Using Elastic Audio...losing audio playback?

[Dabbler]

I just downloaded and installed 7.4 and was busy playing with/learning to use Elastic Audio and I've run into something odd and I can't find any mention of it in the manual or from searching the DUC.

Short version...created a new stereo track, set it to X-Form (rendered processing), dropped a stereo audio file into the track, went to 'warp' view on the track and dragged the last Event Marker out about a second. When I go back to 'waveform' view the waveform itself is grayed out as though it were muted, although the region background remains it's original color, and no audio plays? I hit undo and I get full color audio and playback again, redo...gray audio no PB. Seems like it only happens with the XForm plugin, all others work fine in both rendered and realtime modes.

I tried 'commit'-ting the newly stretched (and grayed) region by disabling elastic audio and selecting Commit from the dialog (per manual p507) and all I get is the baby blue "missing audio" placeholder region...it doesn't seem to be rendering a new audio file like I think it's supposed to (unless it takes more than 5 minutes to render a 38 second clip)

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks much.

[sinukus]

Check in the Protools task manager. XForm is extremely slow, but high quality. You are better off editing with Polyphonic then switching to XForm when you are happy with your edits.

[Dabbler]

sinukus -

seems as though it does take about 5 minutes to render a 38 second clip with Xform....damned my impatience.

But seriously, doesn't this seem prohibitively long for this operation? Based solely on the tests I'm running (using stereo orchestral film score with big brass and heavy percussion) Xform is the only plug of all the Elastics that sounds anywhere near as good as Pitch-n-Time....but if I've gotta wait several minutes to render a 30 second clip, I might as well just keep using PnT.

again am I missing something?

thanks for the tip, should have occurred to me to check the task manager....

[Steve MacMillan]

X-form is crazy slow, but in my humble opinion sounds way better than PnT. I've done some pretty deep testing.

STeve

[sinukus]

You won't be able to do the same level of editing with PnT - like quantizing ... etc. Like I said do your edits with Poly then switch to XForm when you are happy. XForm sounds good but it uses too much CPU for real time playback.

[sinukus]

Oh, there is also a lower quatlity setting in the XForm UI which speeds things up somewhat, but then that would be lower quality

[Dabbler]

Sinukus -

I agree totally that the Elastic interface makes it a LOT easier to manipulate audio than PnT and the like. But, after running tests with the various elastic plugs both in realtime and with rendering, I have to say that sonic-ly the only one I would even consider using on a finished product would be the Xform plug (which, upon further review Steve M, I agree sounds somewhat better than PnT). And while it's true that I can do all the moves with a Realtime plug especially quickly and then switch to Xform to do the final rendering, the fact that it takes literally 4 minutes 30 seconds to render a 38 second stereo clip with minimal time compression/expansion moves makes me afraid to even try it across 64+ tracks of orchestra. Just doing the math based on my experiments with stereo files, it would take roughly 45 minutes to render a 10 second clip across 64 tracks...something that PnT will do in about 3 minutes. Thus even if it did take me 1/2 hour to make the same moves in PnT versus 5 minutes using the significantly more efficient Elastics, I still save time....and lots of it.

I'm without client for the whole holiday weekend, so I hope to actually do some time trials with more in depth track layouts to see if my guesses are correct or not. If it does take such a long time for a high quality render, which is what my clients will demand, it is totally unusable in this incarnation. Maybe it'll get faster in the future, I hope so.

Anyway, after all the hype surrounding Elastic Audio I'm really kind of disappointed by this rendering time issue.

.02 cents