Soundtrack Pro and Pro Tools M-Powered 7

[Kevin Wells]

Hey everyone. Just planning for a project and want to hear thoughts on Soundtrack Pro vs. Pro Tools M-powered 7. We are editing on a quad G5 and are looking for a good audio program to manufacture sounds for a training video we are doing set in a spaceship. We will be doing a bit of foley work as well. Just wondering what some of the pro/cons are. Any thoughts would be appreciated. thanks.

[Noiz2]

Protools is a better audio program for film post but if you don't have someone who knows ProTools and your not doing a real audio post I would probably go with STP.
STP is better integrated with FCP and I suspect the work in a similar fashion. PT while an industry standard has a certain learning curve and for non sound folks it could be steep. I think FCP and STP share a lot of work flow where going to PT and back would be deep water for someone not familiar with that work flow.

[Nik Manning]

Definetely go with soundtrack pro. The way you can edit the waveforms and see it change is amazing! check out lynda.com it taught me alot about stp. Watch the free interface tutorial. After that watch the tutorials at http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/tutorials/
peace

[Luzer]

I suggest you go with Soundtrack.

M-Powered Pro Tools does not have an OMF import function and it does not have the DVToolkit plugin unlike ProTools LE. But then again, the DVToolkit plugin is a separate software which will add additional cost.

So, Soundtrack is the way to go. If you're using FCP as your nle, the workflow is much simpler.

[RyanT]

Definetely go with soundtrack pro. The way you can edit the waveforms and see it change is amazing! check out lynda.com it taught me alot about stp. Watch the free interface tutorial. After that watch the tutorials at http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/tutorials/
peace

Wow, some of the tutorials on there are pretty cool. Thanks.

[Noiz2]

You obviously are not familiar with Protools. Protools is a MUCH better audio editing application. But as I said I think in this case STP is probably the way to go. Not because of it's "amazing features" but because it works more like FCP and because of the integration. STP can create some big problems if your going to do an audio post elsewhere so it's a mixed bag.

Lack of OMF is a ~~semi issue. Since FCP doesn't really support OMF it's not as huge a deal as it would be with Avid. FCP does not include any automation (vol levels) in its OMFs, or pans and it only supports embedded OMFs which is a problem if your working on a feature that isn't split into reels. There are two applications that I know that get around this issue. one makes a full OMF and the other creates a PT session. If you use the second then the Le limitation doesn't factor in.
There are two Toolkits. One will work with M-powered, but it's not the one that has the OMF import. Both toolkits include a bunch of features and plugins that are pretty useful so while the cost is a bit steep you actually are getting a pretty good deal.


Definetely go with soundtrack pro. The way you can edit the waveforms and see it change is amazing! check out lynda.com it taught me alot about stp. Watch the free interface tutorial. After that watch the tutorials at http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/tutorials/
peace