How To Create Templates In Pro Tools

Pro Tools' Quick Showtime dialogue does exactly what its proper noun suggests!

When you open the Pro Tools awarding, the kickoff affair y'all come across is the Quick Start dialogue window — unless, that is, you have ticked the pick in the bottom left-hand corner of the Quick Start window to not have it show when yous start Pro Tools. If this has been ticked in mistake or if you desire to reinstate the Quick Start window, go to the Display tab of Pro Tools Preferences and tick the box marked 'Testify Quick Outset dialog when Pro Tools starts'.

The Quick Starting time window enables y'all to quickly go to the place you need, whether that ways browsing for a session on your system, directly opening a recently used session, creating a blank session or creating a new session from a template file. This feature can help experienced and new users akin, only oftentimes gets turned off earlier users have explored what it can do. So let'south work through the options from top to bottom.

Create Session From Template

A template is, in effect, an entire Pro Tools session without any project-specific content. It tin include audio, MIDI, instrument and auxiliary input tracks, buses, primary faders and plug-ins. If you wish, it can also include generic content such as drum loops and MIDI parts, or even custom sound segments.

Whatever existing Pro Tools session tin can be saved equally a template: simply go to the File carte and select Save As Template, then follow the instructions in the dialogue box to save information technology in an appropriate category, with or without its media. Although information technology's generally considered better to keep working projects on separate drives, templates are stored by default on your system drive. If you are running Pro Tools 11, the Session Templates folder is now in the Pro Tools folder in Documents, just if you lot're notwithstanding running Pro Tools 10 on a Mac, they are in the Digidesign binder in Library / Application Support on your start-up drive. Templates stored within this folder tin can be freely categorised by placing them in named subfolders.

The Quick Start dialogue, with the all-important Session Parameters section visible. Even so, yous don't accept to save templates to this folder; they tin be stored anywhere on your arrangement, and sometimes it's useful to exercise so. For example, when I am starting on an album project I oft create a template for the album and save that in the binder in which I volition as well store all the dissimilar sessions for each track. To exercise this, tick the 'Select location for template' option; then, when you click OK, yous will get the pick to name the template and save information technology to your desired location.

Subfolders within the Templates folder will appear in a drop-down list of 'categories'. Subfolders inside the Templates binder will appear in a driblet-downwardly list of 'categories'. Y'all can also save media with your template. I utilise this feature when I am working on a radio serial where each episode shares some common content. Rather than importing the same content into a new session for each episode, I create a template that includes the mutual content such equally jingles and music stabs. At present each time I create a new session using that template, all the shared content will be prepare to get straight away.

At the lesser of both new session options in the Quick Start window, you also get a section labelled Session Parameters (click the arrow if yous tin't see information technology), where y'all can ready items such as file blazon, sample rate and fleck depth. This works for Pro Tools sessions created both with and without a template and yous overlook it at your peril! It is where you determine all the cardinal parameters of your session. Often, mistakes fabricated here don't become apparent until much later, when they can have a lot of fourth dimension to correct, so please take a moment to check these settings and make sure they are every bit you want them to exist before y'all click OK.

Create Blank Session

This pick allows you to create an entirely blank session and enables you to edit the Session Parameters. As I explained above, these parameters are an essential part of setting upwards a Pro Tools session, every bit they and so make up one's mind some things that are non always easy to change later on on in the procedure:

Audio File Type: Pro Tools can work with Broadcast WAV or AIFF files. Unless yous have a particular reason for choosing the latter, Avid rightly advise selecting BWAV to maximise compatibility between versions and platforms.
Bit Depth: The chip depth (or 'discussion length') of an audio file determines how much dynamic range information technology can capture. These days, there is very petty reason for recording at sixteen-flake, though you may demand to dither the output of your session down to 16-bit at some stage in club to make your music available in commercial formats such as CD. While 24-bit audio takes up 50 percentage more infinite on your difficult bulldoze, it also offers a dynamic range wide enough to capture the output from any existing A-D converter, while still leaving headroom, so is very much the safest choice. Pro Tools likewise offers the option to shop audio in 32-bit floating-point format. This is little-used equally information technology takes upward yet more than hard-bulldoze space, and offers no reward in terms of capturing real-world signals with greater allegiance. Yet, it tin can help to preserve audio quality in situations where audio is repeatedly processed and bounced to disk.
Sample Rate: The two almost commonly used sample rates are 44.1kHz — the sampling frequency employed by CDs — and 48kHz, widely used in broadcast. The other available sample rates are multiples of these. Contend rages about whether they offer a noticeable improvement in audio quality, but again, audio recorded at high sample rates takes up more than deejay space, and playing it back uses more system resources.
Interleaved: This is a relatively new option that determines how Pro Tools will handle multi-channel audio files. In older versions of Pro Tools, stereo and surroundings recordings were always collections of individual mono files, but you lot tin can at present choose to have Pro Tools handle them as single interleaved files. This can aid when editing or locating multi-channel audio files in Pro Tools, and means that they can be direct imported from other applications without having to be converted first.
I/O Settings: This is i of the most misunderstood settings in the New Session window. In a modest one-studio setup where you always employ the same audio hardware, the default Last Used I/O Setting will be fine, because you lot know what the Last Used setting was. However, equally soon as yous start sharing sessions with other users, who will almost certainly accept a different set of I/O Settings to you, you can start to have problems. These problems get fifty-fifty worse if you are in a facility with shared systems — you have no idea what the last used settings were, because someone else was the last person to employ this arrangement! So I ever recommend never to use the Last Used option simply always to change it. If you have created your own I/O Settings so choose one of those. If not, and so utilise one of the mill defaults like Stereo Mix.

Open up Recent Session

This option gives you the take chances to browse a recent history of sessions you have been working on and cull to open up one of those. It saves a lot of having to hunt through your drives to find things. One minor note: if Pro Tools crashes before a session was saved, it volition not announced in this list.

Open Session

Information technology doesn't get much simpler than the final choice. Click OK and you tin navigate to anywhere on your computer to open an existing Pro Tools session.

Off The Mark At that place aren't any features that are exclusive to the Quick Get-go window and unavailable anywhere else. You can create a blank session and a session from a template using the New option in the File carte du jour, but as y'all tin can access the Open up Contempo and Open commands. However, the Quick Get-go window does have the reward of bringing all these together in one identify, and is especially helpful for new users getting used to how Pro Tools works.