Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for joining my class on how to create a podcast production in Pro Tools. This class will take you through the podcast production process from start to finish. But before we even get into the edit and the mix inside Pro Tools itself, it's important to make sure we set ourselves up right from the very start. If we do that, not only is there less need for extra conversion further down the line, it's also easier for us to find the tools and windows we need for each step and allows us to set ourselves up for an easy and efficient podcast production. In this step, I'm going to show you how to optimise your Pro Tools session. So let's get started and open Pro Tools. We'll go File, Create New Session. This will open up the Quick Start dialog box. From here, we'll go ahead and create a new session. And we won't use a template. So let's call this Podcasts. And then from the dropdown, we'll go to and check the file type we're recording WAV. We'll sample rate at 44.1, which is the standard, as well as a bit depth at 16 bit. Everything on a podcast will get reduced down to an mp3 at that session rate. So we'll set it right from the start. Then we'll check our location and we'll create a new folder called Projects. At a very top level, I like to create three folders. One's called Projects, another called Assets, and another called Exports. So let's put our project files into Projects. And when it opens up, it should look a bit like this. So we have our Edit window and our Mix window. If we want to flick between the two, we have Apple and Equals as a shortcut. That switches between the two, as you can see. So let's go ahead and start and create tracks. Shift-Apple-N brings us a shortcut to create new tracks. So let's say it's a podcast with just one voice for now. One mono audio track, and we'll name that DX for Dialogue. On top of that, we'll create a stereo aux track, and we'll name that DX Group. And this is where we're going to send all of our dialogue tracks, whether it's one, two, or ten tracks, to as a bus. From there, we'll create an audio track for the music. We'll name that Music. That'll be in stereo. And then we'll also have a stereo group, again as an aux track, for the music. Name that Music Group. And finally, we'll have a stereo master bus, which is Master Fader, and just call that Master. And we'll create those. So from here, I like to make sure that our dialogue recording track is as big as possible, so we can really see our waveforms that we're recording. Then we'll look at our meters. As you can see here, there's a few headers that we're actually probably not going to use. So let's go up to View, click on Rulers, and then we'll click on Minimal. And as you can see, that only shows minutes and seconds. From there, let's go back to Rulers again, and we'll add in markers as well, because we'll be adding markers, I'm sure, throughout the edit process. And as you see here, we've got this Universe window, which we're probably not going to use either. So we're going to View again, Other Displays, and Deselect Universe. Another thing we want to hide is the track list, so we're going to View, Other Displays, and Deselect Track List. So you can already see we're starting to make some real space in our screen here. And we want to make things as simple as possible. So now we want to look at how we're going to operate when we're recording. So let's go into Options, and make sure Quick Punch is selected. And another thing to look at when we're recording, I like to see the Edit window scrolling by page. So once it's filled up with one recording, it goes to a new page and shows that it's continuous. And then finally we'll go into Options again, and select Low Latency Monitoring. And that'll make sure that we don't hear an echo of ourselves when we're recording. Then we want to check our Playback Engine, make sure we've got the right setup, and then we'll have our buffer size as high as possible. Click OK. So let's now look at our preferences. If you go into Pro Tools and Preferences, one thing that I want to look at is the colour coding. As you can see, the tracks here, we have the dialogue audio tracks and the music is blue. Then we have our buses in green. But what I really like is to make sure that all of our regions and all of our clips are recording in the same colour as the tracks, just so we can really easily locate different track types. So on Default Track Colour Coding, make sure Track Type is selected, as well as Track Colour below. Then we want to go into Editing, and make sure that Edit Selection Follows Clip List Selection is ticked. Now let's click OK. So let's take a look at our toolbar here. So when we open up the session, I like to make sure that we're in Slip Mode, so we can click wherever we want. And then I'll also make sure that the Smart Tool is selected, which can also be selected by pressing Apple 7 on the Mac. We'll take a look at the Smart Tool a little bit later in the class. I like to make sure that Tab to Transients is selected, which helps us with music editing later in the podcast edit. Then we'll make sure this one here, Link Timeline and Edit Selection is selected. And then we'll make sure that Insertion here, Follows Playback, is disabled. Then we'll move along to the Grid. So then let's set that to seconds here, as we have here in our Edit window. And I'll set that to 1 second. And from there we'll set our Nudge to 10 milliseconds. And then let's take a look at the Mix window, just making sure that everything's bussed correctly. As you can see, the width of each channel is quite thin. If you want to widen things out, just Apple Option M keeps things nice and wide. So let's go ahead and make sure that the dialogue is going into our dialogue group. We can rename those groups whatever we want to, but it's already named here as a preset. Make sure our input for the bus is the same, and again with music. Now there's a little trick, and we'll get into mixing later, but I like to make sure that everything that's going into a bus has a hard limiter on it. So nothing is going to peak digitally because of our mixing. And what we can also do here is duplicate that plug-in across all of the different stereo plug-ins by holding down Alt and drag clicking. Now let's just go back to the Edit and make sure that our shortcut keys are enabled here. If that A to Z icon is yellow, then that means we can use single button shortcuts. For example, R and T to zoom out. R to zoom out, T to zoom in. So from here, let's go ahead and save this as a template. We'll name this Skillshare, and select OK. So now that we've saved that, every time that we start a new podcast, we know exactly how we're going to have our session set up, and that saves us all the time that we've just done setting everything up.