Logic/Protools problems... any help?

[J. Whaley]

Hello all... I've got a piece I've been working on that is almost 27 minutes long. It's an underscore and at the end of the day there's almost 120 audio tracks! Yikes. Alot of stuff. Usually when I pull stuff into PT from logic I just record all my files from the same start time. But since this song is so long and there's so many tracks, I see no reason to waste the hard drive space. SO:

I've marked the files with the measure number where they start and have been pulling them all in. And then I realized that Pro Tools isn't reading my MIDI file correctly. So when there's a retard, the next downbeat doesn't exactly line up. This is throwing all my files off.

So, the 2 solutions I've come up with are as follows:

1) Time stamp all the files in logic and have PT move the files to the original time stamp. Sounds simple, but I can't find anything in the Logic manual about time stamping files! errrrrr. Does anybody know if I can do this and how?


2) The other situation would be if I did merge all the files to the same start time at the top of the song, and then if I could do a "strip silence" and clean out the spots where the files don't play, and actually remove that space from the drive. This would accomplish the same thing. Anybody know how I could do this?


Thanks in advance for all the great advice!

J-

[Nick Batzdorf]

If you use .wav files in Logic (Broadcast Wave), they automatically include a timestamp (it's part of the format). I'm not sure whether SD2 files include it automatically - although I think they do - but it should be easy to tell in Pro Tools if you try to move them in Spot mode.

You could also try to export an OMF file from Logic, but I think that's going to write new files too.

Strip Silence in either Logic or PT will remove silence, but of course that's only going to reclaim space from end-to-end tracks, not save it in the first place. Unfortunately, silence takes up exactly the same amount of space as a full scale square wave!

[Nick Batzdorf]

I just checked, and I was wrong about OMFs. Logic has an option to export OMFs with or without including the files, so that should - should - work.

[J. Whaley]

OMF won't work for me because PT LE won't import them without an add on software.


Is there any way to actually clear disk space when you strip silence?