SUMMERY:
For this tutorial I'm going to show you Pro Tools Preferences. Pro Tools has dozens of preferences so I'm not going to cover them all. I just want to go over with you the most important and essential preferences that should be enabled.This will open up a window with 7 different Tabs.
If your not already on the Display Tabs, click on it.
The first section in called Basics. When you are just starting out on Pro Tools it's a good idea to keep the Tool Tips boxes ticked so when you mouse over any little buttons etc in Pro Tools, little tool tips will pop up to tell you what it's about. Once you have become familiar with most things in Pro Tools you can go ahead and take those off.
The Meter section. I like to keep the peak hold at 3 seconds. This will show you how hot your recording levels are and will stay there for 3 seconds.
Clip Indication will let you know if a track Clips. I like to keep it on Infinite so I always know when a track has clipped so I don't forget about it.
I also like to keep ticked Show Meters In Sends View. That way I can see that meter in the Edit Window.
Next is Always Display Marker Colors. This allows the markers you make in Pro Tools to display different colors so you can easily see where your markers are in the edit window. I tend to just have this off.
Midi Note color Shows Velocity. This is important if you work with lots of midi and you want to quickly identify the harder and softer notes. They will be different shades of color.
The rest of the settings on this page are not as important. They are just color coding for tracks and groups etc.
Moving on, Lets's go to the Operation Tab.
This is where we have the absolute most important preference of all.
Auto Backup.
Working in a computer based system to record music is always going to be unstable. Computers freeze up, crash and do some of the most random things sometimes. Pro Tools is also known to be just as unstable and can unexpectedly quit at any time. Usually when you just did something really cool or just got a really good sound going on in your mix.
So, Make damn sure you Enable Session File Auto Backup. don't even think twice about it. Keeping the 10 most recent backups is good but I like to change the backup every 5 minutes to every 1 minute. You just never know.
Everything else on this page is optional and not necessarily important to go through so will move on to the Editing Page.
At the very bottom of this page we have the Levels Of Undo. This allows you to go back in steps of what you have done in Pro Tools up to 32 levels. I like to just keep mine at that but know that the levels of undo are kept in your ram so if you want to save on your computers processing power you can reduce this number so Pro Tools won't have to remember as many Levels of Undo which will allow you to have more processing power for plug-ins etc.
If you have a lot of Ram in your computer (which I highly recommend) then you don't really need to worry about reducing this number. If you don't have a lot of ram, you can reduce this number providing you have made sure your preferences for Auto Backup is set to 2 minutes or less as you won't need Pro Tools to remember so many steps you made to undo. Make sense?
Again, everything else on this page and the other tabs are optional for you to experiment to your liking.
What we have covered here are the main essentials for you to know about and set up before you do anything in Pro Tools.
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