Merging Technologies

This has been covered before, but I never feel it carries momentum to get high onto the wish list.

I edit a lot of high track count recordings, figures up to 90 odd is not unusual for me. It is therefore important that all tracks are grouped so when I cut, or adjust a crossfade, all tracks follow.

In the middle of all this I sometimes have need to work on a single track. So I un group the tracks. I now need to re-group all the tracks again. The official method appears to be to SHIFT select every clip and then group the selected clips. Fine but when you are dealing with 90 something tracks, this is not really practical. So to get round this I have built a macro that in effect selects and groups ALL clips that happen to be under the cursor. This is fine, and it works.

EXCEPT.

A drawback to this macro is that it groups ALL clips under the cursor. Including clips that are in other track groups. My problem is that I mix down the multitrack onto another couple of tracks in another track group through an external mixing console. If I want to go back make an adjustment I just go back and drop in over the already recorded mix down tracks. But if I un group the multi track, then run the macro to re-group them, I now group the mixdown tracks too.

Another situation. I record classical recordings for television, so I need to record while in sync to timecode. The recordings tend to be public performances in the evening finishing after 2200 hrs. We use time of day timecode, and when we make a two separate recordings. We offset the timecode generator by 12 hours to ensure the timecodes are different. After the video edit and after I have applied the EDL. the edit starts at 1000 hrs on the timeline. If the edited programme goes onto another reel, the timeline re-starts at 1000 hrs again. This is as instructed by the people taking delivery of the programme, so I've got no choice but to work this way. So I end up with lots of multitrack reocrdings at the same point in time, but in different track groups. Once again my macro become un-usable and I have to resort to selecting every track in turn and grouping them together.

What I would really like to see is a command that selects all clips under the cursor (or under the mouse pointer) in just the currently selected track group. When I say clip, I refer to the whole clip, not just between the mark in and mark out points. It doesn't have to group the clips together, there might be some people who don't want to actually group the clips, just select them.

How does that grab people?

Regards,

Julian

Hi,

I just posted an answer to a similar problem in thread http://forum.merging.com/viewtopic.php?t=2736.

In your case, you could do the folowing: In the Track Groups tab, choose "Selection=YES". This forces any selection (click+drag) within a track group to span all the tracks in the group. If you make a selection that spans over the clips you want to group and hit CTRL+G, all the clips affected by the selection will be grouped, even if just a small part of the clip is selected. I usually work with this option checked. You can still make selections on single clips by pressing SHIFT+ALT before selecting.

You can also select one clip in a clip group by CTRL+clicking on it. Unfortunately you can not select more than one clip with CTRL+click.
Suggestion to Merging: implement SHIFT+CTRL click = select more than one clip within a clip group.

I have made some macros that groups/un-groups all clips in a track group and groups/un-groups only the clips under the cursor in the track group, which I use all the time. I can mail them to you if you like.

I have suggested for Merging to add a option in the Track Groups Tab that when checked would group all clips in the track group for editing, regardless of whether they are part of a clip group or not. This way it would be very easy to ungroup all the clips in a track group, perform the edits on some of the clips, and then regroup alle the clips in the track group. Pro Tools has this feature (called edit groups) and I miss it EVERY time I work in Pyramix!

Regards,
Øystein Halvorsen
NRK

I have been struggling with selection av multiple clips inside a clip group. Found this thread when searching for solutions.
This would be a good solution. Has any alternative solution emerged since 2007?

ljudatervinning wrote:I have been struggling with selection av multiple clips inside a clip group. Found this thread when searching for solutions.
This would be a good solution. Has any alternative solution emerged since 2007?

In a word, no!

This is still a feature of Pyramix, and an annoying one too.

I've moved on since I made the original post in 2007 so this is not as big a problem for me. but would still like to see a way of selecting clips with a high track count. rather than SHIFT+ click on each track in turn.

Julian

Julian Gough wrote:

ljudatervinning wrote:but would still like to see a way of selecting clips with a high track count. rather than SHIFT+ click on each track in turn.

Try this:
Click on a track - the top track within a clip you want to select. Do not release the click yet.
Press & hold down shift.
Drag your mouse down to select more tracks.
Release mouse click, then release shift.
Make any changes to all the selected tracks. Tasks like clip gain, reset envelope, etc. will apply to the entire clip, not only the highlighted area selected.

Hope this helps.

charlienyc wrote:Try this:
Click on a track - the top track within a clip you want to select. Do not release the click yet.
Press & hold down shift.
Drag your mouse down to select more tracks.
Release mouse click, then release shift.
Make any changes to all the selected tracks. Tasks like clip gain, reset envelope, etc. will apply to the entire clip, not only the highlighted area selected.

Hope this helps.

I tried that, It only works if all the tracks can be displayed on the screen at the same time. I reach the bottom of the screen but still got loads more tracks that I want to select. What would be good is that the screen starts to scroll down, sadly, it doesn't. I have to release the mouse, scroll down manually then SHIFT + click individually on all the other tracks. Which for high track count projects, could be quite a lot.

Julian

Yes, a very useful feature that should also be easy to implement is that it starts to scroll once you reach the bottom with a selection. Would be very useful.