[BScout]

Originally Posted by JCBigler

I thought feature films were still using live orchestras. 1024 MIDI tracks sounds like independent films that can't afford to hire real musicians.

No.
The mockup is still done in MIDI and in-depth MIDI at that

Not to mention there's a wide variety of synthetic sounds, obscure percussion, and ethnic instruments that are left in the final score even with real orchestra. Templates can have 300 MIDI tracks devoted to different types of metallic hits or pads alone; a lot of those custom built/recorded "instruments." If you see someone like Alan Silvestri, John Powell or Hans Zimmers full templates, you'll see hundreds of tracks -- however hiding the unused groups of MIDI template tracks is pretty common.

And that kind of palette also takes up more MIDI tracks in a template. Cubase and Logic have been handling this well for A list composers. Pro Tools has been awful at this which is why expanding MIDI is/was needed.

The small-minded people railing against this as "not being creative" just lack imagination of what the workflow is like for others (professionals.)