Computer for Film scoring???

[GuyPicks]

Is anyone doing film scoring?
If so any tips on hardware? I've just been dealing with this too long.
Right now I'm using a Mac rig and getting "overloading CPU" all the time errors.
It tells me to unload plugins (Can't do that).
Also not getting audio from drive fast enough errors. (what???)
Computer isn't overheating either.
Can't figure out what's going on???

Here's my scoring rig:
macOS Sierra 10.12.6
Pro Tools HD 12.8.1
Mac Pro (Mid 2010) 5,1
Processer 2 x 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB
Using a Glyph external rack of 3-500GB drives-7200RPM, Firewire 800
and all 4 internal drives are 7200RPM
Sample drive internal and separate from other drives (3TB).

Using this scoring software:
Native Instruments Kontakt 5 with all their plugs.
Spectrasonics
BFD3

[Darryl Ramm]

Basic stuff you need to do...

System fully optimized?

Plugins all up to date?

You need to check for instantiated plugins that might be burning lots of CPU due to denormalization problems. Classic offenders are DVERB and Sansamp. Remove those plugins or put a dither plugin in front of them. Lots of posts on DUC on this.

You need to check for problematic plugins that can cause problems even when not instantiated. You need to remove plugins from the plugin folder in batches and see if you can find ones causing problems.


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[Darryl Ramm]

And what IO buffer size and sample rate are you operating at?

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[Darryl Ramm]

Where are your audio drives? dedicated video drives? hopefully not on RAID. If SATA connected is that motherboard SATA II or a SATA III card? The disk errors are likely not unusual side effects of running out of CPU, but your disk subsystem is old technology and much slower than what is possible with say PCIe SSD. I would be using PCIe SSD for audio drives.

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[GuyPicks]

Thanx Darryl
I will check all this and report.
In a session right now.

:)

[GuyPicks]

finally got a breather,
found out my rack mount firewire 800 Glyph GT103 is going bad.
it holds 3 drives the middle slot is intermitent and sometimes locks up so...
Thinking about getting something else to record to. This thing is about 10 years old and they don't make them anymore I've replaced drives in this unit over the years. I can pull the middle drive out and use it in another slot and works fine.
I've not had to shop for awhile. So whats out there. I'd like to get something with at least 3 drives that I can pull out and swap with other drives.
What are you guys using nowadays to record to, any thoughts?
I see glyph has a 4 drive system but it's thunderbolt. I need firewire.

Thanx

[Darryl Ramm]

For audio storage I would only go SSD. And I would stop investing money in dead-end Firewire. An example would be put a USB 3 PCIe card in the Cheesegrater and use Samsung T3 SSDs. A single tiny portable T3 might exceed the IO performance of your entire old rack, certainly will for random IO. If you need bulk archive or near line storage then HDD might still make sense, but I would always be working off a SSD audio drive.

If you want maximum performance then internal slot mount PCIe SSD, including Samsung SM951 M.2 drives on a PCIe card adapter are faster than USB 3, Firewire, SATA and most Thunderbolt storage.


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[GuyPicks]

I just downloaded AJA system Test app.
https://www.aja.com/products/aja-system-test

Now I realize what I've been dealing with.
You guys have probably heard of it already anyways...
It will tell you your drive and bus speeds.
My drive speeds on all 3 drives in one rack were 42MBs (write) and 49MBs (read).
That's not very good on huge projects.
Very enlightening.

I'm gonna take your advise Darryl.

[Darryl Ramm]

Be a bit careful with these benchmark tools, they can overestimate the disk performance, including because of caching effects. But the numbers quoted in this thread do give you a good example of how fast modern PCIe SSDs are... even in PCIe 2 slots.

Be aware that the older SM951 M.2 cards are AHCI so can be bootable. Modern M.2 cards like the Samsung 960 Pro are NVMe not AHCI so can't be bootable, but can be used as non-boot disks on a Cheesegrater. Whatever PCIe SSD storage you look at make sure it is AHCI if you want it to be bootable on a Cheesegrater. Of course you may not care, in which case you have more modern drives to choose from, which offer faster performance and a tiny less overhead due to improved NVMe efficiencies.

And speaking of caching... hopefully you are running with disk cache enabled. Stuff as much memory as you can in the box and try setting the cache to large sizes and see how it goes. BTW I think your Cheesegrater can actually go up to 96 GB.

[MusoPro]

If these problems occur while using VI's there is only one solution. Buy Vienna Ensemble Pro. You load your plugins through that, it works separately from Pro Tools and then links to it taking taxing CPU power off of Pro Tools. I used to have the same problems...no more.https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Vienna_Soft...a_Ensemble_PRO


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