[Michael Carnes]

I'm not doing film scoring (I'm a regular old composer), but my needs aren't all that different from you guys doing scoring. I've set up a new Mac Pro (7.1) with 16 cores and 384GB of memory. My virtual instruments now live internally on a Sonnet 16-channel PCI card--4 M.2 cards set up as RAID 0. My old Trashcan was an 8-core with 64GB. Virtual instruments lived in an external T-Bolt enclosure, on SSD drives also set up as RAID 0. There are no HDX cards in this system: I'm fully native.

I took a large piece which I'd previously built on the Trashcan, using the Dolby Atmos renderer (no external RMU). The piece has 198 active tracks, a lot of Spitfire and NI instruments, along with some pre-recorded tracks. There were a pair of Stratus3D reverbs, 4 Symphony3D reverbs and a couple of Excaliburs. There's some pretty aggressive Atmos panning throughout a large and complex piece.

I was not able to do any meaningful work without freezing a lot of instrument tracks. The minimum load time (with most tracks frozen) was on the order of 15-20 minutes. The piece ran and rendered, but it was right on the edge of what the Trashcan could do. I really didn't want to go the VEPro route, with a herd full of computers that I had to keep synchronized. It's obviously a workable solution that lots of people use, but I'm at the stage of life where less stuff is a good thing.

It's a whole different story with the new Mac Pro. I took the same piece and unfroze all of the instruments. Loading time has never taken as long as two minutes, usually somewhere around 1'55". There's lots of RAM left over, so there are a lot of ways I could tweak Kontakt if necessary. For now, I'm simply sticking with defaults. The piece runs perfectly and you can see from the attached screen caps that the machine is cruising. I should point out that I had email, safari, Slack and a couple of other things running that I'd turn off in most cases.

The first screen cap is the Pro Tools activity monitor, during a busy session. According to this monitor, I never hit 40%. Of course, you should take this screen with a grain of salt. Years ago I had a talk with Andy Hall (long since gone from Avid) about this load monitor. It conveys a lot of information, but it's not an accurate reflection of how the cores are loaded. And to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't say anything about the load outside of Pro Tools.

The second screen cap is the MacOS core activity history (which covers a couple of minutes). If you don't know this display, it can be a little confusing. It shows a single physical core as 2 cores. This accounts for hyperthreading. You can see there's a little hyperthreading going on, but not much. This is a much better way to see the load of everything on your computer. I think this shows the Dolby renderer working in the first 8 physical cores, with Pro Tools more evenly spread across all 16. It also shows all the system stuff and background apps I was running. There's a little CPU spike that I don't understand: it didn't happen on a repeat playthrough.

There are some obvious differences between what I'm doing and what you film scorers are doing. I'm running the soft Atmos renderer. You're more likely to be using an external RMU or perhaps no renderer at all. I'm not running any video and that's going to be a requirement on your side. But I think it does show that you can put a very large template into one machine and either defer freezing until later (or perhaps avoid it completely).

Hope this as been worth the read.