I’m a lifelong Pro Tools user and have started my first games project in FMOD so am leaning it right now.
One thing I’m hoping to understand is how best to approach saving projects.
Let me explain, in Pro Tools, you can set an automatic backup save of your project as often as you like (every 5 mins for instance) so if you get a crash, all is not lost - is there anything similar in FMOD?
Also, Pro Tools has a ‘save as’ function so I can save different stages of my sessions in case I need to go to an earlier version. Does FMOD have something like this?
It seems to me that both of these things are unavailable in FMOD? Given this, if someone could just explain how they go about saving their sessions and how they approach it it would be very helpful.
For instance, if I do something stupid like delete some cool fx chain I’ve been working on and accidentally save that in FMOD, I presume the work is lost?
FMOD Studio does have an automatic backup save feature, though it works a little differently to the one in Pro Tools.
Instead of saving a backup copy of your entire project every x minutes, FMOD Studio saves a record of every change you make to your project while working. This record of made-but-unsaved changes is only purged if you successfully save the project or decline to save changes when prompted to do so.
If you load a project in FMOD Studio, and FMOD Studio detects any unsaved changes in its record, FMOD Studio will prompt you to either restore those changes, or to discard them.
This feature means that, in the event of an unexpected power cut or similar inconvenience, you’ll actually lose fewer changes than you would with a Pro Tools-style autosave system.
FMOD Studio has this feature. To save a copy of a project under a new name, make sure your project is loaded in FMOD Studio, then open the “File” menu and select the “Save As…” command.
Yes, if you delete something from your project and then save your project, that item will be deleted from your project.
If you want to be able to roll back to earlier saved versions of your project, we recommend using one of FMOD Studio’s source control integrations.
Awesome, thank you Joseph for your detailed and well explained response.
On the ‘save as’ functionality, I presume it doesn’t save an entire copy of the session including all assets etc. but rather just a copy of the FMOD project file?
By default, it saves a copy of the entire project, including all assets (other than those in audio tables, if your audio tables are external to your FMOD Studio project’s assets folder).
If you want to override this behavior, you can do so by specifying an external assets folder for your project in the “assets” tab of FMOD Studio’s preferences dialog when you first create the project. If you do not do this, all assets imported into the project will automatically be copied into the project’s “Assets” subfolder.
I should mention that “an FMOD Studio project” is not a single file. Rather, it is a folder containing multiple subfolders and a large number of files - some in binary format (the assets and built banks), others in xml format (the metadata that defines all content designed in FMOD Studio). The reason the project is made up of multiple files is twofold: It support multiple users collaborating on the same project without overwriting each other’s work when using a source control integration, and it improves FMOD Studio’s performance, allowing FMOD Studio projects to scale to any size.