The Track Presets feature in Pro Tools provides a quick way to store and recall tracks or groups of tracks into your session, but is often considered a music feature and maybe not so helpful in post-production workflows. In this free video tutorial, Avid Application Specialist Daniel Lovell shows you how he uses track presets in an audio post workflow to break up session templates into manageable, modular building blocks.
Many of us over the years have developed complex Pro Tools template sessions. Templates range from being more broadly related to a show type or genre or for a specific show or series and while these templates are a massive time saver and provide a fantastic starting point, templates can also become large and cumbersome to manage.
In terms of DSP and computer power, they may require management of hidden and inactive tracks and plug-ins and they can turn into big files that are slow to open and the multitude of sometimes unneeded tracks can be visually difficult to navigate.
Track presets enables you to split up those large templates into smaller and more manageable groups. Rather than trying to create an all-inclusive template, you can use track presets to design your own “modular” workflow.
Converting a large template to a group of track presets is straight forward. Simply open your template and select each group of tracks and save them as appropriate names in a category for that template, that might be by session type or for a specific show you work on.
Because you can drag-and-drop (or right-click and import) an entire folder of track presets directly into Pro Tools, you can still use your previous template in its entirety, if needed. Simply, right click on the folder and import track presets to the session.
The benefit of saving track presets, or your sub-templates in this in this way is that you can easily bring in just the tracks you require for that project.
For example, you might have a TV advertisement template that is split into groups such as, VO, Dialog, Atmos, Foley, Music, SFX, Masters, and so on. However, you may not need all these groups in every session. So, you can start with, say, VO, Music, and Masters Track Presets. Then you can add some SFX later, as needed.