Project Management
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| Project management is largely a matter of developing a method of describing your projects and having the discipline to stick to it. Your method will evolve as you become more familiar with the VS-2480 and its disk operations. The Project List DialogThe Project List dialog, shown in Figure 15.1, displays a list of all partitions on any connected drives, as well as any optical drives that are attached. Figure 15.1. The Project List dialog The current drive is denoted by a black square with the letter C in it. The files on the current drive are also listed. The IDE: partitions are on the VS-2480's internal hard drive. The SCSI3: drive is an external SCSI CD--RW drive set to SCSI address 3. The SCSI5:0 drive is the first partition on an external SCSI hard drive set to SCSI address 5. Other partitions on that drive are denoted as SCSI5:1, SCSI5:2, and so on. Creating a New ProjectYou may only create a new project in the current partition. There are several choices you must make when you create a new project. Project NameThe project name is limited to 12 characters . Adopting a naming standard early will help you keep track of your projects down the road. Here's my method: Reserve the first two characters for the initials of the artist . and Reserve the last two characters for an incrementing version number . Use the remaining space to approximate a title. It is common to simply use the first letter of each word, with a few letters of the last word if there is enough room to do so. Copying ParametersYou may choose to make your new project a copy of the current project's settings. Choose Copy Utility Prm to copy all the info in the Utility menu to the new project. You may also choose Copy Mixer/Scene Prm to copy the mixer and scene settings. Project TypeWhen you start a new project on the VS-2480, you may choose from several sample rate and recording mode options. The decisions you make at this point will determine sound quality and storage size . The more hi-fidelity your choice, the larger the files created. Some of the more hi-fidelity choices may result in reduced channel capacity for both recording and playback. I choose to work primarily in 44.1k sample rate and MTP recording mode, allowing 16-track recording and 24-track playback with 24-bit data. Table 15.1 lists the recording modes and their limitations. Table 15.1. Recording Modes and Number af Available Tracks at Different Sample Rates
Saving and Protecting ProjectsYou just can't save your project too many times. Save after good takes, large edits, when you define a new scene, or just about any time at all. The VS-2480 will ask if you want to save your project before many disk-based activities. Usually, you'll want to go ahead and save it again. If you don't save it, the VS-2480 reloads the most recent copy of the project from disk. If you protect your project, the VS-2480 knows not to prompt you to save over it. Protecting projects saves time by eliminating this prompt. Protected projects also generate a warning if you ask the VS-2480 to erase them, just to be sure. Copying and Backing Up ProjectsAt some point in the life of your project, you will want to make a copy of it. You may decide to make a copy after each session or only now and then. Backup copies of projects can be a life-saver for those "just in case" and "oops" scenarios that are bound to crop up now and then. Before you may copy or back up projects, you must "mark" them in the Project List dialog. The Project Copy dialog, shown in Figure 15.2, shows the project(s) you have selected to copy and combined file size. Figure 15.2. The Project Copy dialog When you copy a project or a group of projects, you must select the destination drive. Click on SelDrv or press F4 to display a list of all available partitions, their sizes, and remaining capacity. Make sure that the destination drive has sufficient capacity for the project(s) to be copied. Always try to leave a little breathing room of a few hundred empty MB on a partition. To provide more security, projects should be copied either to another partition on the internal hard drive or to a partition on an external SCSI drive. Projects cannot be copied to CDR or DVD. The copy process can be started and then left unattended. It will either succeed or fail with no further user intervention. An image of a project may be stored as data to a CDR or DVD. This process is referred to as backing up. A backup of a project may only be restored. If a backup cannot fit entirely on one CDR, you will be prompted to enter additional CDRs as required. For larger projects, this can become quite tedious . Backups are not copies, and copies are not backups, although both methods retain all the data for a project. There is an old saying about digital data: If it is not stored in at least two places, it's not safe. The VS-2480 data is no exception. If the data is important, make two copies or backups on different devices and physically store them in different places. Sharing DataComplete tracks from the current project may be split into their own project. The split process actually creates copies of the track data, leaving the original project intact. You can export tracks or phrases as .WAV data for use in most professional digital audio environments. You can also import .WAV data from a CD or capture a stereo audio track from a CD.
You can combine two projects into one. To combine two projects, they must both reside in the same partition. You must mark the two projects in the Project List dialog, one of them being the current project and the other being any project of the same type. The second project will be absorbed by the current project and will no longer be available as an individual project. The VS-2480 can use data from or format data for other digital recorders . You can export the project in a format that is compatible with other Roland VS workstations or import projects created on those workstations. |
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