Transferring Pro Tools Sessions with Fab Dupont

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Good morning, children! Today, we're gonna touch on a riveting subject such as: the Pro Tools folder file structure. Mmmh! How to export a whole Pro Tools session so you can send it to someone without missing stuff like the lead vocal, for example.

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Important stuff! Let's go.

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Let's create a Pro Tools session File.. Create New.

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Most people do this and call it, like: 'My Session' We're not gonna discuss this little thing I'm doing right now because that's a different video.

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And I want to create it on the Desktop.

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Here's the folder that Pro Tools created for me.

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It's called 'My Session', happily named.

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Inside that folder, Pro Tools created for me, handily, a bunch of folders.

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I will let you guess what is going to go into the 'Audio Files' folder, the 'Bounced Files' folder is a little more cryptic: this is where Pro Tools will by default park every file that you bounce. Hence the name.

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The 'Clip Group' folder is maintenance, you don't need to care about it, Pro Tools uses it to store information that he needs to recall when you reopen the session, later, when you grow up, if you grow up.

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The 'Session File Backup' folder is the folder in which Pro Tools will incrementally keep versions of the session.

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You can force Pro Tools to auto save a backup of your session down to the minute, if you want, so even if you crash or whatever happens, World War III, anything, you will have a backup of the last minute of the work you've done which is very useful, especially for WW3.

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'Video Files' it's written on it.

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The 'Wavecache' is the file that Pro Tools uses to store the waveforms that you see on the screen, it's a way for the software to have pre-calculated waveforms so that they display quickly.

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So this is what Pro Tools creates when you create a session.

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What is nice about this is that it's organized for you so you could decide to ignore these rules and guidelines and make a mess but we're not that kinda people, here, so we're not gonna do that.

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There are some extra folders that Pro Tools will create, for example: if you tune something with Melodyne you will see a 'Melodyne' folder come in there. Technically, the Melodyne plug-in is creating that folder and parking it inside the session folder so that everything is together, which is lovely so you don't have files all over the place.

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However, there are a couple things you need to know to make absolutely sure that you don't have files all over the place.

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Let me show you.

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The secret preference that will save your life and your family's life and their family's life forever, seven generations down from now is here: go to 'Setup', 'Preferences' and here in the 'Processing' department you have this thing that says 'Automatically copy files on import'.

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What does that mean? That means that when you drop a file in Pro Tools it will make a copy of that file in this folder right here, the 'Audio Files' folder for example: somebody sends you a bunch of stems you know, like, raw audio files that are not in your session, you're gonna drop them in Pro Tools and Pro Tools will convert them to whatever session file format it is you know, it could WAVs, it could be AIFF, it could be 24 bits, it could be 32 bit float, that's your decision, and make a copy of those stems into this 'Audio Files' folder.

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What I do, is I keep the stem file in the same folder as the session so I am adding to the folder that Pro Tools generates by default.

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The reason for that is I want to be able to have everything related to that song put together in the same folder so you will very often see a folder called 'Name of Song' you know, the name of the song, and then either source tracks or stems, depending on what the client calls it.

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And that folder lives in there.

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That's not a Pro Tools-generated folder I generate that folder and I park it in there.

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But! You're gonna say..

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why not just not have this preference and thus risk your children's' life for seven generations, but..

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..since you have the files already in this folder, here, why do you need to make a copy of them by dropping them and having the copied.

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Good question, thank you for asking. The reason for that is..

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..files never ever fail to get lost.

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By copying and using the life-saving preference the stems into your session and making a duplicate A) You have the original files untouched in a folder, right there no matter what happens. B) You now have, thanks to Pro Tools 'Copy files on import' preference a copy of everything you have that has a Pro Tools unique ID put onto it.

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Whenever you drop a file in Pro Tools, it puts an ID on that file.

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That ID follows the file for the length of the session be it a day, a week or ten years.

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Every single file in Pro Tools, audio file, has unique ID is key, we're gonna talk about it in a few minutes. To summarize: in your Pro Tools session folder you have the folders that Pro Tools creates to do its own kitchen work: Audio Files, Bounce Files, Clip Groups, Session File Backups and Video Files.

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Of those, the only ones you're really gonna look at are gonna be 'Audio Files' in case you are looking for something you missed and 'Session File Backups' when you crash.

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By the way: the preference for session file backups, which is slightly off-topic but I'm still gonna show you..

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and it says 'Auto Backup', it's in 'Operations', 'Auto Backup' 'Enable Session File Auto-Backup', keep however most you want, as you can see I use 100 backups and I backup every 1 minute. Because I'm not paranoid at all! And then there are the other folders that you may put it like the stems or the source tracks or that a plug-in is gonna put in there, like Melodyne would, to keep its.. you know.. hidden files, there.

