Watching other people edit sounds in ProTools can be enlightening, but there is one thing that usually indicates how experienced the person is, and that is how reliant on the mouse they are. As an input device the mouse is brilliant because it is easy to use; pretty much everyone understands the concept as soon as they move it. But that ease of use belies the fact that it actually isn’t very efficient because it requires you to locate where the cursor is before you can do anything & it then requires eye/hand coordination to pursue the task.

I have heard some people say ‘But I prefer to use the mouse’ and that’s fine, but I suspect that’s sometimes a bit like someone saying they prefer driving a car with an automatic gearbox when they have never used a manual gearbox. In reality both have their advantages and unless you know how to use both, you simply cannot determine under which circumstances one is better than the other. Inevitably we use both the mouse & the keyboard, but which is better & when?

The answer to that is determined by the task & I’d like to illustrate a series of ProTools keyboard shortcuts that make mouse-less sound editing possible. When you skim-read the many shortcuts listed in the manual these ones don’t appear very significant, and may appear a bit unwieldy due to lots of combinations of modifier keys (command, control, option & shift) while using the numeric keypad plus and minus keys. But if you work as a sound editor I believe these are some shortcuts worth learning until they are second nature & in fact as I started writing this I had to go verify what the shortcuts actually are, as I use them so often & have done for so many years that I do so totally by feel, without any conscious thought as to what keys I am pressing…

I’m going to work through the techniques one by one, but first I want to sort out a bit of terminology, because the way Digidesign choose to describe these shortcuts is confusing to me. In sound post when moving sounds around it can be confusing if people say eg ‘Nudge that region back by 3 frames’ or ‘Nudge it forward by 2 frames’ – it is not a terminology I ever use. I much prefer the terms earlier and later as then there is no confusion if I say “move that sound 3 frames earlier”
See the problem with using the term ‘back’ is that it has two meanings – in this context they mean later but what if someone moved a sound incorrectly & you asked them to move it back to where it originally was, but abbreviated it by saying “no thats wrong, move it back” – do you mean back further in sync? or back to where it originally was? I don’t care for this possible confusion & accordingly I don’t use the term. A few other terms annoy me too eg ‘left edge of region’ is not human speak to me, ‘start of region’ is more like it…. Anyway here’s the shortcuts I am referring to, they are listed in the ProTools documentation in a PDF labelled Mac Shortcuts.pdf

So terminology aside, what do I mean by mouse-less sound editing? Mouse-less obviously means not using the mouse, but sound editing? When working to picture, if we have a soundfile sitting on a track then we will want to do a number of things to it, to make it fit the pictures. First is to alter its sync position relative to the image, then we may want to trim the start and end of the region, cut it into pieces, and also possibly shift sync of the material within a region.

Now nudging a region in terms of sync is very easy, but first you need to check what the nudge value is set to, have a look:

So in my case it’s set to 1 frame and if I select a region and hit the plus key on the numeric keypad the region will be moved one frame later, or if I hit the minus key it will move one frame earlier. Simple, but damn handy eg if a sound feels late relative to picture, then nudging it 3 frames earlier may well solve the problem. But if it still doesn’t feel right against picture you need to know that it was 3 frames you moved it and can then make a decision as to whether you nudge it earlier again or later. Judgement on sync issues is essential to sound editing, both in your edit room but also in a mix situation.

Now when moving sounds around on the tracks we are aiming to avoid using the mouse, so what if a region is five seconds out of sync? We don’t want to sit there & hit the minus button 5 x 24 times, so inevitably we will want to change the nudge amount. Of course you can do that with the mouse but we want to keep our hands on the keyboard, so here is the first of a few more complex shortcuts:

Command-Option Plus or Command-Option Minus
This steps us through the nudge settings, so if we are currently on a nudge setting of one frame, then hitting CmdOptMinus will decrease it to a 1/2 frame, and again will change it to 1/4 frame, or hitting CmdOptPlus will increase it in steps up to one second… You need to get very used to doing this, so it becomes second nature.

