Mixing Sound in Pro Tools

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about finishing your sound mix. They had actually make two mixed files, a stereo left and a stereo right, out of all the tracks that we've combined. Right now I have a group of six tracks, some are mono and some are stereo. I need to combine them just the way I hear them through the speakers. There's a couple different ways. Once I get all my mixed levels adjusted, one way I can get the sound mix to render is highlight the beginning point and end point of the mix, and go ahead and select, file, bounce to disk. Now what that's doing is it's going to render the audio and it's not as exciting because what happens is you don't get to see the Quick time movie play and it's just rendering your file. I like to watch the mix at every opportunity I can, so there's a better way to get around this. You can do it just like you were recording on a separate machine. Right now, we have all our audio being sent out through buses. Dialog's, again, through bus one, two and the music three, four and effects through five and six. So, if we go and take a look at those buses, here they are Dialog, music, effects. We need a master track to record onto. I mean, if I could just record all my tracks onto another track in Pro Tools that would be great. Well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a new track right now. I'm going to Tracks, new, and I'm going to make a stereo track, which is a left and right, and I'm going to label it my mix track and it's going to be going out output one and two. What I need to do, now, with these auxiliary buses, I need to send that audio from those buses instead of to the speaker, to that track and then listen to that track. What I'll do is I'll find an empty bus. We've used one, two, three, four, five, and six. We'll just go to seven and eight. We'll keep it simple. So, we'll take the output of that track with all the dialog, now it's going to be combined and go to seven and eight. Then all the music is going to go to seven and eight, and all the effects is going to go to seven and eight. What I do is set the input to my new record track as, you guessed it, bus seven and eight. All the audio will route through those faders and then to my master track. What I need to do now is just enable that track to record, click on R, then press the number 3 key or record play. The track will actually will start, you'll see the wave form appearing right there. That will be all those tracks combined. So that's my dialog track, my music, and my bird tracks are all being combined down to one channel. And I can stop and start anytime I want in this case. So, if I make a mistake, I can go back and my Quick time movie plays at the same time I can pick up record at any point. And, if you are going to pick up records, it's a good idea to make sure you have a pre-roll sitting on your tracks that way you don't have any loss or any gaps in when you pick up. That's a quick tip too. If you go ahead and look at your controller here, you have a pre-roll time. What that'll do is it will roll back a little bit before you go into record and that helps get rid of a click every time you go in to record. But, now I can record the end of the program, and I have a Quick time movie of, or I should say I have a wav file of the entire mix rendered for me."