Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/637797
59 Q1 2016 / CINEMONTAGE 59 Q1 2016 / CINEMONTAGE TECH TIPS There are a lot of reasons why you might want to render a track out to another audio track. One reason is to free up resources on your computer. For example, suppose you have a track to which you have applied a lot of processor-intensive plug-ins such as compression, EQ, delay, chorus or guitar effects. Lots of processing can slow down the responsiveness of the program and its ability to play back smoothly, especially if it is a large session with many tracks. By using the Commit function, you can burn in all the effects applied to a track into a new track with a resulting waveform that sounds like the original track but without the processing overhead. Another reason to use the Commit function is so you can give someone a version of the session to work on without having to worry about whether they have the same plug-ins that you used. A nice feature that I really like about the Commit function is that you don't have to render every insert; you can use it to render the track up to a certain point by using the Commit Until This Insert command. Whatever plug-ins remain after that are simply applied to the new track. In this way, you can render some of the inserts into the new track, and apply the rest of them to the new track. When committing a track, a dialogue box pops up, which presents several options from which to choose. You can choose whether you want to commit the entire track or just a selected region. You can also decide whether you want to render volume and pan information and whether to copy sends and group assignments. In addition, there are options that allow you to decide what to do with the original track: Leave it alone, make it inactive, hide it or delete it — which is a good option if you are sure you are done with it. Although you might want to keep it around in case you ever need to change something and recommit it later. If you have an audio track that has multiple cuts and edits, using the Commit command on it will consolidate all the regions on the new track into one. If you like, you can later use the Strip Silence command to separate the audio into different regions automatically. Incidentally, you can also use Commit for multiple tracks at once or to bounce the whole mix down to a rendered track. Commit works not only with audio but with virtual instrument tracks as well, and you can simply drag a midi region (or multiple midi regions) into an audio track beneath it to render it. This is handy if you plan to send your project to someone who might not have the virtual instruments you do. It's also useful for archiving. Besides working on mono and stereo tracks, Commit also works on tracks with multiple outputs. For example, you might be using a virtual instrument such as a drum plug-in that has separate outputs for the kick, snare, toms, hi-hats and cymbals. In this case, Commit can render each output to a separate audio track, a useful technique for those who wish to have precise control when mixing drums. There's another new function in Pro Tools 12.3 called Track Bounce and it allows you to bounce tracks to disk, a useful thing to do if you want to hand off your tracks for mastering. If you use sub group aux tracks, you can render out stem files for delivery. Just select all the aux track sub-masters, then choose what format, sample rate and bit depth you want in the dialogue box, as well as where you want to save them. You can also choose to create mp3 files at the same time (see Figure 4). Figure 2, above: At the bottom of the Playback Engine dialogue box are settings where you can determine the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the Disk Cache. Figure 3, left: Version 12.3 introduced the Commit function. Here is its dialogue box, where you can choose the different options available when rendering an audio track.