AutomationPanel
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Main Page > REAPER Documentation > Reaper Suggestions
Contents |
The Current State
A mixing situation will call for many different actions. You'll want to change volume levels, send levels, plugin parameters and so on. Reaper allows the user to change the activation, arming and display of each and every parameter, and herein lies a problem of efficiency. The user has to handle the setup of each and every parameter one by one, on every single track.
The Problems
Setting up automation recording takes a very long time, orders of magnitude more than in applications like Nuendo, Protools or even Cubase.
Solutions
The automation panel of Nuendo shows a good way to do a lot with very little action. The control panel section headed by the buttons with the labels "Suspend Read", "Suspend Write" and "Show Used" are a simple way to handle readout, arming and display of automation on the tracks session-wide, in a clear and concise manner.
This level of control enables the user to work on specific aspects of a mix, without altering any other.
To illustrate this, here's an example.
Say you've written volume and send level automation across four vocal tracks, and now you've decided to treat each individual track with a different EQ setting, but you're treating other parts of the mix of the tracks with different EQ settings. For this you must use the WRITE mode, as you'll be playing your section in a loop and want to wipe the slate on all parameters of the EQ.
So you protect your existing volume automation and send level automation by clicking on the Volume and Send buttons of the "Suspend Write" section. You could even suspend reading of the parameters you wish to change in the "Suspend Read" section to protect yourself from ugly jumps in the automation that may play back when you intend to change only a single parameter on an EQ or compressor, and work in Latch mode instead of Write mode.
There is another advantage to this panel. It gives you visual feedback on every button you press on it. It is unlike many actions that may show no sign of its work. The ENVELOPE window is usually hidden, and it can stay hidden with control switches like those on the panel.
You'd still need to activate a bunch of parameters in the envelope window sometimes, and surely you could add some controls inside the envelope window to speed that up, like having a checkbox for every plugin and column of checkboxes.
For active mixing, this panel of sections would take the place of tens, if not sometimes hundreds of clicks on checkboxes. This kind of panel can be a good start or an inspiration for an even better way to handle this.
The discussion that lead up to this design can also be read here: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=26116
