standard is no longer used so it was up until very recently but we switched to a loudness metering standard now and in the UK that's called ebu r128 in America it's ATSC a85 which is similar but the spec is just a little bit different so there's various different plugins which you can get to meter that type of loudness and the one which I like to use is waves WL m+ so it's ways loudness meter and I'm just going to switch to the preset so with this preset what we'll be doing is we mix in fact let me just talk a little bit about what the specification requires so if I just run this dialogue through its average area level is of course random and a lot of traditions or mixed its misspoke you've got designer the short-term loudness here and basically and this is measured in Lu FS loudness units full scale and the spec basically says the the most important specification here is the long-term loudness so the long-term is the average loudness measured a cut across the entire program duration the short term is I've reached over and I might be wrong here but I think it's about the last three seconds or so so usually dialogue is quite a good indicator of program loudness so my work flow generally is as I'm balancing the dialogue out I'll be aiming for the target level and in the cote case of ebu r128 in the UK the target level is - 23l ufs i'm going to start by playing this dialogue and i'm going to clip gain these pieces of dialogue there's a shortcut which I use there actually which is ctrl shift and then the minus key at the top of the keyboard allows you to toggle the clip gain line on or off so if you are clip gaining something you know the clip gain line means that you can use dynamic clip game within the clip like that if you want to do that or of course even without that you could use a little clip gain mini fader and it will just bring the whole clip up or down so let's just run this one so I'm going to do the first part of this and then we'll probably just cut a section out so that we can skip ahead to the point where I've done all of the dialogue levels so firstly let's go with this samurais heritage it's tradition so that's a little bit less boat I'll push that one up I might also go back in and just sort that peak out Samuraizer and the other thing that I'm going to do a couple of things is firstly let's switch to timecode I like to work in grid and I'll make sure that the grid is set to one frame increments there's a bit of a rough edit on this Samuraizer you know when it comes in till just for a short fade on that samurais heritage it's tradition it's bespoke and even though I said I was going to use this microphone track you can see that there's a noise there so on second thoughts I'm going to go back on what I said actually and I'm going to try using the other microphone track that actually now be given that that noises there suggests to me that that is probably the tie clip mic as opposed to the shotgun mic so because I think he enough the mic a couple of times so let's change tact a bit and go with this one stavros heritage it's tradition it's bespoke it's designer okay and this seems to have brought in some fade files as well stavros heritage it's tradition it's bespoke it's designer so looks like a fades and basically is world run out you can go for us at the style and all these clips let me bring this one up so you know this is quite a tedious process and based essentially I'm going through and making sure the interface of dialogue is somewhere in the ballpark of minus 23 if you're working in the US on programs for broadcast the ATSC 85 standard uses the same basic measurement mechanism in the background it's something called ITU bs 1773 but the target levels different so the u.s. target level is actually minus 24 and it's denoted as lk FS it's just a minor difference but here in the UK to minus 23 so it's the mecca for tailoring in the world it's the man you know you could spend they just messing about with this but we are going to compress this afterwards and the reason why I'm doing this with clip gain as opposed to volume automation is just because of the fact that clip gain happens before the insert so if you get it roughly right with clip gain then you put compression on it the compression is acting on something which is already broadly in the right ballpark across the whole you know lot of dialogue the Great and the good in menswear have been going to Savile Row to get a cast for it so this is going to get a little bit tedious to watch so now I'll just skip ahead a little bit to where I've finished all of this clip gaining okay so I've been through and done all the clip gain now and the next thing to do is to put a little bit of compression onto this dialog just to give it some control and to make it sound even more consistent I really like the waves Renaissance compressor so I tend to use that almost every time and working on a project will just reopen this loudness meter so the thing about applying compression is this is of course now going to affect the level that you've just established so you need to compensate the output gain accordingly Saverin so I usually outage I don't know it's tradition after one order of a stroke maybe even tighter than that and basically is world renowned is the center of excellence maybe at the loudest loudest point on rare occasions it might hit 6 DB of gain reduction but generally it'll be less than that it's just to give a bit more consistency to it and so now that I've got some compression I mean you would obviously spend a bit longer than I just have but you got international I'm just going to attend this you've got to turn the output gain up so we're now hitting hang got hardly a masseur there that there are really treating where around - 23 shortened brangäne well just check it on this next bit it's a highly vibrant place and absolutely twenty years ago it is fast the old okay that's that's close enough the voiceover I've also gone through and set the level on that this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring and a mecca for men who dress to impress so obviously it's not going to be dead-on -23 the whole time but it's going to be somewhere around there for most of the dialogue at least next thing I'm going to do is have a look at the music now this is typical because music is usually mustered to a peak level of zero DB so it's right up there and if I run this now it's going to be way way over minus 23 just get into it you know so it's it's over by a significant amount I could just use the fader you know when I'm when I'm mixing this we will of course be automating the level of the music around the dialogue but let me just show you