User Manual

Chapter 11: Sessions and Projects 151
Chapter 11: Sessions and Projects
Sessions and Projects
The first step to working in Pro Tools is creating a
new session or project.
Sessions are represented by session files that can
be saved, copied, and made into templates. Ses-
sions and all associated media and settings files are
stored locally on connected qualified storage sys-
tems (such as internal and external hard drives, or
certain network storage systems (such as Avid
ISIS).
Projects are similar to sessions except that they
store your media and project data online (as well as
caching it locally) in your Avid Cloud account.
Projects also let you collaborate on a track-by-
track basis with anyone in the Avid Artist Commu-
nity anywhere in the world; or, if you prefer, you
can choose your collaborators privately and invite
them to join a project by email as long as everyone
is using Pro Tools 12.5 or higher. Otherwise, proj-
ects operate just like sessions. Projects have all of
the same recording, editing, mixing, and process-
ing capabilities as sessions. As such, throughout
most of this Reference Guide, unless otherwise
noted, any feature or function for sessions works
for projects as well.
Projects can also be online or offline (Pro Tools
12.8 or higher). Online projects are stored in the
cloud and mirrored locally (though the local cache
can be cleared to free up local storage and down-
loaded later). Offline projects are not backed up to
the cloud and are only stored in the local project
cache (you might want to do this to free up online
storage for other active projects). You can only
collaborate with online projects.
Projects store all associated media and project data
in the cloud while caching it locally. Sessions store
all associated media and session data locally, ei-
ther on hard drives in your computer or networked
storage. For example, with a session, you can go to
the session folder and find all of the audio files as-
sociated with that session in the Audio Files folder
(note that if you have configured Pro Tools to store
audio in other locations, those files will not be in
the session’s Audio Files folder). With projects
you must export media from the project as a new
file. While media is cached locally it is all bundled
with the project data, so you cannot simply go and
find individual audio files in the local cache.
You can save a copy of a session as a project using
the
Save Copy In command. This lets you take an
existing session and save it as a project for cloud
collaboration. Likewise, you can save a copy of a
project as a session. You might want to do this with
the project is complete so that you can archive it as
a session and free up storage space in your Avid
Cloud Account.