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One other folder I put in all the time and because of legacy, I call it 'Bounces' and in there I put my personal humanly-generated bounces, not the Pro Tools bounces.

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It's kind of a double use with the Bounced Files but Pro Tools only added this Bounced Files folder two versions ago, and I'm so used and all my assistants are used to seeing and looking for stuff in that 'Bounces' folder and it's called 'Bounces', not 'Bounced Files' so I still keep that tradition so basically now I have a delineation: if I generate the bounce myself, I put it in 'Bounces', and if Pro Tools does that for me through a 'Bounce to Disk' function, I will find it automatically in the 'Bounced Files' folder, which is nice.

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A question that comes to mind is why should you care about this insanely-boring stuff? Good question! Let's look at a real-life scenario: I have here 'Coraçao' by Magda! The thing with Magda is, she likes things filled and she likes to do a lot of overdubs so I have here this session as you can see which is absurd. Sounds good, though! But now I have to archive this session.

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Let's go to the computer's Finder and locate Coraçao's Pro Tools folder.

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There it is. As you see we have Audio Files, Bounce Files, Bounces, I made it myself with my little furry hands as I mentioned before, Clip Groups, do we have clip groups? None.

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And then the 800 sessions that it took to achieve this masterpiece.

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And then a bunch of folders we created: exports, guitar DI, that stuff that is created in the process we put it in the folder so we can always find it.

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Melodyne, plug-in settings, Rendered files, that is something we'll talk about in a second The session file backup folder itself is 7Gb.

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It's just silliness, the whole session is 44.3Gb, now..

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..hard drives are cheap but this, just this one record at this point is 0,5Tb, for one record.

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It's silly, right? Say Magda calls me and says: 'Fab! I don't like your mixes anymore! I want you to send this session to CLA!' So, what I need to do is I need to send him just what he needs: the top playlist, none of the 2-3 years of agony that we went through to get the session to this point.

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How does one do that? Well, it's not that easy because, I mean, I guess you could go in the Audio Files folder and have a laugh! There's 3246 items, that makes no sense! How you do sort through that stuff? Let me show you! When you're about to share a session with someone and you want to pair down to the strictest minimum absolute necessary stuff A lot of people work on the song even the same person works on the song and the track count gets out of control but there's like, fear of commitment so you hide some stuff and often the stuff has audio on it.

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So before I'm gonna send the song to someone if I've decided that I'm only gonna send the absolute strict minimum to that person what I will do is, I will go here, and show only Inactive Tracks.

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And I will do some soul searching and make sure that, whatever is in here is stuff that I really don't need, I'll let you enjoy the absurdity of this particular session there you go! And I will select all that and delete them! Boom! Another thing to do is to get rid of the playlists you don't need.

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You can see there is 81 playlists of drums in this one so, what you could do in Pro Tools is you could decide to delete unused playlists and everything that's not used in this session will be deleted from the session but not from the hard drive, which means that Magda comes back next week and says 'I wanna go back to where we were a year ago!' you still can. You can open the session from a year ago, what you're doing right now is you're creating a new session that only has the stuff that you need for the transfer.

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So, you can see all these playlists have been selected and I am now gonna delete the playlist.

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Notice that nothing happens to the session.

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Do not hit 'Save'! Do not hit 'Save'! All right.

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Just when I tell you to.

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Then, I'm gonna remove all unused files so I'm gonna select in this clips bin any unused file that's been generated by removing all the unused playlists and also by all the files that were just hanging in there.

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Because of years of work.

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You can do that by choosing 'Select Unused' or Shift+Cmd+U.

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Pro Tools tells you: 'Hey! These are all the files that you're not using!' and that's a truckload of files.

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What you're gonna do? Well you could choose to delete these files but then you would break compatibility with your older sessions in case you know, there's a revision of history coming your way or you can just remove them from this session.

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To do so, you can hit Shift+Cmd+B, you could choose to 'Delete', which does that, 'Move to trash', which is kinda like a less of a commitment delete it's like: there's a purgatory before you ruin your life or 'Remove'.

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We're gonna do 'Remove'.

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You have to hit Option, when you do 'Remove' otherwise Pro Tools is gonna ask you if you're sure about what you just did, 800 times. So hit Option 'Remove'.. and now every file that is unused is removed from this session so at this point you have this session live, in Pro Tools not saved yet! Live in Pro Tools that only has the files you need and that's it so what you do at this point you do a 'Save As', stay with me: I always do a 'Save As' so I can come back to this point.

