[markblasco]

Ok, well this is one of the reasons that I switched to Reaper, which is a lot easier for me in a lot of ways to do film stuff, since I don't have to worry about whether each instrument is compatible or not (since it seems to run just about everything under the sun), and the 64bit version doesn't have any ram limits, so I can host a lot of instruments without running out of ram. As for some of your questions, though:

1 - I'm pretty sure you can't do that with ProTools (unless something major changed in this regard with PT8, since I haven't really used it much after 7.4) You get one sound per track, so if you want more, you have to add additional tracks. To me this makes much more sense than what you are describing, but I come from a background of live rock music recording, so I want everything on it's own dedicated track for adjustment later on.

2 - Groups are your friend here. You can have each track in more than one group, and you can show just the groups you want to see, so you can have your solo violin in the strings group, the violin group, the solo instruments group, and the orchestral group, and it will show up for all of these.

3 - You could always rewire another program which hosts your instruments (such as Bidule, Vienna Ensemble Pro, or even Reaper), which will allow you to access more ram.

4 - No Idea

5 - This probably isn't a bad way to do things, and then you can just hide the midi track afterwards.


The idea of a template is a good one, but if you don't need all of the tracks up and running from the get go, what you can do to save some RAM is just start a new project from a template which has your reverbs, routing, and anything you always use. Than, you can import session data from another template (which has everything) one track at a time when you need other instruments. This way those instruments have all of your settings already set up, but don't take up any resources unless you add them in. The other option is to have your plugins for the tracks you are not currently using disabled (not just bypassed), which keeps them from using any resources, and then you just enable them when you need them (I believe you hold down the control and windows keys and then click on a plugin in the edit/mix window to do this)