Monday, February 28, 2011

Soundtrack Pro Woes!

File Under Tech Talk:

I'm finishing up my latest film, "Pets" which will be part of an an anthology called SOURCE UNKNOWN.

We're in the final stretch and I'm really excited for you guys to see this thing. Unfortunately, there seems to be one huge obstacle standing in the way: Soundtrack Pro!

The present issue I'm having is that with or without video (a hangup I found out about online), the AAF file output by Soundtrack Pro 2 does nothing but crash Pro Tools, where we're finishing the audio.

And this is just the latest issue I'm having with the program...

Past issues:

-Soundtrack Pro 2 does not like mono. If you try to do certain things with mono you end up with an ear splitting squeal that is somehow able to bypass any kind of volume preset. Apple supposedly fixed this, but only with the release of STP 3. STP 2 remained ignored throughout it's entire release. This can be fixed by converting to stereo, but until you figured out that little trick you lived in fear.

-Soundtrack Pro does not like feature films. As far as I know this is still the case. Although Apple doesn't mention it, STP can not handle a large project without first breaking it into smaller parts.

-While it may have been my doing, I ran into a strange problem where I lost and could not reconnect the video in several Soundtrack Pro projects. I don't know what I did to sever the connection, but I had to re-export the project and connect the video from the new project to the old.

-Soundtrack Pro 2 does not like Final Cut Pro. Tracks converted from mono to stereo in FCP remained mono in STP 2. Which means if you didn't know that ahead of time you get to convert everything twice!

Ugh! What's especially depressing is that if STP worked as smoothly and reliably as FCP it would be an amazing program. As it is, I'm keeping my next feature as far away from it as possible. The headaches just aren't worth it!

1 comment:

Mark said...

Yay software! :(