Importing the Score and Incidental Music

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Music plays an integral part in almost every visual production, from films and TV shows to corporate training videos . Music can come from CD libraries or from original music composers and recording artists . It might show up to you in the form of DAT tapes, Audio CDs, CD-ROMs, or even as multi-channel audio files. I've even used MP3s, but the quality is very low with these compressed files. Try to get uncompressed files for use in any professional project; MP3s might be sufficient for demo or scratch purposes, but they should not be used in any final product, if possible.

Importing from CD, DAT or Tape

Music commonly comes to you on an audio CD and can be imported using software such as Toast Audio Extractor to first translate the audio from the CD to a compatible file that Pro Tools will import. Details on how to do this appear earlier in this chapter, in the section on foley recording.

DAT tapes are still a long-running standard in audio studios and are often used for music mastering. If the music was scored to picture and must be synchronized to your project, it must have SMPTE time code recorded on the DAT or a 2-beep must be present in order to sync up the music to picture.

The same is true for analog tape. Some analog formats have a center SMPTE track to allow for synchronization. Often, a 2-beep is all that is necessary to sync the music up. With analog tape, two beeps may be required more often because of the inherent shift in tape machine transports.

Audio that is on any time-coded source, such as time code DAT or quarter-inch analog with center-track SMPTE, will need to be synchronized with Pro Tools. Connect the analog's SMPTE output to the input of your SMPTE-to-MIDI time code converter. Put Pro Tools online and record. MachineControl is not necessary for this operation.

Importing from CD-ROM

Audio files stored on a CD-ROM should be very easy to import directly into Pro Tools. Using the Import Audio function, you can access your CD drive just like any other drive on your system, and then import the audio directly from the CD, assuming the CD-ROM is in a format that is readable by your computer.

If you're exchanging audio files across platformseither PC to Mac or Mac to PCusing CD-ROM discs, the data format of the CD is critical. CDs formatted for Macintosh cannot be read by PCs. The ISO 9660 format is readable by both systems. However, there are two naming conventions that can be used. The first is Joliet, which is used primarily for backwards -compatibility with DOS systems. Joliet stores a list of names in two formats. The first format truncates every name to no more than seven characters. The second list contains Windows 95 long names, which are up to 32 characters in length. When opening one of these CDs in a Macintosh computer using OS9.x, you will only be able to see the short name list. When descriptive names are truncated to seven characters , much of the information is lost. Programs that need to identify audio files by their full name, such as Pro Tools, will not be able to recognize these truncated names. OSX has built-in support for Joliet names, and there are third-party shareware solutions for OS9.x users that will read Joliet names in their full length.

The second naming convention is called Romeo. Romeo is only recognized by Windows95, 98, NT, and later operating systems on the Windows platform. Macintosh computers can also read this Romeo format. File names in the Romeo format can be up to 128 characters in length. Using this method will ensure that programs will be able to identify audio files by their original names.

Be sure to use the ISO 9660 format CD-ROM with the Romeo naming method employed. This will allow the files names to have more than eight characters on the CD-ROM. Using the Joliet method results in file names that are clipped if they exceed the eight-character limitation. This can make finding the file Star_Wars_cue_R1033.wav quite difficult. It might look like STAR_W~3.wav after being encoded onto a Joliet format ISO 9660 CD-ROM.

NOTE

WORKING WITH FILM COMPOSERS

Film composers also work synchronized to picture. This allows them to create music that times out with the action onscreen, often accenting key moments with musical punctuation. In order for these accents to work correctly, perfect sync must be maintained from the composer's studio to your workstation. You must communicate with the composer to find out exactly how they synchronized to the picture. Did they run pulled-down or not? Do they use 44.1kHz or 48kHz? Did they perform any sample rate conversion when outputting the files given to you? Again, these details should be worked out in pre-production, as unexpected discrepancies can wreak havoc when deadlines are closing in.

Importing Multi-Channel Audio

Many composers will generate a surround sound mix of their music for you to import. It may come in the form of several mono tracks or as a self-contained, multi-channel audio file.

Mono tracks can be imported directly into Pro Tools if they are of the same format and resolution as the current session. Once imported, these files must be placed together in the timeline and moved to the proper location for sync. Each file can be dragged from the Audio Regions List into the timeline while in Spot mode. When you let go, the Spot Dialog opens and you can specify the same SMPTE start time for each file. This ensures sample accuracy between each channel of a surround sound mix. You should then group all channels in the surround mix so they stay locked together, even if you edit them further.

If you import one multi-channel file, Pro Tools will have to convert it into multiple mono files first, but it will keep them associated as a surround group, as shown in Figure 5.29. You can create a surround channel with the same number of channels as the surround group you importedin this example, 5.1 surround or six channels. It is then possible to drag the entire surround group into this track at once, as shown in Figure 5.30.

Figure 5.29. A multi-channel file once it has been imported into the Audio Regions List. The file has been converted into several mono files, but they remain associated as a surround group.

Figure 5.30. Dragging a multi-channel group of audio files into a surround track.

Using this multi-channel group ensures sample accuracy within the surround mix. This track can still be edited and the relationship will be maintained. Surround tracks behave just like stereo tracks but with more channels.

MP3 Files

In Pro Tools 6, MP3 files can be imported directly. In previous versions, it was necessary to use a third-party application to first translate the MP3 into a PCM format such as WAV, AIFF, or SDII before Pro Tools would recognize it.

Understand that just because Pro Tools has converted an MP3 into another format does not mean that the inherent quality degradation in the MP3 codec is somehow reversed . Once an audio file has been converted into the MP3 format, the quality loss is permanent.

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