Template development: Undipped tracks - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's dive a bit deeper into our custom templates. Remember, a template can have as many tools as you need to keep your audio consistent and your workflow as efficient and fast as possible from project to project. This week I'm going to concentrate on a simple technique. We'll look at how to set up an undipped music stem. Undipped music stems are delivery tracks containing just a project's music with no volume changes. They are common delivery requirements. Oftentimes, broadcast networks ask for these in addition to traditional music stems. So I've created a separate output stem here in this session called MX Undipped. And that's going to be where our undipped music stem exists. Now, one thing you want to make sure of is you don't want your music undipped track feeding in to your full mix, because then you'd be doubling-up your regular music stem with this undipped stem. So, as you see, I've actually set it to an unused bus. And you can do this just be going here, choosing Bus in the track output, and I chose a bus that's not being used currently. Now, to make this work properly, I recommend doing all of your volume automation moves in your actual music stem, in the music bus that all the music tracks are going to, not in the music tracks themselves. Notice there's no volume automation in the music track. So you leave the automation for your actual music stem when you do your music dips, which is another way of saying your music rides, or your volume automation rides, in your music track. And let's take a look at what this sounds like. I've got some music rides here already done. So what I've done is typical sort of mixing moves. You duck the music around where the talking is, right? So let's take a listen to this. (jazzy music) - [Man On Recording] When the Vitaphone was in its laboratory stage, a man had to beg me, fairly kidnap me-- - So it ducks down-- - to get me down to hear it. - When there's music, and then it comes back up. And you can see the volume automation here and the level you can see changing and going down-- I was greatly impressed-- with the device, but questioned its show value. - [Instructor] And rising back up in the music stem. Now again, we're looking to make an undipped track that actually has the music undipped. So to do this, we're going to actually use a send. Notice I have my Sends column showing in my Edit window. I'm going to make a send from the music stem, which effectively splits the audio off, also, into another location. In this case, we're going to send it to Track Music Undipped And we've created a stem. Now, to have this stem here, the volume is all the way down. So we're going to quickly option click the fader to drag it up to Unity Gain. And this send is now sending audio to our undipped track. Now how do we avoid also sending the volume automation? Well with a send, that's pretty simple. You can set the send to pre-fader and it will send the audio before it's reached the automation stage. So it'll just send the raw audio from the music track to the undipped track. And our mission will be accomplished. We're going to get a separate music track that does not contain the volume automation. Now we'll need to play it through and we can take a listen If you watch the levels here, you'll notice that as the volume dips, it does not dip in the music undipped track. Here we go. (jazzy music) - [Man In Recording] When the Vitaphone was in its laboratory stage-- - It's staying the same level. - a man had to beg me, fairly kidnap me, to get me down to hear it. (light music) - [Instructor] So that's another tool in your arsenal, another aspect you can use to create your custom templates. And if your delivery requirement requires a music undipped track, now you have a fast and easy way to set that up and recall it later in any session or project that might require it.