Pro Tools 8 has brought a lot of great new stuff, and also some new pitfalls to be aware of.  One thing that changed is the waveform overview engine.  This is nice because you get a 16-bit overview instead of the old 8-bit one, allowing for greater visual accuracy especially when dealing with lower-level recordings.

However, it also means that every waveform from your older PT7 sessions needs to be re-created when opened in PT8, and this doesn’t always work too well.  Here’s the window we’ve all come to know and love:

This process takes significantly longer now that we’re getting 16-bit overviews, and that can be a real roadblock when doing things likes running laybacks after importing stems.  Fortunately, the underlying audio can be played as soon as it’s copied in; there’s no need to wait for the overviews to complete.

In addition to long copy times, we’ve also been confronted with a glitch that can be a real scare before you realize what’s happened.  Sometimes when importing audio from PT7 sessions into PT8, the waveforms fail to calculate correctly and all your regions will appear empty.  Talk about panic-inducing!

Fortunately everything is fine; your audio is still there, and in fact it’ll even play just fine.  All you need to do is re-calculate the waveform overviews manually.  Just open up the workspace, select the audio files in your Audio Files folder, and choose “calculate waveform” under the top-right pop-up menu.  Like so:

Worst-case scenario you can always re-consolidate the audio regions on your timeline to create brand new media that Pro Tools can properly create waveform overviews for.  Of course this is only really a useful option in a stems session where you’re dealing with simple continuous regions that don’t require handles and have no edits.

All of these complications aside, it’s a mighty nice thing to have 16-bit resolution for the waveform overviews, and makes editing an even better experience in Pro Tools.