For 4 weeks we are running a community tip competition again as we have 4 very special silver iLoks to give away. You have been sending in your tips and so here is another selection of them.
Here is one on routine and efficiency from Torbjorn Frisk
My two best Production tips are these:
Have fixed routines. Such start same time every day, take pauses of different length etc, end the day scheduled.
Take a pause every hour. Alternate shorter and longer pauses
I work mainly from home and these two "guidlines" help me tremendously to be productive. When I fool myself to not take pauses or just work around the clock I end up not being very productive in the long run.
This next tip is from Arthur Khayrullin with a tip to help lay up ambiences quickly in post production..
We have a lot of work which has to be done in a very short time. So, the tip is about how to speed up editing ambiences. Usually, even if you're working as fast as you can, you still use more than one ambience clip simultaneously. And if you need to have different ambiences, depending on the shot, this tip will help you with it.
Before you start to edit ambiences you need to spend a little time (depending on how large the project you're working on) putting markers at the beginning of the every shot, naming them 2, 3... etc. through to 998. Markers 1 & 999 are needed for the beginning and end of the session.
After this, you're ready to put your ambiences in the session, you just drop them into timeline on the tracks you need, and then you can use thel shortcut: "." "marker number" "." (Periods on the num pad only.)
This shortcut lets you to put selector cursor straight on the marker (in our case - in the beginning of shot). Then, by pressing "B" you can cut your ambience clip in two parts. One of them stays on the same track; next one is going on the track above or below.
Then the last step - putting fades on the place the clip was cut. What you're getting? On the ambience tracks in your session you have continuous clips, which are perfectly fitted to the shots. Once you have deleted this markers you still see length of every shot by the length of clips. Finally It's easy to set up a balance between different sounds for every shot with clip gain function.
P.S Not everybody knows, that the marker "999" is equal to the marker "0", which, in fact, doesn't exist. The trick is that you can select all your video file length by pressing next combination: hold "shift", then press "." "1" "." "." "0" "."
Robert Shiloni wants to share this command (win: ctrl) + trim trick tip....
If you use the Command key in grid mode for Trim you can trim like you can if you were in slip mode. But there's a difference when you hold the Command key! When you hold Command and then you use your mouse for trimming, then Pro Tools automatically fills the gap between two clips. If you click on the mouse first and then you use the Command key you just defeat the Grid mode without filling the gaps.
John Moffat offers this tip about handling loud mixes...
Big loud mixes require a light touch, which seems counter intuitive. Often when tweeking a mix, people push the volume up on the sound they think is lost in the mix, more often than not, this just presents more problems, try turning other sounds down first, not only does this give you more headroom later on, but it will often give you a better balance in the overall mix
Its taken me a while to learn what level of compression is appropriate "by ear", one of the most useful ways I found to learn, was to push the compression hard, then slowly dial it back to the sound I was looking for, then repeat the process, first dropping the compression down again before pushing it hard, until I have the minimum level of compression for the sound I want. Same applies to Limiting.
These 2 mix tips are, in my humble opinion, the most useful for mixing, I love hard compression and big loud mixes, its part of my style as a mix engineer, but to get a big full mix, which still retains a musical dynamic range, you need the space to fill in the first place, and that requires subtlety in the work process, including channel levels and compression.
Please note that just because we have published them doesn't mean you have won, its just what we want to share the best of your tips with the whole community. Each week we will announce one winner on the podcast, so listen out and see if you are the lucky one, each week.
What Do I Need To Do To Try And Win A Silver iLok?
- Send us your tips and tricks that help you in your productions. Use the Contact Us page please.
- Take a look at the community tips that are on the site to see the kind of thing we are looking for, and also to make sure we haven't covered the tip already.
- Each week we will pick out one winner for the next 4 weeks as we only have 4 iLoks.