For example say a sound turns out to be 5 seconds and 14 frames late & the nudge rate is currently one frame, I would hit: CmdOptPlus, CmdOptPlus, (nudge amount is now 1 second) Minus x5, CmdOptMinus (nudge amount is now 5 frames) Minus x2, CmdOptMinus (nudge amount is now 1 frame), Minus x4. Ok?

In another instance it may be a case of trimming a region start or end to a picture cut (eg cutting ambiences) so with the region selected, Option Plus or Option Minus will trim the region start later, or earlier respectively, by the nudge value. Again I tend to use this command while switching the nudge amount up & down. To trim the end of the region later use Command Plus or earlier Command Minus

The last shortcut in that excerpt from the PDF above is a really handy shortcut when editing ambiences. Say you have cut an element of the ambiences to the duration of the scene but when you play it, the start has an inappropriate wind gust. Rather than nudge the region and recut the start and ends of the region, you can use the Control Plus or Control Minus shortcuts to move the region’s contents by the nudge amount without changing the start or end points! This is also handy if eg your source file has ten metal hits in it, and you have sycned & cut one hit. By using this shortcut you can move through the source files other nine hits without having to trim out the source file to access them. Try it, it makes a lot of sense when you see it in action!

Now if we need to cut a region into pieces, there are a few means of doing this. If the region is selected we can hit Tab to shift the cursor to the end of the region, or Opt Tab to jump it to the start of the region, then use the Plus or Minus keys to move the cursor through the region. Once at the edit point hit Cmd E, and the region is sliced into two parts. To select the first half, hit Shift Opt Tab, or to select the second half hit Shift Tab and then it can be moved, edited etc as above…

Another option for editing is to use scrub, but not using the mouse! Check you have your preferences set so that Operation: Edit Insertion Follows Scrub/Shuttle is enabled. Then use the following shortcuts, again using a modifier (Control) and the numeric keypad:

So to start playback on the track (mono or stereo) that the cursor is on, hit Control 5. By then hitting Control 4 or Control 3 or a lower number you can slow playback down to a crawl. While its playing like this you can hit the minus button and it will play backwards, and to return it to forwards playback hit plus. Now this shortcut has a multitude of uses!!! Obviously you can use it to scrub backwards & fowards to find a cut point. But one very relevant fact is that the video also plays back in sync at whatever speed you choose to scrub at. So say you are editing foley and a hit looks loose for sync. Play it at half speed by using Control 2, and play forwards & backwards across the hit point. Still not sure? Use Control 1 and ProTools will literally crawl across the sync point.
Another practical use for this is when testing soundfiles for possible pitch manipulation and/or reversing. Rather than do the processing to see if it might sound interesting, you can instantly play it forwards or backwards at half speed or slower by using these Shuttle controls. I use this function a lot when experimenting with source files to see if they hold potential for serious manipulation.

Aesthetically I much prefer this ‘constant shuttle’ type scrubbing than the actual Scrub Tool itself – I really don’t like hearing audio ‘wowing’ or varying in pitch as it plays. I know for dialogue editors it can an essential tool but to my ears its grates, whereas I love hearing audio slowed down.

When I get some free time I’ll have a go at doing some screen captures of some of these techniques, but for scrubbing I would need to record the audio on a external machine as unfortunately ProTools hardware architecture does not let you scrub or shuttle through a bus…. doh!

Also an important detail for train spotters re nudge settings: the steps in the nudge amount are dependent on the frame rate you are using;
@23.976 nudge steps are [1/100th frame, 1/4 frame, 1/2 frame, 1 frame, 6 frames, 1 second]
@24 nudge steps are [1/100th frame, 1/4 frame, 1/2 frame, 1 frame, 6 frames, 1 second]
@25 nudge steps are [1/100th frame, 1/4 frame, 1/2 frame, 1 frame, 5 frames, 1 second]
@29.97 [1/100th frame, 1/4 frame, 1/2 frame, 1 frame, 5 frames, 1 second]

Also note: Of course parallel shortcuts exist for ProTools users working on PCs, check your PDFs for the equivalent modifiers….