So often I get ProTools mixes in for mastering that are 24 bit, when the engineer bounced the mix at 32bit. I send them this video to help get it sorted out with the Session bit depth settings. Thank you for this excellent bit depth and dither explanation, Paul!
Paul these are hands down the best Pro Tools tutorials on RU-vid! Thank you for all that you do. I would love to see you do a video on the I/O setup window, as no one has ever covered that topic with your level of depth before. Stay great bro!
You're an excellent teacher! Please continue to produce these extremely informative videos. Especially on subjects that explain why something is or is not important to do. Thanks again.
Thanks. I was recording in 32 bit float and bouncing to 16 bit to put on CD. I put a dither on the master track just before bouncing and I can tell the difference between that version and a bounced file with no dither. Dither made it sound cleaner and more cohesive.
Nice review. It would have been nice if you had shown how Bitter detects for oversample peaks, for example when checking for any overloading between chained plugins on a channel.
Paul ... this is one outstanding tutorial! I have one question please. If I am using OTB summing, a Dangerous Music 2 Bus LT, are you recommending that I use a dither plugin on each of the buses feeding the hardware outputs to the summing box? Thank you.
+DF Tweedie That's a good question. If it's going out of a 16 bit D/A convertor then I'd suggest that you probably should dither each output. If the convertor is 24 bit (more likely) then it's best not to dither.
Great video Paul! One question, is ProTools dithering automatically after "bounce to disk" every time? Like if I dither myself, there will be two sets of dither? Or will ProTools cut the dithering prosess if it detects that I`ve dither manually? Thanks
Hi Simen. Bounce to disk will never automatically add dither. The only time Pro Tools automatically dithers anything is when you use the Export Selected As Files command from the Clip List menu and reduce the bit depth to 16 bit. The only dither which will be included during a bounce to disk is dither which you've added as a plug-in yourself. If you don't add it Pro Tools will just truncate the last 8 bits.
Paul, I mix to a stereo track in PT12 at 24bit. After printing the 2mix to the audio track in 24bit I then use an audio suite plug to dither it down to 16bit. Finally, I've been exporting the dithered 2mix using the "export clip as file" and select 16 bit. QUESTION: Does PT recognize that the 2mix is already 16bit and leave it as-is, or does it add another layer of dither?
Just to clarify: ProTools uses the old Dither every time you bounce period, or just when you bounce from the clip list? Can you choose the dither when using "Bounce to Disk" ?
If you bounce it from the timeline with no dither plug-in then it won't be applied. If you export audio to a lower bit depth, it's applied automatically.
Great video and I was really inspired by it. I worked with a lot of bad and clipped dialogue tracks this summer and wanted to try it out. So, I tried doing this on some dialogue and it doesn't seem to be working. I switch my session to 32-bit, recorded the clip back internally into Pro Tools, applied the gain reduction, but the file is still flat-lined. So, is this only possible if the original file wasn't clipped to begin with?
+Tcapac This is only possible if the clipping was caused internally within the software at 32 bit. It can't correct for clipping which was incurred at the recording stage. There are some plug-ins which can deal with that sort of thing though. Take a look at Izotope RX4.
+MENT Probably not. Your audio interfaces will be 24 bit so if you record everything at 32 bit float you will just end up using up 1/3 more disk space. I'd say record at 24 bit and switch to 32 bit float if you're doing any internal laybacks within the session. By that I mean bouncing to tracks. 32 bit is also great if you're mixing something down to send to a mastering engineer.
@@paulmaunder3007 Hey Paul. Thanks for taking the time to make this informative video. On the above point I've heard a lot of conflicting information in regards to 24 bit to 24 bit bouncing. Bob Katz maintains that since larger word lengths are created by the DAW to handle the processing, bouncing to 24 bit is still a truncation event, necessitating dither. Any ideas on this? Cheers
@@parlourstepsmusic As I mentioned in the video, the Pro Tools mixer is 64 bit floating point so the audio passing through it will be operating in an environment of greater resolution than 24 bit. Technically, it probably is a good idea to dither when bouncing to 24 bit but also consider the fact that 24 bit dither is around -144dB in level and the truncation is most probably imperceptible to any human. But sure, for the sake of best practice and the theoretically optimum result, dither when bouncing to 24 bit. As an additional point, a read about a double blind listening test where a group of listeners were given the task of differentiating between 24 bit 96kHz and truncated (no dither) 16 bit 44.1kHz. The results were consistent with guess work (49.8% one way vs 50.2%the other). And that was 16 bit!
