Template development: Plugins and sends - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] I wanted to dive deeper into template building and give you another technique to enrich your template and workflow. Let's take plug-ins, for example. These can be saved into your templates, including their parameter settings and automation enable settings. Notice I've added an EQ plug-in to all of my dialogue tracks. I've used Equality by DMG Audio. It's my favorite go-to audio post-production EQ. Notice I've set up a basic starting point for the types of frequencies I'll typically need to mess with on dialogue tracks. I've got a low roll-off at 75 hertz to get rid of any kind of low rumble. I've got a parametric EQ at 150 to take care of low frequency stuff. I've got another parametric EQ at about 340 or 350. That's where I'll find some sort of midrange, low-mid murkiness in dialogue. I've got an EQ point at one K, and this is usually for weirdness you get in lavalier microphones, so with a steeper Q, I might want to take away a little bit of that, depending on what's going on in the track. And then I've got a presence bump at about five K where I can increase presence if I need it. I've also got a high frequency roll-off at about 15 K to take care of some of the sort of natural hiss or air that will arise in dialogue tracks. So this is my favorite sort of go-to, default setting for any dialogue tracks, and I'll want access to these parameters throughout different scenes in the movie. Now, how can I automate these parameters to change over the course of my timeline from scene to scene? The answer is by automating all the parameters. And they're not automatically automated by default. You have to go up to your automation enable window here, and select all of the parameters of any plug-in you want to automate, so I'm going to go ahead and Command + A, select all the parameters, and add them to my bin, and click OK. Now that I have enabled all of the automation parameters, you notice that they all have a green box around them. This means that I can automate any of these EQ moves over the course of my timeline. So now this track is pretty set up. It's got a EQ plug-in on there. Notice I also have a RX Voice De-noise. It's currently bypassed, but if I need it, it's right there at my fingertips on the track. I've also dialogue verb sends going to a reverb down here, so this track is kind of armed and ready to put any kind of dialogue in and work with it. Now, I want to show you a new way that you can save this as a track preset in Pro Tools, and to do that, I can right-click on the track name and I can say, save track preset, so if I wanted to, I can go ahead and name this, Scott's Dialogue Track Preset, or something like that, anything that's a little long, but whatever you want to make it, and I can categorize it into the Avid. I can even go as far as to put it in the EQ, but let's just put it out on the top layer for now. You can give it these tags so that you can search for it when you need it, and if I go in here, Track Data to Recall, I can make sure that things like Plug-in Settings and Automation are checked, so that's going to be saved into this track preset. I can also save anything from Track Colors, to output assignments and all sorts of stuff like that, into my track preset that I can recall anywhere else. So when I click OK, OK, and now, I can go into my track right below it, for example, go in, right-click, and I can say Recall Track Preset under Avid, you see Scott's Dialog Track Preset, and I just populated that, now it's got the equality all set up the way I like it for my default settings, so track presets kind of exist separately from what we've been working with, which is just basically making a session with your track presets, which works as well, too, so you can save this session and bring these tracks into any other session as a template, or now we've gone one step deeper, and we're now saving tracks using the new Pro Tools feature to save a track preset, which you can also bring into any session, so this is just one example, kind of the tip of the iceberg, in terms of how far you want to go in terms of setting up your template and, in this case, our track settings, to give yourself more powerful tools in your audio for film, video, and multimedia projects.