how loud this would have to be or how low in level it have to be for it to be correct so to bring it down this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring and a mecca for men who dress to impress samurais heritage it's tradition so I could quite happily mix it like that but the thing is if the fader is going to always end up around minus 15 or minus 20 DB you can see that that part of the fader has less resolution in it than this part so for example 10 DB here covers that much range whereas 10 DB when you get further down is a smaller amount of travel on the fader so it's better to start off with the music quieter and use higher fader levels it just gives you a greater degree of control and so for that reason with music which is peaked very high like this I'll usually bring it down you know you could bring it down I don't know 8 or 9 DB just as a starting point and it just means that you're operating in the greater resolution section of the fader when you're actually mixing so you could mix this with the mouse going through drawing little breakpoints in you know this kind of approach where you establish the level and then put fades in this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailor it and a mecca for Mahler to bring up the record to impress that row so heritage for the other approach is to do it with a fader itself and it might be a worthwhile idea to do this in touch mode but there's a setting which is going to be relevant to this I'll just show you this so in preferences mixing the auto match time I'm just going to set this to 400 milliseconds and I'll show you why in a minute so what the auto much time does is if you've already got existing automation on the trike and you start writing something in touch mode when you let the let go of the fader the auto match time governs how long it takes for the fader to return to its previous level and I find that with 400 milliseconds if I'm bringing music down underneath dialogue and then I want it to go back up in level at the end 400 milliseconds it just seems to give it about the right sort of duration so I'm going to try and you know see how this goes to do all this in real time using this little floating fader will give it a go so there we go ring and a mecca for men who dress to impress samurais heritage it's tradition it's bespoke it's designer and basically is world renowned as the center of excellence in terms of bespoke tailoring it's the mecca for tailoring in the world the grain the good in menswear have been going to Savile Row to get dressed for four decades and they still do you got international designer collection unless you've got the right tool and bow just try to keep the mix interesting and find out about varying the level and pushing it off in gaps where I've gotta be so with all some new brands as well and this would be filled in a little bit by Atmos as the only man once the best of what mentor has to offer you go to sell below you'll get it all it's a highly vibrant place and then I'm going to fade this music at this 20 years ago is Faust the old bespoke catering Street now it's a it's a it's got much more of a presence ok I'll stop there so that seemed to be okay you know yeah I could probably spend time on it and get it better than that but that's the workflow I'll just quickly go through and do the rest of this and I'll come back to you in a second and as if by magic all the audio levels on the music have now been done so I'm just going to switch these tracks into read mode now so I don't accidentally start writing automation might just make this smaller the next thing that I like to do or that I will do in this session is to work on the atmosphere I think and so these tracks well let's just see what we've got that that one looks interesting that looks like dialogue each component of each garment has been developed from scratch okay that's something that's something to watch out for actually sometimes if the editor is used to cut away from another video you might just have stray audio that you don't don't need and so if something just seems not not right as this you know this won't seem right at all this is going to conflict with the voice-over then just get rid of it in collaboration with world-renowned tailor that's obviously a total mess so I'll just get rid of that if you were worried that you know maybe you want to go back to it for whatever reason then you could always just mute it with command M but with no chance we're going to use that so I'll delete it same thing there you know you can tell by the waveform that's dialogue now access was the best wall to get rid of that as well some of these clips are just silent by the look of it like those and we use the best name okay so drop those just to tidy at the timeline obviously they wouldn't actually do any harm by being there but there's no point in them being the time Alfre brown outside more the same so again it's just a tidying up process to get rid of anything that's not wanted and then this looks like atmosphere which was recorded on the camera so you probably hear that it cuts when the picture coils I can see that there's a load of silence here as well that we can drop ditch those what's this one of British that's more dialogue that we don't need in fact by the look of it we can probably get rid of this second utmost right I love that dialogue because some would say Taylor to go Richard J Savile Row is the yeah okay so I'm just going to trash that whole dialogue truck you could just hide it but I'm going to delete it so this atmosphere once again I'm going to put a high-pass filter on it because I know that I don't want any of those low frequencies in it and the this Atmos is just going to really be there just to underpin the the pictures really and to provide some support for it so I'm probably going to keep it reasonably low let's just see how this sounds take it back to the start this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of it yes some of them I'll probably just bring down a little bit and maybe just keep it there but a cautious level row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring and a mecca for men who dress to impress samurais heritage it's tradition it's bespoke it's designer I'm just going to check this bit more the same you got Boateng got hardly a misled that there are really traditional and well-established brands with also new brands as well if you have time you could probably replace this atmosphere with you know better sounding stuff that was stereo but a lot of the time you don't have the time and the client wants the video immediately so you just have to work - the time constraints you know that they