A mini-flurry of posts on an unusual aspect of clip croups has been prompted by the excellent tip submitted to the podcast by community member Nando Eweg on using clip groups. This tip and an upcoming ADR tip soon to  be published by Alan both exploit the slightly counter intuitive fact that a clip group can be created even when it doesn’t contain any clips. Just by making an edit selection and hitting cmd+opt+G/ctrl+alt+G a clip group can be created which can be treated like any clip on the timeline but because it contains nothing it doesn’t increase the size of the session.

I’ve used Avid Media Composer quite a lot and something I’ve always wished would migrate over to Pro Tools is the far more comprehensive marker facilites. Multiple marker rulers with colour codeable markers make staying organised more straightforward.

Pro Tools only offers one marker ruler but by creating some additional tracks it can be easy to create clip group markers to de-clutter your marker ruler.

I have used this approach to mark out sections of a song. By dropping edit selections for the various sections and creating clip groups I can rename the clip groups, colour them and use tab (with tab to transients disabled) to navigate between the clip group boundaries. Similarly you can mark out comments on the timeline by dropping clip groups and renaming them “bass fluff” “BV late” or similar. We’ve had comments in the mixer window for years but this is a way to comment on the timeline.