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And I call it..

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'Cons', consolidated.

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That's what I call it, you can call it whatever you want, you can call it 'Margaret' if you want. There you go. So now..

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you have this session that has only the stuff you need and I saved it as.. so all the work I just did is available and recallable but you're still not at the point where you can copy the Pro Tools session folder and send it on its way to CLA, because, you have everything in there, all the history of years of work.

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What you need to do is you need to force Pro Tools to generate a copy of this session with the audio files related to this session and just that and the way to do that is to do a 'Save Copy In..' but before you have to make sure that the person who's gonna get this session also gets the processing if you wanna pass the processing onto them.

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And the way to do that for sure is to do commit.

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So you can select the tracks that you feel have processing that your counterpart will not have but you're married to the processing and you can commit those tracks.

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If you commit the tracks you will make sure before you send a track out that there's a playable version of whatever tracks have very special processing. What I do is I commit the track and I keep the original source track in the session if it's that important to have the processed signal, because sometimes, you know, perspective, perception, sometimes maybe your processing sucks so if you're doing something very special I would commit the track and I will leave in the session and I will keep the original track inactive in the session just in case..

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..and now I really have in this session only what I need. I removed all the playlists the were unused and I removed all the tracks that were inactive and thus unused and at this point is the leanest possible thing.

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'Save Copy In..' is a new step in the life of your song because of the aforementioned unique ID.

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What happens when you do a 'Save Copy In..' is Pro Tools takes this one session copies every file that's in this session and you saw how many files we got rid of in that session..

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..and makes a new Pro Tools folder with the architecture that we showed you at the beginning but.. creates a new unique ID for every files it creates in that session, which means that say you want to open this newly created session and try and use the old audio files from the original session, that's not gonna work.

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So imagine all the potential catastrophes that could happen there.

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If you don't label that stuff very well you will find yourself trying to use audio files from one session and session files from another session and that when your entire children, children's family for 14 generations gets screwed forever.

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It's always a good idea to check what file format you were in before, this is a 2488, I don't wanna sample rate convert so I want to save at the same sample rate 'Save Copy In..' it says you can choose your file type, I keep the same, choose the sample rate, I keep the same, choose the bit depth, I keep the same, don't worry about the Character set stuff, it doesn't matter 'Items to Copy:' Audio Files, Convert to Specified Format I always copy Rendered Elastic Audio Files, I copy everything and then the other stuff you need: Main Playlist Only, I know I know..

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if there's a main playlist only option here.. why go through the problem..

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because this is safe and works. The other one, sometimes..

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Session Plug-ins Settings Folder, in case you know, Melodyne wants to carry over, you never know and that's it! Nothing else! Do not click 'Preserve Folder Hierarchy' or you will suffer! Click 'OK', choose a location, so I'm gonna choose the Desktop, here.

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And then name it something good, you will notice Pro Tools calls it 'Copy of..' and then the name of my session.

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If you leave it like this it's hard because in a search of a hierarchy cold look at the folder this will not line up with the other sessions so what I do is: I remove 'Copy of' but I make sure I keep it.. give it a new name like '2.0' and I click 'Save' and at this point Pro Tools will create a new session, we will save you this part.

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Pro Tools is done folder's been created let's go look at it! There it is.

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Coraçao FabMix pureMix 2.0, notice how lean the file structure is because there's only a session which is our big session, and 'Audio Files'.

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Howe big is this folder? Remember the original Coraçao track for 43Gb Get info.. 6.83Gb now CLA is gonna be happy about this one! In summary Pro Tools is pretty good at keeping your sessions together in one folder, especially if you don't forget to check that 'Copy Files on Import' preference.

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And even though Pro Tools is good at keeping things together in one folder, sometimes..

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..things still get outta hand and you wanna create a sub-session or a 'start fresh' session and 'Save Copy In..' is the way to do that but you have to remember to: A) remove unused playlists, remove inactive tracks and all that stuff that creates noise and garbage in your session folder.

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Don't forget: if you choose to go ahead and 'Save Copy In..' you will create new unique file IDs for the audio files, which means: that you're gonna break backwards compatibility with the previous sessions.

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That doesn't matter if you use this to share a file with somebody else, CLA or someone else or to archive it long term and you know that the person you're gonna work with is not gonna wanna go back a year or two years ago in mixes, for example: NOT Magda.

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That's about it! What is left to do for you buddying sessions share, is to zip the file because, it's better to send one big file over the internet because you're using the internet, right? The one with email, that's the one! So you zip the file and then you send it to CLA and then you wait for the results.

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Et voilà!