have to work - on these are sound effects tracks there's planning automation that's come across which I don't need so I'll get rid of that because if you have you know automation breakpoints and you then try and pan around see you're always fighting against it so just drop drop them get rid of them okay I'm just checking the volume there I know we've gone through this quite quickly but finally I'm just going to balance out these sound effects tracks so just make sure the panning is left and right see what they're doing let's just try that go with a lower level one maybe even though this is there on this I think I'll just use the it's a gold mouse to follow these so and a mecca for me when you've got the trim tool you can press select something in you know pull the level up or down what's this one okay well we'll keep it separate some heritage others like the same sort of thing and there's a taxi drivers that we spoke here it's designer you can hardly hear that diner and basically is world renowned suppose it's there it's okay we could make more of a feature of the ball I'll leave it in this case we got Boateng got hardly a misled that there are really traditional and well-established brands with also new brands as well any man okay just skipping ahead I know we've blasted through that you would normally spend a lot longer on a mix making it right but for just to show you the workflow that's basically how I would make something like this this is a really really simple post-production video the majority of broadcast shows or videos which are heavy on dialogue interviews and so on would have a much higher track count than this this was just one of the simplest ones I could find really and the final thing that you'll want to do is probably reset the measurement on on here so and then play the whole program through and see what the integrated loudness is and hopefully this is going to come out at very very close to minus 23 Lu FS what I'll do is I'll start playing this through then we'll just skip ahead a little bit and we'll come back in at the end and see what the integrated loudness is this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring and a mecca for men who dress to impress and seblak fabric color he's a master at color he gives you lovely little pops of interesting color but you don't stand out a mile so it might be a subtle color in aligning or just a really nice bright tie but you're still wearing a blue suit and so all of that we did with him on an ongoing basis and still are okay so that's the end of that and the integrated loudness has actually come out within tolerance it's minus 20 2.7 l u FS going off the broadcast spec well it depends who you speak to really the the actual spec itself I believe says minus 23 l u FS plus or minus 1 l you so you're supposed to be able to get away with as high as minus 22 or as low as minus 24 but in practice I think a lot of broadcasters prefer it to being within a lot closer tolerance than that so you should ideally be within not 0.5 L you so this is within not 0.3 which is probably okay personally I like to get it - precisely - 23 just because I'm pedantic like that and with this waves plugin once you've read you know what you've been through and measured the loudness this trim control will give you the option of basically bringing the level to exactly the target target level so it says - not 0.3 because we are not point 3 DB out so if I click that now if I were to play it through again that would come out of precisely - 23 so that's our mix done and the level would be fine if we were sending it to a broadcaster in this case though it's not actually going to be for broadcast this will be for YouTube and so even though I've worked to the broadcast spec because it's going to go on YouTube what I might do now is bring it up to the target level for YouTube and so YouTube recently fairly recently introduced its own loudness spec and their level recommendation is -16 Lu FS so there's a 7 DB difference there with the broadcast spec and so given that rz7 db2 choir I'm going to use a limiter so the avid pro limiter but you could do with Maxum the waves l2 l3 you know any any look ahead limiter will be fined firstly the ceiling here's another part of the specification the loudness spec stipulates a maximum peak level of minus 1 dB true peak so a true peak takes into account potential into sample / levels so I'm going to set the ceiling like that and then I'll bring the threshold down now if I bring it down to minus 7 that will actually result in something that's 1 DB out because we've dropped the ceiling so in actual fact to get it 7 DB louder given that'll pull that down by 1 DB I need to set this to minus 8 DV and I'll just put this before the loudness meter and just measure it again now our mix should be somewhere within the you know within the ballpark of -16 and the reason why I like to work to minus 23 is just because I think it's just good practice you know it's the broadcast standard here in the UK and then it's very easy to repurpose the mix for any other medium so for YouTube I'll just turn it up by you know 7 DB for other things I'll adjust it accordingly but at least my mixes are all uniform and they're all in accordance with the r128 specification so let's have a look at this now should be about minus 16 on the short term when the dialogues on this is Savile Row in London's Mayfair it's a golden mile of bespoke tailoring and a mecca for men who dress to impress yep so if we run that through it would come out precisely minus 16 so then you just you know mix it down you might choose to bounce it to a track so you might actually route all of these to an audio track and record it within the session I'll probably do another video on that some of the time but for now let's just bounce this down in fact if this were for broadcast we'd probably make it 16-bit I'll just go 24 for this and then I'll do an offline bounce some people might prefer to do a real-time bounce even if the bouncing to disk you know because you can do a final check on it I'll just for speed now do it offline bounce it and there you go so I haven't gone into absolute detail there about the post-production workflow but hopefully that gives you a quick overview of the process and as I mentioned in other videos I will talk about some of the specific processes in a lot more detail thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Paul Maunder

Views: 67,165

Rating: 4.9737921 out of 5

Keywords: Pro Tools, 11, 12, Broadcast, EBU R128, ATSC A85, Loudness, Waves WLM, Post production, Workflow, Software (Industry)

Id: N-goa27BSJs

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2015