Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Michael Cullen for Film Sound Tutorials, and welcome to my first video of my tutorial series detailing a one-man workflow for post-film sound. And for this video series, I'm going to be talking about the entire process of sound designing and mixing a short film. And in this tutorial, we're going to talk about creating a new session, organizing our files, and then a couple tips and tricks within Pro Tools to make the editorial process much easier. And for these tutorial series, I'm going to be using Pro Tools 10. However, you can use whatever DAW or digital audio workstation that you want to because the tips and techniques can be transferred into any digital editor. So before creating my Pro Tools session, let me show you the project folder that I create for every project that I work on. And so for this tutorial series, I'm going to work on a project called Murphy's Law, which is a short film directed by Alex Feixeira, which had an awesome director and an awesome cast and crew. And so I created this folder called Murphy's Law. And then within it, I have a couple different folders that I always put within every new project that I create. So let me show you. So first I have my turnover folder. And this is where I put all of my files that come from the picture editorial editor. This would normally be my picture lock and my AAF and anything else that they normally deliver. Afterwards, I have a music folder where I put all the score or temp music or royalty free music that the director or the producer give to me. Then I have a folder for ADR that I can put all my Pro Tools sessions that I queued ADR and then recorded ADR within. Then I have a Foley folder, same thing where I can put all of my files of my queued session for Foley and then my recorded session for Foley. And then the next two folders are where I do most of my work. And the first one is editorial. And so editorial is where I do all my sound design work, all my dialogue editing, all my effects editing, Foley, backgrounds, music. This is where most of my Pro Tools files will live. And then after doing all the editorial work, I've moved all my sessions to my mix folder. And this is where I start mixing all the files to the final print master that I'll create. And then finally, when I print and bounce my stems and print master, I'll put them into my deliverables folder here at the bottom. And so what's really nice with having this organized file structure is that whenever I open up a project folder, I know exactly where all my files are. And so it might not seem a big deal when you're actually working on the project. But there have been many times when I've come back to a project a year, two years later and have to find where all my files are. And so by having this organized file structure, then I'll know, okay, I know exactly where I can find my files. So let's head back to Pro Tools. And here's my new session panel. And so it has a couple different parameters I need to look at. This is my audio file type, which just defaults to WAV, which is great. The next two are more important. Currently, the standard for film is using a bit depth of 24 bits, and then a sample rate of 48 kilohertz. And so I've seen sessions that have used more, but this is normally what I'm required to deliver. And so this is the settings that I'm going to create my new session. Then I have my IO where all my audio is going in and out from. And this is just my inbox. So that will be fine. Some people like to use interleaved, but I've never seen really a difference. So I'm going to leave that unchecked. Great. So let's create the new session. And it's going to ask me where I want to save the session. So here's my Murphy's Law project folder that I was just talking about. And we're going to save this session within my editorial session. So let's name the session Murphy's Law. And I like to use camel case because it's easier to read. And then we'll put editorial because that's the type of work I'm going to do within the session. And then I'm going to put the date, which is 05-2016. And then I'm going to put my initials at the end. And so if you work on a team that's larger than just yourself, you will put your initials at the end of the session just so people know who actually worked within that session. So let's click save. And great. Okay. So here's my blank Pro Tools session. And there's a couple settings that I want to make sure are right before I start working within my session. So the first thing that I do, I go to setup, and then I hit on session. And so within the session setup panel, you'll see some of the settings that I was just talking about. But what I'm really more interested in is my session start and my time code rate. And so whenever I begin a film, I always have my session start at 59 minutes within the session itself. And the reason I do that is because in the United States, the convention for film is that the beginning of your film should begin at the one hour mark within your session. And so the reason I started 59 minutes instead of one hour is because normally the films that I'm working on have a leader or a pre-roll that happens before the picture starts that I need to leave space for within my session. And so I'm giving a minute of pre-roll so that my picture start can start exactly at one hour. And this is a little arbitrary truthfully, because in the UK, I know that they start on the 10 hour mark. And I believe that's a convention going back to when the mixers used to print on tape, that they would begin their session at 10 a.m. in the morning. And so that's why they start at the 10 hour mark. But here in the States, we start on the one hour. And so normally I'll use 59 minutes for my session start. Now the only caveat with that is that if you are working on a longer film, they will sometimes break up the film into different reels. And if you have different reels, then each reel will start on a new hour mark. And so the first reel will start on the one hour mark, second reel on the second hour mark, and so on and so forth. Great. So then underneath session start, we have my time code rate. And so also in the United States, the standard time code rate for film is 23.976. And that's what I'm going to have my time code as. To ensure that we are seeing the time code within my Pro Tools session, I have to make sure over here that I am using the time code time base. Because I know sometimes when Pro Tools opens up, it will use a different time base, like minutes and seconds or bars and beats. But for our purposes, all we need is time code. And then we can have markers as well to help us put in notes during the editorial process. One thing I also like to set up is I normally work in grid mode within Pro Tools, which allows me to shift sound effects on the basis of a grid. And so over here, I like to set up my grid on a one frame basis that's using the time code as its time base. And then I also like to set up my nudge factor also at one frame as well. Couple other settings. Throughout this tutorial series, I'm going to use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. And to make sure that the keyboard shortcuts will actually affect my edit window, I have to make sure that this A to Z over here is selected. Because sometimes Pro Tools will have a default in other windows. I like to make sure that the four bottom boxes underneath my smart tool are selected. And this will just aid me when I'm doing my editorial process. I like to also ensure that within my preferences, which is underneath setup. That my default auto backup is set at three minutes. And so what's really nice about this feature is that it will back up your session every three minutes and it'll keep the last 20 backups. Then I'll have a backup of my past hour of work within my Pro Tools session. Great. So with all those settings set up, we are now ready to begin the editorial process. And so stay tuned for the next video where we actually start creating the tracks and then importing my files. So thanks for watching this video and I'll see you soon.