First, configuring your system. Understanding your PTHD automation prefs and your ICON console prefs is vital to getting the system working the way YOU want it, rather than YOU working the way the console wants:

PTHD Prefs

ICON console prefs - aimed more at DCommand

Most folks can find their way around the board pretty easily, particularly if they are familiar with PT in the first place, but will possibly be intimidated by how to insert a plugin onto a channel.

ICON Assignment matrix - inserting plugins

Another great feature on ICON is interrogating your signal flow by holding the sends button, or opt/alt sends button to show the input/output view:

Where is your signal coming from and going to?

Now you’re ready for the big league - CUSTOM FADERS…unique to ICON - the key to navigating your mix on the console in the context of the mix, rather than following the layout of the session inside Pro Tools

Introduction to Custom faders

Lets leave custom faders for a minute and look at the new plugin mapping feature…

Intro to Plugin mapping with PT8

Now back to custom faders to put the two together:

Mapping plugin parameters and other mix components together into custom groups

OK, so now you’ve got a very good idea of how to move everything about and navigate your way around the ICON. Why do we have so much flexibility in where things go?? Well, simply put, to automate your mix as effectively and effortlessly as possible. So lets more on into automation.

If you like to automate your mix moving down the timeline, typically in Touch auto mode, please consider moving over to Latch mode. Latch allows you to multitask, where Touch will only allow you to work on whatever you are touching at the time. Autojoin and back and play are new features to help Latch based workflows.

Autojoin workflows, mixing down the timeline in sequence

If you work in post, chances are you like to write your automation on a scene by scene basis. The Write To commands are your key. Snapshot automation is also very powerful.

Using the automation “Write to” commands for scene based mixing

Using snapshot automation on ICON

Speaking of scene based automation - or writing automation within a selection, such as to a region - Preview mode is a super powerful tool to use, which largely surpassed older “Automation suspend” workflows:

Using Preview mode with the Latch Prime in Stop Preference

Lastly, you may need to lock up more than one HD rig together to mix your film or you may need HD video playing alongside your mix position. Check our these new, related technologies:

Avid HD picture workflow with ICON and Video Satellite

FCP QT HD picture workflow with PTLE and Video Satellite LE and Decklink technology

I hope these videos are of use to both earlier adopters of ICON and new users. I made these videos to assist freelancers who often have no time or training and are expected to sit in front of a relatively complicated piece of kit and use it proficiently in a very short amount of time. Hopefully they find these videos and it helps take some of the pressure off their shoulders. PLEASE pass this post on to your peers who you think could benefit from the tips and tricks!

Kind Regards,

Brent Heber

Senior Applications Engineer, Pro Audio

Avid Digidesign

Sydney, Australia

Preview mode allows you to skip the “suspend automation” step, and “dynamically suspends” only the parameters of your mix that you touch. So you can hear your changes in the context of your mix, without turning off global automation families like Inserts or volume.

Preview mode and Latch Prime in Stop

“ICON Bootcamp” up next…

These two videos explore the two sides of an ICON suite, the Pro Tools HD system’s preferences and the ICON console’s preferences. Key components of the PTHD prefs are your choices on the “Mixing” page amongst others. On your ICON you can completely customise how the unit behaves, where your custom fader groups go, how many faders they steal, what automation commands you want in your user pages…all these and more allow you to make the console jump to your commands, rather than fitting yourself into the “default” box.

Tweaking your Pro Tools HD Preferences

Customising your ICON Preferences and User menus

Until next time!

Sorry for the break in content.

I’m planning to shoot a few new videos shortly, ICON related, and update a few of the SD videos on Vimeo to HD. Once that’s done I’m planning to collate it all together in a logical progression of ideas to make a bit of a step by step, online ICON bootcamp to post on the DUC. Hopefully that helps. There still seems to be slow uptake on some killer features like Preview, AutoJoin and other custom fader options. I also seem a lot of clients using their ICON with its shipping default preferences so thats probably the next topic I cover.

In the meantime, here’s a short video interview with Eden from Song Zu in Sydney, a well respected advertising house. This video has been in the pipeline for quite a while, so I apologise if its dated a bit now, but the elastic audio information is just as relevent today as it was a few months ago.

Eden @ Song Zu & Elastic Audio

Here is the second part of the interview with Paul where he goes into more detail about Dolby E.

Paul Neyrinck Interview Part 2

Where does your picture department get the audio that they then hand over to you with an OMF/AAF?

Its dead technology. Read more below after enjoying this instructional video about voice over recordings:

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s this thing called the “inter-ma-web” and it connects lots of places too, so the smart coders over at Source Elements created a plugin for Pro Tools called Source Connect. It allows a CD quality stream of audio (and TC!) to be pass 2 ways between two PT rigs connected by decent broadband connections. By decent, I used to have it running on a 256k out and 1500k in ADSL connection and it worked great, with a 300ms delay, which for a VO is bearable.

Sournce Connect was susceptible to drop outs depending on your internet connection, so they have developed a new caching technology (with SC 3.x) to go back after the recording and fill in the gaps with Auto-Restore and Auto-replace functions! Well cool!

They also have a plugin for one way communication that would be handy for quick approvals with multiple parties. Its called Source-Live and it sets up a stream from your PT rig (from an Aux out to the plugin) so that anything you play in the studio can be heard by the email recipients who connected to your stream with windows media player or itunes!

I’m hoping to get an interview with Rebecca from Source Elements in the near future and she can talk us through their various SW with a demo.

A second piece of technology that works very well with Source Connect is Digidelivery. DD for short. DD allows the owner of the box (its a rack mounted server) to send large media packages over their outband internet connection as simply as email. Its integrated into PT and Avid Media composer directly from the file menu, so you can simply DD a PT session and it comes up with the dialogue box similar to a Session session copy as - ie would you like to include media, videos files, etc as tick boxes.

These systems have been used together for remote VO records, where source Connect allows for the director/producer to give the talent feedback on their recording from somewhere else, and at the end of the session, the local PT session recording is delivered to them uncompressed via DD. Tidy workflow!

Paul Neyrinck Interview Part 1

This video shows the HD QT workflow option “Video Satellite LE” in action. Jeff Komar, long time Digi employee demos two Mac pros locked together using the Pro Tools ethernet protocol. A Decklink Extreme card provides external picture on a Pro Tools LE system locked up to the main D|Command ES Pro Tools HD system.

NAB2009: Video Satellite LE in action