If you are working on a one-minute commercial and the Edit Window Default length is set to one hour, the scroll bar will be very insensitive. The scroll bar across the bottom of the Edit window represents 100 percent of the Session timeline. The Edit Window Default Length has been around for ages, but it never fails to amaze me when I turn up at a client's premises to find they have this set inappropriately.There are two levels of this feature: the first is a function description, and the second is the details section, which adds items such as track names. Fortunately, you can turn it on and off from here. This is an excellent help feature for beginners, but can get a little annoying for power users.
Tool Tips Display: Pro Tools 7 brought us Tool Tips, whereby a descriptive box appears whenever the cursor hovers over a button for a few seconds.This page, not surprisingly, enables you to configure how Pro Tools will display various options: Instead, we're going to review how some of the settings can affect the way Pro Tools functions, and look at some of the other settings that might have escaped your attention, especially where they have consequences that aren't obvious.
We're not going to go through every setting here, as the Pro Tools manual does a very good job of that. In this article we're going to concentrate on the first five of these pages. The Pro Tools Preferences window can be reached from the Setups menu and has seven pages or panes, which can be accessed by clicking the list across the top of the Preferences window.
Some of these can make a big difference to both the sound and the ergonomics of Pro Tools, and as we'll see, it's possible to come up with a general-purpose set of 'recommended' settings that should give the best results for most users.
In this month's Pro Tools workshop article we're going to take a closer look at some of the application's Preferences and work out what the various settings do. It takes five minutes to set up your Pro Tools Preferences, but getting them right can smooth your workflow and even allow you to run more tracks from your hard drive.