Managing “scenes”…specifically, Pro Tools workflow

Question

I'm currently working on a throwback radio drama (no image involved). It's not long, however, production value is going to be very high. There is a fairly significant amount of foley/sound design being applied throughout.

Curious, what can you tell me about track management and scene management in Pro Tools. I'm working the project scene by scene - learning the workflow as I go. For tracks, I currently have 4-5 foley tracks per character, 10-15 stereo and mono tracks for layering fx, and 5-8 tracks dedicated to layering the scene ambiance (all this is in addition to the primary and secondary dialog tracks). I don't have a specific issue with the track workflow, I'm quite interested to get your input on timeline management.

Region groups? Track Groups? Aux sends? Edit/Timecode Lock?

What can I learn....

Answer 1

First, I'd set up submasters for your dialogue, FX, Foley, music and ambience tracks. Example, hard bus (on the output, as opposed to on a send) your dialogue tracks to an aux & solo safe it. Then, hard bus all the submasters to a final printmaster aux (or a printmaster audio track if you're using HD.)

As far as splitting for scenes, it ultimately just needs to be manageable. With 4-5 tracks of Foley per character, you might want to pre-dub this stuff together. Mix each track you need so that you've got a solid sounding Foley mix for each character, and then either use a mix/edit group or do a layback of that mix.

If you stagger by scene (e.g. scene 1 FX uses FX 1-4, scene 2 uses FX 5-8, etc.) your life will be much easier.

I normally use time lock on my regions, primarily with dialogue when sync is crucial.

Region groups are useful for a lot of things, mostly editing, but also if you've got some sort of layered effect that you need to use a bunch of, like a gunshot or monster footstep.

Hope that helped a bit! Good luck.