Imagine the scene: You’re preparing for an intense ADR session with a tight turnaround. There are a lot of lines to get through, and more issues you’re noticing as you go. You’re manually creating and labelling clips to keep track of what’s been done, what’s working well, what needs editing, and what needs to be addressed. All of which eats into what little valuable time you have.

This is exactly where our software, Marker, can help, streamlining how notes are incorporated within Pro Tools so that you and your team can keep track of your workload without sacrificing time.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly how Marker can turn a tight project into a more manageable experience.

Marker is also great for Session Notes with a Team, and Speeding Up Project Review, for example with a director..

How Marker Works

The basics of Marker consists of a text box, where you enter your notes, and buttons which correspond to particular tracks within your Pro Tools project.

When assigned to a track (just highlight a track in Pro Tools and Ctrl/Cmd-click on a button), that button will automatically be named and colour-coded to the corresponding track.

Multiple tracks can be assigned at once by highlighting multiple tracks instead of just one. In the image below, multiple tracks are being assigned to buttons by using this process:

By clicking on one of these buttons, you’ll insert a note of your choice (either a clip, marker, or a combination of the two) on the assigned track at either the timeline selection or at the position of the playhead, depending on your settings. You have access to five pages of buttons (A-E), as well as a dedicated ‘selected track’ button that sends the note to whatever track is selected within the Pro Tools window.

Marker automatically syncs with your Pro Tools session, saving your tracks, pages, and Favourites automatically so they’re ready whenever you open the session.

Making notes as you go during SFX and ADR Markup sessions

As previously mentioned, notes can be implemented within Pro Tools either at the timeline selection point or wherever the playhead is when the button gets pressed. Notes can also be anchored to typing, meaning that they will be implemented where the playhead was when you began typing, rather than when you actually pressed the button. This allows for notes to be made on the fly, so you can keep note of multiple tasks, over multiple tracks in real time.

In its simplest form, you can use this during a first pass to simply highlight areas where dialogue replacement or Foley is necessary. All you need to do is make sure ‘At Playhead’ is turned on, as well as ‘Keep Text’, so whatever generic note you’re using isn’t removed after a button is pressed. If you want to add more specific information each time, turn off ‘Keep Text’ so that you have a blank text box to add to after you have incorporated a note.

For more in-depth notes on the fly, you can use the Favourites list to add terms that are likely to be used repeatedly in the session. For our example, we’re using an ADR markup session, so all the terms relate to specific types of ADR replacement that may be needed. But for an SFX markup session, this may include a range of generic or specific terms you would need, such as ‘Footfall needed’, ‘Replace scratch audio’, or ‘Insert Wilhelm Scream here’.

You have multiple options for incorporating your Favourites into the text box. For on-the-fly note making, you might want to add notes as quickly as possible, so ‘replace’ is probably your best option, so that no previous information is kept when adding notes. However, if you’d like to keep specific information alongside your Favourite text, you can have the text inserted wherever it’s selected within the text box, or added to the beginning or end of the text (Prepend/Append).

To permanently assign text to a specific button, in edit mode (Cmd/Ctrl-E), you can add custom text to any button of your choosing; this text will appear instead of what appears inside the text box. This allows you to have dedicated buttons for specific notes on certain tracks, for example, in the example we have ‘Frank’ and its duplicate track repeated with a range of notes for each. This is great if you’re focusing on a single character or type of SFX, and you need to quickly make note of a range of edits and additions. As you can just press the corresponding button instead of typing out your edition or selecting a Favourite text.

The power of this is properly exploited when used alongside the key triggers to insert a note. To use your keys to trigger buttons, you have to open the keyboard overlay (Cmd/Ctrl-R), which will show the corresponding numbers and letters for each button on the display. Then to make a note all you need to do is click on the Marker window and press a key.

Different notes for different tasks

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, Marker makes notes as clips, markers, or a combination of the two. So far for this article we have used clips, as they’re useful for quickly jumping to the next clip/note on a track by using the tab key, allowing for simple navigation to what needs doing next in the session and making sure you haven’t missed anything.

It’s likely you’ll be using predominantly one type of note, with the other types being used more sparingly for specific use cases, such as sectioning off a sequence or marking takes for review. To save time changing the Note Type setting each time, you can use the aforementioned edit mode to assign a specific note type to a button. You could, for example, have a dedicated track just for the director or dubbing mixer to review, and have that button create notes as markers so they stand out from your personal notes.

Clip length is another useful option if you’re making note of not only what needs changing, but also the duration of the event. When clip length is locked, you decide the size of your clip within the editor itself, but when unlocked this allows you to create a clip with the length of your selection within Pro Tools. Allowing you to highlight a length of time within your timeline and create a custom note for that specific duration. Very useful for marking up SFX to show type and duration of atmospheres and soundscapes.

Organising your button pages is a recommended bit of prep to ensure your markup sessions run smoothly, especially if you’re juggling multiple hats within the post-production pipeline. Have one page dedicated to the main elements of your ADR or SFX project, with subsequent pages becoming more focused on specific areas or tasks (see image 5 for an example). These pages can have custom text and note types that allow you to get even more specific, allowing for less time editing settings in Marker and more time planning out your sessions.

Finally, it’s worth noting that button layouts and Favourites can be saved as presets for later use in different projects. An invaluable timesaver if you have a naming scheme for both your tracks and notes that are applicable across projects. As loading track presets from a previous session, any tracks with a matching title will be automatically added to the Marker window.

Save Time on Markup with Marker!

Find out more about Marker on our dedicated Marker page, or see how it can help you Work on a Project Review in a Team or to Speed Up a Pro Tools Project Review as well!