Print multiple stems at the same time - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] This week, we'll take a look at how you can exploit all of your output stems to print faster than real time at the same time and have the correct naming to boot. This is a really big deal if you have to send off a bunch of different stems to satisfy delivery requirements on a project. If you are stuck printing stems in real time on, say, a project that's an hour long, that could be up to 10 to 12 hours spent after printing out each delivery stem. This way, you can do it in a matter of minutes. Let me show you. Let's have a look at this more complex template I created for this short film. It has output stems set up for full mix, dialogue, effects, music, nat sound, and voiceover narration. Now the first thing we need to do to make this technique work is to go into our IO setup and rename some of our unused buses. So we'll go up to the Setup menu, under IO, and we're going to take a look at our Bus tab. So in our Bus tab, we have some unused buses. We can know they're unused if they're in regular-face type. Buses that are currently being used are in boldface type. So you'll notice I have Bus 1-2 down to Bus 21 to 22 already unused, so we'll start there. What we're going to do is we're going to rename these buses to the file name we want our outputs to be called. So in other words, for the full mix, we're going to go in here and double-click, and we're going to name this, I could name it full mix, but I don't want to conflict with the actual stem name, so I'll call it STEREO_MIX. And I'm going to go down the line. For the dialogue stem, I'll simply name it DX. For the effects stem, FX, and so forth. And finally, our narration stem. So now I have these dummy buses. I'm calling them dummy buses because they're not actually sending audio anywhere. Traditionally, buses in Pro Tools are audio pathways. You're sending audio from one place to the next. These buses are just going to be used for output file names and to output our bounce to disk, our final prints of all of our stems. You'll see what I mean in a moment. We click OK now that we've created these dummy buses, and we're going to route our stems to those buses. Now here's the trick. All of our stems are currently routed to our full mix, and we want that that way because remember we're combining our dialogue effects, music, nat sound, and narration all to create our final full mix. But did you know you can output any track to two different places or multiple places at once in Pro Tools? That's what we want to do. We want to output or route our dialogue stem both to the full mix and to that dummy bus we just created. Here's how you do it. You hold Control down as you open up the output selector. And by holding Control, you can select both full mix and also the dialogue dummy bus we just created. So now, indicated by a plus button, it is now going to two places at once. It's going to, as you can see, our full mix, as well as that dialogue bus, DX bus, we just created. And I'm going to do the same for all the other tracks. So for effects, I'm going to go in here, holding down control, I'm going to send that simultaneously to the full mix and also the effects bus. And I'll do it for music, nat sound, and narration. And lastly, I'm going to do it to the full mix as well. Remember, the full mix is going out our output one and two, and I'm going to simultaneously send that to our stereo mix. Okay, so all of our tracks are routed to both places at once, that we need them to go, and now it's time to do our final output print. So we want to make a selection for the entire length of our movie or our documentary piece or whatever the project we're working on. We want to have our selection for the entire length, going to go up to File, Bounce to Disk. And here, under Bounce Source, by default, it outputs to Stereo one and two. That's our main output. But we're going to change this to those dummy buses we just created. So we're going to make one go to stereo mix. And as we hit plus, we can add bounce sources as well. And notice the next one down is dialogue. So simply just by hitting plus, I can include all of our output buses that we want or all of our outputs, those dummy buses we created, and so I've got all of them in here. I've got stereo mix and one to accommodate each of our stems. Now we're ready to output. We want to name it myproject. And it'll simply append these names to all the files. Now a couple more things I want to make sure that is this Interleaved files, 16 bit, 48 is fine. I can keep it to 24, which I actually like to do in my sessions. And I'm going to choose a place for this, for these files to go. So let me just create a folder called My Final Mixes and Stems. And click Open, and we'll bounce to disk. Now watch how fast this does all of them at the same time. It works very quickly, much faster than real time. And when we're done, let's pop over to that folder. All on your desktop, you have all of your different bounce sources already named, and you can send these off. You've got all of your outputs and all your deliveries, all done in a matter of minutes rather than sitting there waiting for each stem to print. This is one of my favorite time-saving power user tips in Pro Tools, and I'm happy to share it with you as a technique you can run with in your own productions.