PT5 / Scrubwheel acting weird

[Chris Lambrechts]

WOW, has it been so long since I've visited this place,.........a whole new section just for us PC owners........great and just in time *G*.

I've just installed PT 5 and got working with it,......everything seems to be functioning well untill yesterday afternoon I used the scrubwheel on my PC. PANIC PANIC, whats happening , my favourite PC tool doesn't function properly anymore.........help......I can't seem to control it anymore,.....it is flying around from left to right.....

Why is the scrubwheel so sensitive since I've installed PT 5 ??? I can't control it anymore with the same detail as I used to.
for instance, in a zoom where I see only 1.5 frames on the screen, I tried to very very slowly move the wheel and I noticed that the cursor jumps in twelve steps to the next frame. I hope you can follow this. What I mean is, that instead of being able to slowly and smoothly move the cursor form one frame position to the the next.....it jumps in twelve or less steps from one frame to the next. very anoying when doing precission editing and the cursor does not want to stop at the right position. Of course you can just mouse click the exact position you want the cursor to be. Still, that is no reason why the scrubwheel shouldn't be able to stop there too.
I've gotten very used to this very nice tool on my PC and I would hate to see it left unused because it doesn't work properly.

Any feedback, comments, help and most important,....solutions would be very welcome


Thanks

Chris Lambrechts

[This message has been edited by Chris Lambrechts (edited January 05, 2000).]

[Chris Lambrechts]

anyone please ????

[Chris Lambrechts]

Digi, can you please let me know what and why the scrubwheel action has changed.......
I went to another PT user today with my PC to see if it had anything to do with my system setup. And nope,.......,it does not have anything to do with my system. Connected to the other system the PC reacted exactly in the same way......a jumpy a very nervous scrubwheel. Th finer fixed resolution works better but then that is what it is supposed to do.
But even this finer fixed (CTL+scrubwheel) has not the same smooth action as the trackball / mouse scrubbing.
One other thing I noticed......when scrubbing in a full window zoom with the trackball....the sound will not speed up. It will not playback faster than the original speed, no matter how fast you control the trackball. Using the scrubwheel on the PC it will speed up a lot......almost like being in shuttle mode, even with the finer resolution shortcut.

Can you guys reply please and let me know what is happening.


Chris Lambrechts

[Chris Lambrechts]

Digi Please.................at least a we don't know ??????:?
Chris.

[Chris Lambrechts]

wondering if I will ever get a reply ??????


Chris
(patient but there are limits)

[Dave Lebolt]

Hi Chris,
Sorry it take a few days for someone to reply. Things are pretty hectic around here. We had a changeover with a new product manager that you should see up on the ProControl section of the DUC soon (Gannon Kashiwa).

The scrub action has changed, but it should be for the better; you just have to adjust your workstyle to get best results. By holding down the Command modifier when scrubbing, you should be getting "fixed fine scrub" which should take care of your problem. If it doesn't (and you've read what I have to say below), please let us know.

Here's the deal: up 'til now, ProControl (and Pro Tools) did not have true "positional scrubbing." This meant that when you moved the wheel on ProControl (or scrubbed with the mouse in PT), you would not be guaranteed to end up at the same place you started at in the audio with a given physical movement. This drove post production editors crazy (and plenty of music folks as well).

For example, let's say you came up in the biz on tape machines (like I did). You rock the reels back and forth, and if you've moved a quarter turn forward, and then a quarter turn back, you're in exactly the same place. But Pro Tools never responded this way, which made it very difficult to scrub to picture to look for lip movements, etc. So now we've updated the algorithm to perform true positional scrubbing. When you turn the ProControl wheel one quarter turn forward, and then one quarter turn backward, you'll be in the same place in your audio, which is great.

Scrubbing with ProControl (and Pro Tools with a mouse) has two important distinct behaviors. If you are not "fine scrubbing" with the Command modifier key held down (Mac), then you're getting variable resolution scrubbing, the "fineness" of which is dependent on the current screen (zoom) resolution you're using. If you're zoomed way out, you'll get crude scrub resolution, and if you're zoomed pretty far in, it will be smooth. As you zoom way in, it'll be extremely fine. This can be very handy, but most times I use fixed fine resolution mode (which you get by holding down the Command key). When you do this, Pro Tools doesn't "care" about screen resolution. It scrubs at a fixed, fine resolution that works great for detailed scrubbing. The advantage of working this way is that you can be zoomed out pretty far, and get great scrub response.

Hope I'm not being redundant explaining all of this. The reason it's important is that the variable resolution scrubbing that you get when you don't hold down a modifier has probably changed at various zoom resolutions because of the new positional scrubbing behavior. This doesn't mean that scrubbing should be bumpy, it just means that a certain resolutions it might be, and not at others (same as the old days, but at slightly different resolutions). But fixed fine scrub mode should be fine. We worked closely with our testers (both internal and external) to get this right. If you hold down the Command key, you should get great response. If that's not true, and it's chunky, perhaps there's another problem that I don't know about… please let us know how this goes.