Most libraries will have index files and if you're lucky, the files will be labeled as well. I worked on a few independent films and found that I had to jump through a whole lot of hoops within Pro Tools. I kept poking at the workspace to get any sort of workflow but it was lacking and very frustrating because it just didn't work nor was it accessible.
I used a combination of finding files in finder, previewing them right within finder and either importing them into PT or dragging them into a track. I was able to do that successfully but it took to long and too many steps. Plus, I could not audition against the audio that I already had in Pro Tools. Lots of trial an error and a whole lot of imagination.
I got so frustrated with Pro Tools that I bounced stems, imported them into Sonar 8.5 and used the Media Browser which would be the WorkSpace Pro Tools equivalent. There I could easily preview and audition against my bounced stems from Pro Tools and quickly import what I needed into their own tracks or one track depending on what the scene/dialog needed. At least that way I could narrow some of the files that I may or not use at all. I then imported those tracks back into Pro Tools to finish my editing.
What wound up working best and it still wasn't ideal was to find sound effects that I thought I could use, import them into separate tracks and I got extremely creative on markers. You can do some pretty amazing things with them.
I thought this would have been a great way to use playlists but they weren't meant to be used like this. Although how cool it would be to import a bunch of sound effects into one track and just move the ones you wanted from the an individual playlist, move sound effect to where you wanted and the session on a different track and clean up would be pretty easy by deleting that one track.
The hardest lesson for me was that finding the sound effects was the easy part. Making it fit to the program on the other hand was a completely different animal.
Every sound effect cataloging program I looked at either wasn't accessible or just didn't give me what I wanted as fast as I needed it.
I took it scene by scene and took copious amounts of notes on which sounds I may need to augment/fill in. I then went to some sound effect libraries I own and gathered what would remotely fit. I put them in specific folder so I wouldn't have to hunt for them later. When the files weren't named I used indexes that told me where those files should be. I also gathered all of my indexes in one place from my libraries. Sometimes I had to look them up on the internet and download what I needed. At least then, they were of quality and they were named properly. I would put those in their respective scene folders.
Most of the higher end libraries puts things in some semblance of order so sometimes I would just listen rather than only listening to correctly labeled things.
I attempted to use Digital Juice at the time but found it completely inaccessible.
HF On 10/8/2017 3:02 PM, CHUCK REICHEL wrote:
Hi List, Subject says it all. I have a sound effect library I need to access while in pro tools and before diving in I wanted to see what you guys are doing for quick access for sound effects in pt 12. Also Have you guys heard of an app called SoundMiner for quick accessing of sound effects libraries? Thanks Chuck "God does not play dice with the universe" "Albert Einstein’
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
