So you've recorded a bunch of ADR at the stage, you've loaded the media on to a drive, and now you are ready to start cutting. You want to start with the character "Joe", but Joe's media files are in an oddly named folder nested a few folders down on the drive. And once you've found the files, you bring them into Pro Tools on to a bunch of temporary tracks just so you can audition them. Tedious, yes.

With ADR Manager 4, you can store information about all your ADR and production recordings directly in the database. Scan folders or import files to find the media. ADR Manager does the work of linking up sound files to ADR cues automatically, so you can call up all of the takes for a particular cue instantly. Then you can audition each take, circle it, rate it, and add notes about it. You can even transcribe the recorded dialogue if the actor said something other than what was cued. Now you have a database you can use to search for words that were actually recorded, or find only the good takes, or find media files with certain text in the filename.

Once you've chosen the takes that you want to cut, simply select them and have ADR Manager drop them into a Pro Tools session either end-to-end horizontally, or side-by-side vertically on adjacent tracks.

But what about production sound? Certainly looking for alts in production sound can be the same time-consuming headache as searching for ADR takes. Well, AM4 gives you the ability to import OMF media and include that in the database as well. Now you have all the dialogue recordings for the show in a single database.