Community member Stuart McWilliam has been in touch with a question that I am hoping the community can help with the answer to. It is a question about global libraries/clip groups in Pro Tools post production workflows...

I work at Lime Pictures, in the UK, where we currently use Pyramix for audio post production. However we have been looking into the switch to Pro Tools for quite a while now and I am personally doing some research to see if it can do the same things. A big part of our audio post production process is the global libraries feature within Pyramix. This is a huge time saver as we have all our atmos tracks built and stored in a location that we can just quickly throw on an episode of a continuing drama like Hollyoaks that we produce here at Lime Pictures.

We have been advised that this can be done using Clip Groups which is great, however is there a way of consolidating these Clip Groups to a location that can be accessed by any project?

Because our projects are getting taken off the network so frequently It would be annoying to have to rebuild them for every episode so I was hoping you would know of a way this could be achieved.

The workaround I am currently looking at is to create a project on a separate drive that isn't backed up and taken off the network and within this project create our global libraries etc. We can then export the clip groups and then when we start a new project we can just drag these clip group exports into the project which will then generate a copy of all clip group components within the project.

Thanks Stuart for this question. To get the ball rolling, when I have worked on a drama series, usually during the first episode I have created and set the atmos beds for each location in the drama as well as the appropriate doors, etc for each scene. I then export these appropriately named, to a dedicated folder so I know where they 'belong' but as of yet I haven't used clip groups to enable me to handle a group of beds and spots. 

So turning to the community, those of you working on drama series must have addressed this problem, so how do you deal with global libraries and speeding up workflows when working on the same scene over and over again in different episodes. Let's help Stuart find an excellent solution to help his colleagues over at Lime Pictures.