Track Freeze in Pro Tools - Let it snow!

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Dizzi45Z

A huge advantage is that it freezes post insert, but pre volume automation and pre effects sends. Bouncing writes in your volume automation to the audio. It is nice to still have the options of controlling the volume automation without having to counter what you may have done with the volume previously. You also don't have to copy over effects sends like you have to do with bounced tracks. It just works way more seemlessly than bouncing a track does.

Also, in most software I've worked with in the past, when you unfreeze, it deletes the render from the session keeping your session from being bloated with unneeded audio files.

First paragraph - are you talking about Sonar or something else? Never had good luck with freeze when I had that software.

[notable]

Originally Posted by Shan

Though the traditional intention and use of track freeze was to simply conserve CPU usage back in the day, there's a lot more uses of it that can invoke more innovation and a reimagining of it's original concept to a more modern time. Here's a few more I'll contribute to froyo's list above:

• It opens up a whole new world of very quickly turning MIDI(Instrument tracks) into audio, and then doing audio edits that just can’t be done in the MIDI realm. This is great news for those in sound design.
• If a series of plug-ins on a track exceeds the available amount of delay compensation, quickly freezing the track will solve that issue.
• Plug-ins with denormalization spikes can now be frozen. I'm looking at you Mr. SansAmp!
• Any tracks with a high amount of plug-in delay, that can interfere in certain workflows such as recording etc, can be quickly frozen.
• The odd problematic plug-in that may give out errors during playback can be quickly resolved using track freeze, thus keeping one in the creative flow.
• It enables the use of higher quality plug-ins and higher sample rates that can bog down a session quickly.
• Cross DAW workflows and collaboration, which is more common than ever in music creation these days, now become a lot easier to deal with. The amount of time and issues when working on sessions between different DAWs will be significantly reduced now with track freeze.
• We can now use HEAT on an Instrument track(HEAT can only be used on audio tracks). I'll be able to quickly freeze the VI(Instrument track) and use HEAT on it, since it's now audio. Praise the snowflake!!
• A much quicker workflow for making stems.
• Faster Session archiving.
• Plug-ins that don't have an AudiSuite version can now be quickly rendered to an individual clip, or to an entire track.
• Older and slower computers can run larger sessions with higher track counts.
• Free up HDX DSP chips. They can now be used for other tasks.
• Frozen playback tracks create a more stable and solid system with a lower chance of related AAE playback and disk streaming errors.
• If you have VI's that use a lot of RAM you can free up and purge the RAM usage, hence allowing the RAM to be used for other tasks.
• Sessions with frozen/rendered tracks will have faster session loading times. Extremely large session will benefit from this greatly.

Shane

Awesome list. Do you mind if I share it with my PTUG group and students?



Notable.com

[Shan]

Originally Posted by notable

Awesome list. Do you mind if I share it with my PTUG group and students?



Notable.com

No problem. I have a few students also. Thanks for asking by the way!!

Shane