Sound Workshop- Working with Protools

In this second session of my sound design workshops, we started looking at protools and tried to grasp the basics of it, as this is the software we were using for our projects. Having previously used Adobe Audition, I was sure I could pick up this software fairly easily, as I figured that the tools would be the same in many ways, but the layouts and placements of these would be different.

We firstly looked at very basic settings, like how to set up your project, what the layout of the program was like and how to add new tracks and import files. All of this was fairly similar to audition and it was easy to see how you could build up from a blank canvas to a complex project quite easily.

We then looked at some basic tools like cutting and extracting bits of audio, We did some recordings of our own, and then looked at organising the tracks and creating buses.

Having gone through the basics, we started looking at some of the effects we would be using for our projects. I have to say that this was a major difference for me from Audition as the interface of Protools is a lot more user friendly, which was not a bad thing, but not having everything simply listed and more as you would see it on a physical desk was a change.

One of the cooler things about Protools I found was this selector that allowed you to select multiple tools at once, and changed depending on where you hovered your mouse over the audio. I liked this as it eliminated some of the use for shortcuts, and could make your work slightly more efficient as it saves you from changing between tools all the time.

After this session I decided I wanted to aim for using Lynda.com to complete the essential training for Protools so I could have a more complete understanding of the program, which would ultimately make it easier when it comes to creating my project.