Comping with take lanes: My experience

I happened to be at a point in one X2 project where I had a bunch of take lanes full of vocal takes, ready for the comping process. And then X3 shows up! So, time to give it a whirl.
 
(I watched the getting started video, and my first comment is, is it just me, or do they zip through the feature just a little too fast? Clearly my mental buffer isn't big enough because I had to keep pausing... anyway.)
 
I wanted to try speed-comping, so I opened the take lanes and swiped with the smart tool to break the clips up into phrases. Selected the first clip, and pressed SHIFT-SPACEBAR to start the process.
 
Observation: The workflow is fantastic, with up-down and left-right arrows working great.
However, it seemed to be hit-or-miss whether the "right" clip was left unmuted. (I think perhaps I was forgetting to hit ENTER to "save" the good clip selection? That might explain it...)
Also, I was clearly hearing playback on clips that were showing as muted - it's like the mute/unmute coloration wasn't following the arrow key 'focus'.
I ended up stopping the playback and deleting clips I knew were "bad" because I didn't want to listen to them again.
 
This was in Sound-On-Sound record mode, by the way. I still don't really understand why there is a new "comping" record mode.
 
I had some trouble with "flatten comp track" - it seemed to miss half of my selected clips - but I think this was because I was confused about which clips were muted and the flatten operation would ignore a muted clip even if it was the only take lane with content at the point in time.
 
I think I need more practice.
 
Another problem: It was almost impossible to re-size (i.e. slip edit) clips. The cursor insisted that I should change the intro fade curve, and never gave me the option to shorted the clip. Always a red line, never a blue. I was trying to take a screen shot of this behavior when something changed and it started working. I have no idea what happened.
 
Conclusion:
Take Lanes are not Layers. They are something else, something great, but not layers. This is clearer in X3 than it was in X2. I get the feeling that X3 still misses the "layers" functionality.
 

The new mute indication does take a little getting used to but I find it a little easier than just the mute icon in the corner, especially on really long clips where you can't see the start of it. Although the mute icon wouldn't go amiss as well but I guess there'd be an awful lot of mute icons all over the place if your comping is anything like mine.
 
Basically if the waveform is dull grey the clip is muted (the header is dull as well). A muted clip can still be auditioned it just isn't "promoted" to the comp take until it has been isolated by either clicking in it (lower half) or pressing enter while it is auditioning.
 
The crossfade tool allows you to slip edit the fades by click dragging left to right. Up down adjusts the crossfade itself.
 
HTH

what would "layers" functionality be?
what's the difference?

so if they made it possible to enable two clips simultaneously, then it would be layers?

stickman393
I feel that this is distinct from a feature such as Take Lanes where there is an assumption that only one overlapping clip should be audible at any one time.
 
At this point, I think this uncertainty stems from my unfamiliarity with the X3 implementation.

Read my thread concerning a heads-up about comping...the issues you've described seem to be almost completely due to unfamiliarity. For example, you can do "multiclips" if you want more than one clip to play at a time, and you can definitely do fades. And if you're going to do comping, it's best to select comping mode.
 
All of these same things (and a few more!) threw me at first, until I had several "ah-ha!" moments after reading the online help thoroughly. The bad news is there's more to learn if you want to use the new comping options effectively, but the good news is you'll save so much time in the long run you'll more than make up for the time spent learning.

nullobject
How do you get the direction arrows to work? When I hit them it moves between tracks or busses and tracks?

I have the same problem. I recorded three takes in comping mode and broke them into segments. I can use the mouse to audition and select different segments fine, but the arrow keys bounce me around various other parts of the screen (e.g., tracks, busses).  Also, hitting shift+space does not result in looping the selected segment as it is supposed to.  I fully expect this is user error, but I can't figure out where I am going wrong.  
 

nullobject
How do you get the direction arrows to work? When I hit them it moves between tracks or busses and tracks?

I found the problem on my X3 that could be the same for you.  In my key bindings, SHIFT+SPACE was incorrectly assigned to play/stop.  It could be this is something I assigned and forgot about back in some earlier version of Pro Audio or Sonar and X3 retained it.  But it is curious that you have potentially the same issue.  Once I changed my binding to "audition" it works great!