Archiving a Pro Tools Session

This week I’m going to explain what you need to do in order to properly export a Pro Tools session to back it up or to send to someone else.

Open PT and push Ctrl/Command O and select the session you want to archive.

So everything looks nice and organized fit all the tracks to the screen and Alt/Option A to view the entire session.

You may want to consolidate any regions that are chopped up, or anything that doesn’t start at the same time as the other tracks. This will also allow you to take the audio files and mix in another DAW. To do this select from the start of the session to the end of the region and use the hotkey Shift Alt/Option 3 to consolidate the track. This will create a new audio file, any fades will be written to the file, effects will not be however. If you are sending this to someone else this is a really good thing to do.

Next you will want to remove unused regions and audio files from the session. Go to the region list (right side panel) and Ctrl/Command Shift U to select the unused regions. Ctrl/Command Shift B will bring up the Clear Regions dialog. You want to remove only. This will minimize the amount of files that need to be copied.

So now comes the part where you save it to a new location. Push Ctrl/Command 2 to verify the session sample rate and depth. Go to File, Save Copy In…

Note that the Session Parameters should be the same as the current session. In items to copy you MUST click All Audio Files. You don’t have to click Don’t copy fades files, but it makes the saved session smaller, and missing fades are recreated on opening anyway. Saving the session plugin folder is a good idea if you saved anything to it during the mix, you should have. Keep Copy Of on the file name to indicate this is not the original session. Make sure you are saving to a different drive than the one you are working off of, remember you want your backups on a different drive always. The exception would be if you are saving the session to burn to a DVD. Optionally, you may want to add the date to the file name as well.

Click Save and it will begin writing everything to the new location. This can take a while depending on the size of the session and computer speed.

Thats it. Now that you know how to do it there is no reason not to do this regularly.

Also Interesting:

1. Pro Tools 7.3.1cs3 update
2. Pro Tools vs. Analog Console Mixing
3. Understanding Pro Tools Systems