Friday, 7 May 2010

PD-1 - Protools Long Track Names

I recently visited Luiz Provin in Studio 4 at Shepperton Studios to update the Software in his PD-1. Luiz specialises in re-recording foreign language versions, he uses both the record and monitor sections of the PD-1 and often uses more than 8 stems with original guide track, M&E and multiple print masters.

Lois has used the PD-1 as the monitor controller for the last 4 years, this was his first software update, Lois has two main requests-

1) Increase the number of controlled tracks from 48 to 64
Version 2 of the software allows up to 64 tracks to be controlled on ProTools by sending two commands (ProTools has a 48 track command limit). Luiz uses ProTools 7.2 cs2 which I discovered that this requires a delay between the commands. Look for a software update in the future for this. Luiz now wants even more tracks, I am looking at the software to see if 96 tracks are possible!

2) Allow longer track names on ProTools
Lois had discovered that he could not use track names with more than 12 characters, the problem was that ProTools shortens long track names by removing spaces and punctuation. Using a space as the separator between Stem and Track names did not work ! The solution was simple, use '_' as the stem/track separator, for example 'DMU_Left ......' .