Protools workflow issue how to strip silence and fill all gaps simultaneously

[Brian Merlen]

We use strip silence to remove breathes in interviews along with some trims here and there leaving huge gaps we currently manually fill with room tone. Is there anyway to select all the gaps at once to fill them all with room tone? In media composer I'd just shift click gaps and fill or delete depending what I'm doing but protools LE 8 doesn't seem to have any similar workflow to fill say a hundred gaps at once that we can figure out. So far I select gaps using tab one at a time and paste it in but there has to be a faster way? Thx it's driving us nuts here!!!

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Not sure if the is helpful but I was recently looking at some info about the Izotope products and I seem to recall they have a plug-in that does something like that. Might be worth a look.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Brian, I think it's wrong to strip out all the breaths in interviews because the risk is that this will tend to make the person you're interviewing seem like they're dead and robotic. People in real life actually breathe. Generally, what I've recommended to clients is that they just duck the breath a few dB to diminish it but not completely eliminate it.

Otherwise, Strip Silence works very well in Pro Tools, but I generally only use it to clean up and organize dialogue, not to eliminate breaths in an interview-type situation:

https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct05/articles/ptworkshop.htm

While it's true that there are plug-ins like Vocal Rider and DeBreath from Waves, I don't think anything can replace just an experienced mixer manually riding the levels with his or her hand on the fader. It's not rocket science to do. Vocal processing is an art, and it's always a judgement call as to whether EQ, compression, limiting, and/or fader-adjustment is needed for any given situation.

 

[Richard Luke]

Since you have separated dialog with gaps you could select all on the dialog track, option click and drop it straight on a track of room tone. It will only replace the areas of dialog and leave room tone in the gaps.

 

[Andreas Mendritzki]

Since you have separated dialog with gaps you could select all on the dialog track, option click and drop it straight on a track of room tone. It will only replace the areas of dialog and leave room tone in the gaps.

yep

 

[Brian Merlen]

Since you have separated dialog with gaps you could select all on the dialog track, option click and drop it straight on a track of room tone. It will only replace the areas of dialog and leave room tone in the gaps.

Not sure if this is a protools 8 LE issue but when i strip silence to make the gaps, then select all on that track and option click it on to my room tone track its copying everything including the gaps leaving me no room tone on the second track. we have tried various work arounds involving extracting vs strip silence, positive negative... but the main thing is we cant seem to get it to work. one of the engineers was able to get one track to have the gaps and the other to inverse it and have room tone on the other track but any time we combine it cant seem to get it to function right and we end up copying gaps and then undoing room tone or vice versa and undoing dialogue when we reverse it. which coming from media composer really surprises me im new to protools but id think this should function the way you describe and it simply isn't we are on 8.04 if that helps identify the bug? thanks

ps for our purposes we need the breathes removed, i know its kind of weird and unnatural, but we have strict requirements to do this so we fill it all manually by clicking/dragging one at a time or using tab and then selecting the gap and pasting room tone in each gap one at a time. but both workflows seem very manual for something that should work easier. avid wont answer me on why this doesn't work unless i give them 40 bucks for a support code so next up i may try that unless one of you or another forum has any ideas? im honestly not sure why this wont work at all for us...

 

[PatrickFaith]

How Marc said it with automation is how to do it. For dailies I some sometimes use a mix of the fab filter stuff with this utility program called trackspacer, these needs protool 11 or 12. I also use the rx5 line. There is a monthly cost for protools 12 you might want to look at. For corporate stuff I use to use the Adobe sound packages which come free with it. Lynda.com has good tutorials for what you want to do.

 

[Brian Merlen]

yea im not sure what to do cuz im not the owner here and budgets always a bit tight...maybe its not in this old version? we need at least 4/5 computers running at once here....do you happen to know if they do free trials cuz maybe if i can show them how much time it will save them they would be more receptive to the idea? or get a single seat for mastering? thanks

 

[PatrickFaith]

protools single seat for just about everything you need to do is 30$ a month. gets cheaper for longer. i'd also check out the adobe sound tools, almost everyplace has that monthly license that includes the suite.

 

[Richard Luke]

Brian you need to be on the hand tool only and in object mode and it will work

 

[Brian Merlen]

i tried in that mode and it still isn't working for me...ill get a free trial going on another machine here monday of the new version to see if that works. im still not sure if this is a bug or just this functionality doesn't exist in 8.04 LE? any other advice is highly appreciated as always guys, thanks!!!