OK, but seriously, OFFLINE BOUNCE!

[Kris75]

Originally Posted by lavoll

gah, like for example right now. i forgot for a little moment, and promised the director a work in progress file of a film mix... usually i can just render one out as i put on my jacket and get ready to leave, and then send it off and be on my way... now i have to think of something else to do for 84 minutes before i can go. hehe.

Been there.

[lavoll]

i'm kinda new here at the duc (even though my join date says 2003), and i feel my posts have been kinda negative. pro tools is a lovely program, and i am very glad i am finally getting a chance to work with it and learning it. I just finished mixing 64 kids tv program show in pro tools, and now i am mixing and sound editing two documentaries. the films are cut in avid, and the import into pro tools has been perfect.... but this bounce thing... hehe. do painters charge their clients for the hours the paint needs to dry, saying they need to watch it to make sure the final result is ok? do they frown at modern paint that dries quickly?

[Kris75]

do painters charge their clients for the hours the paint needs to dry, saying they need to watch it to make sure the final result is ok? do they frown at modern paint that dries quickly?

Now that is funny!

[froyo]

Hello. I would like to pop in again and make two recommendations. Number one for those that are working with songs, I would definitely recommend sticking with Bounce to Disk. If absolutely for no other reason than the Quality Control stage I mentioned in my first post. The only way to know that bounces are going down right is to listen to them. Specially if you are doing stems, you have to make sure that the bass is not sneaking into the drum stem, etc.

Again, in professional situations there must be a QC stage before handing things off as the final delivery. You will lose clients quickly if you present a final mix with mistakes and you won't know if there are mistakes in an offline bounce until you listen to it. I realize however that there are stages in a project or situations where a QC process is not necessary. For those situations or for people working with longer projects than 3 or 4 minutes songs look at my next recommendation.

Number two, for longer projects I would definitely recommend either bouncing stems with auxes, or better yet, Record to Disk rather than Bounce to Disk. Say you are working on a video project that is 74 minutes long. With BTD, you have to sit through the entire 74 minute bounce in addition with the 5 minutes or so it may take to process afterwards. As mentioned before, if 22 minutes into the bounce you find a problem, the bounce must be cancelled and started again.

By using Record to Disk you are 'printing' the final mix as you go. So as you start your final mix of the 74 minute project and find that mistake in minute 22 you can just stop, fix the problem and carry on. Either in Quick Punch mode or Destructive mode. As you are playing you are creating the stereo master file. After the 74 minutes are done you probably have to consolidate the file into one if there were punches performed, but that's a quick offline process.

In any case, you end up with the stereo master file that can then be exported as stereo interleaved if required or just handed off as .L and .R. Not faster than an offline bounce, but much, much faster than BTD. For professional situations I insist there has to be a Quality Control stage and in projects that are long format the QC stage can be the final mix stage. By combining these together you can save some time and not be stuck with BTD.

As we have all mentioned, there is no technical impediment for offline bounces in PT LE or M Powered, it's just another arbitrary limitation placed on the software by Digidesign. In my opinion however it probably won't happen until HD systems can do it also, and as long as they are TDM based they can NOT do offline bounces. I suppose you can truly never say never, but I think it's safe to assume this won't happen for LE until TDM systems can.

In the meantime try working with stems, auxes, and RTD instead of BTD. Good luck.

[Kris75]

I have used "record to disc" function many times. For the quality control with stems, I always end up putting them in a session to make sure they are correct.

I for one cannot wait for off line bounce in PT

I'm not holding my breath though.......

[Scorpio253]

[Premo]

I didn't read this whole thread, but I have read the nearly 100 other duc post requesting this same feature.

I'm sure this doesn't have much or anything to do with Digi thinking people should listen to their music 1 final time before proofing so that it puts the PRO in Pro Tools. Even Digi employees say they hear us. So I highly doubt they're just ignoring the fact that many people want offline bounce. There's no reason to not include it, because those that don't want to offline bounce, wouldn't have to.

It's much more likely that this just comes down to the same fundamental reasons that other large features (such as ADC) don't exist. Scott Church even explained it in his videos. It's a tremendous coding feat that would require heavy lifting from multiple departments or developers and they simply don't have the resources to quickly and easily do it without abandoning all the smaller features and future product development cycles that will bring more revenue in and pay their stockholders. That's your 1 obligation as a company is to earn more money each year.

So it would seem that this 1 feature as important as it is would seem....keep falling off the plate, just like ADC does each time it's up at bat.

But now that Digi has a MUCH improved customer outlook and appears to be much more outgoing and caring to their customers, why not sumbit multiple feature request letting them know that this feature is indeed worth waiting for and we need it, along with ADC and track freezing and whatever else that comes up time again and again and again.

OR maybe coding it is just impossible because TDM and the whole DAE works in 1x mode and Pro Tools would have to be completely rewritten to even attempt this. (I'm not a programmer so sorry if this is completely off point.)

I'm just basing my assumptions on how other software companies normally work and that Scott Church explained that Pro Tools has been broken down in Object oriented blocks or chunks of code now, so that the coding is more malleable and new features can now be implemented more quickly and easily. But who knows... (but Digi developers).

(Sorry if the real answer is in the thread or Digi posted and I missed it.)

[DigiTechSupt]

OR maybe coding it is just impossible because TDM and the whole DAE works in 1x mode and Pro Tools would have to be completely rewritten to even attempt this. (I'm not a programmer so sorry if this is completely off point.)

This is quite close to the mark - TDM is based on real-time threads and doing it faster than real-time is a significant (if not impossible) challenge. It would be possible in LE rather more easily, as LE is CPU based, but it would still require some major work, as LE is based on DAE which is based on real-time threads so it would mean some major work to 'de-couple' the engine to allow for non real-time bounces.

I think Scott mentioned that this is something we want, it's just that it would be a major undertaking, as we'd obviously want to offer it on both TDM and LE systems, so the technical challenges on TDM would have to be overcome to implement this in a way that's fair for everyone.

[x9blade]

but DIGI, you do realize how much the end user needs this? i think it should be in your top 5? list. you are aware of how limiting protools is as far as VI's go? yes? when i say limiting i'm not talking about xpand (cool plug in)or the like. i'm referring to some of the "cutting edge plug ins","modern",sampler type plugs. they need alot of ram access.since protools has a major,major problem with this, a nice workaround would be able to render midi to audio non realtime.this way we can render this and make the plug in inactive and move on

lately,everything seems to be a problem when it comes to protools code,maybe it is time for a major undertaken???????
please, when you guys do your magic make sure HD is not forgotten

by the way..... protools 8 looks great,congrats digi

p.s. digi if you do not know what i mean about protools being very limiting as far as vi power please let me know, i will send you sessions that will cripple my HD3 with only bfd ,kontakt,omisphere. 3 plug ins in a session that will prob make any system a crashing nightmare.

[JCBigler]

Originally Posted by DigiTechSupt

we'd obviously want to offer it on both TDM and LE systems, so the technical challenges on TDM would have to be overcome to implement this in a way that's fair for everyone.

Maybe it's time to re imagine the Digidesign Business model, and consider the fact that TDM's usefulness has come to an end, and come up with something new--something that solves the technical challenges to the features that Protools' user base needs.