PT 11 gets bugged down with too many short recording

[garnoil]

Today I had 6 different actors come in to do ADR. The ADR per actor was small, meaning actors has about 8 lines each. Most lines were small, such as sighs, short oohhh and ahhs, small words, breaths etc. Each actor has 1 hours for their lines, each actor recorded approximately 4 lines per take (ratio of 4 adr variations for 1 usable take). After the 4th actor, - after 4 or 5 hours of recording small takes- PT began slowing down, to the point that the beach ball would come up for at least 15 seconds before PT would accept any new command. I had to stop ADR altogether and re-boot the computer from cold (I had tried just closing the session and re-opening it but that did not help). After the re-boot from cold everything worked fine again for the next 3 hours.

So....why is this happening? this is especially intriguing because it seems to happen only for when I was recording. In this same movie, I have done 7 or 8 days of dialogue edit, sfx, and athmos work without a single crash or PT slowing down. Note: the ADR session is brand new and NOT the same session that I have been using for 8 days without a problem. I have separate drives for audio, video, and I do not ever record to the systems drive.

[Darryl Ramm]

Classic sign of a memory leak.

Basic troubleshooting time: Does this happen in different sessions of just this one? Try a new empty session (yes I know that wqas a new one, but try another -- not a copy, not from template). And trash prefs and databases. As always suspect the plugins, especially for things like possible memory leaks. Are they all up to date? Try removing third party plugin files from the AAX plugin directory.Trash prefs and databases and try again.

[garnoil]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Classic sign of a memory leak.

Basic troubleshooting time: Does this happen in different sessions of just this one? Try a new empty session (yes I know that wqas a new one, but try another -- not a copy, not from template). And trash prefs and databases. As always suspect the plugins, especially for things like possible memory leaks. Are they all up to date? Try removing third party plugin files from the AAX plugin directory.Trash prefs and databases and try again.

Darryl, this was a brand new session, made form scratch, not a copy of the master and not made from a template. All my plugs are 100% approved (there are not that many plugs that are AAX that are not approved). If it was a matter of permissions, then a re-boot would most likely not fix the problem as it would re-occur. PT 11 does not really have a 'trash pref' because it is 64 bit (that is my understanding anyway, may be I am wrong about that), the trash pref app is for PT 10. I do however have a trash pref app for PT 11 that someone else created (not the same at PT 10) but...if a cold re-boot totally fixes the problem, it seems to me that this is not a pref or plugin issue. I was more leaning towards how PT 11 allocates the recordings to a drive. My recording drive has about 300 gigs of free space but may be it is not 'continuous space', so PT 11 may be recording these bits of audio all over the drive. This may account as to why PT takes a long time to seek and find the empty space where it wants to record or read the audio to and from. Another thing that is important to point out, is that this ADR session only had the Dialogue of the film. So it has about 12 tracks of dialogue and 1 single recording track for ADR. This session is extremely light on the CPU. The master session for the same film is 240 audio tracks, with extensive plugins and full 1920X1080 video and it does not behave this way (same plugins in the folder). Since I got PT 11 about 4 months ago, I have done 3 feature films, all with over 250 tracks, and same plugin throughout, and I never saw this problem (the other films had no adr to speak off).

[Darryl Ramm]

That's a lot of stuff that's nothing about what I suggested.

This is a classic symptom of a memory leak, most often from a plugin. How do you make progress? You include or exclude that as a problem. Yank all third party plugin files out. It's nice they are all up to date, but that does not guarantee there is not a bug.

I know its a new session, good it was a basic empty session, but just for grins try another new one.

And delete prefs and databases--frequently while debugging. That shoudl be second nature. Prefs and databases have *nothing* to do with 32 or 64 bit code, they are components used by all version of Pro Tools. You can use the updated trasher app but seriously any pro should be able to do this blindfolded.
Basic instructions are all under the "Help us Help You - READ THIS Before Posting!" link above on this and every other DUC web page.

Stop worrying about disk (it is irrelevant..) or anything else for now, focus on excluding a corrupt session or plugin memory leak.

[garnoil]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

That's a lot of stuff that's nothing about what I suggested.

This is a classic symptom of a memory leak, most often from a plugin. How do you make progress? You include or exclude that as a problem. Yank all third party plugin files out. It's nice they are all up to date, but that does not guarantee there is not a bug.

I know its a new session, good it was a basic empty session, but just for grins try another new one.

And delete prefs and databases--frequently while debugging. That shoudl be second nature. Prefs and databases have *nothing* to do with 32 or 64 bit code, they are components used by all version of Pro Tools. You can use the updated trasher app but seriously any pro should be able to do this blindfolded.
Basic instructions are all under the "Help us Help You - READ THIS Before Posting!" link above on this and every other DUC web page.

Stop worrying about disk (it is irrelevant..) or anything else for now, focus on excluding a corrupt session or plugin memory leak.

Ok, I will trash prefs and make a new session see how that goes for my next ADR session. Now as far as plugs, if my 3rd party plugs are approved by Avid (they are officially approved on the Avid website), does this mean that they were fully tested by Avid and that they do NOT create memory leaks? (otherwise why would they be approved by Avid?). If I have to remove all 3th party plugs just to test them and gradually add them one by one till the problem re-occurs, this can take me days or even weeks to do as I would have to try to replicate the 4 or 5 hours of ADR recording every time I add back a new plugin and wait for PT to slow down or not. I am sure that you are correct and theoretically this would be the smart and fool proof way to find what the problem is, but I am working on 3 feature films at once, and there is no way that I can take more than a couple of hours max to try to find what the problems is.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion, I follow your posts and you cleararly know what you are talking about.

G

[Darryl Ramm]

And by all means if this happens again grab some info about what is going on with the system, including memory usage. In Terminal.app run the following commands

ps augxl

and

top -l 1

Copy and paste the output of those commands here. There will be lots of long text lines, try to not mangle them.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by garnoil

Ok, I will trash prefs and make a new session see how that goes for my next ADR session. Now as far as plugs, if my 3rd party plugs are approved by Avid (they are officially approved on the Avid website), does this mean that they were fully tested by Avid and that they do NOT create memory leaks? (otherwise why would they be approved by Avid?). If I have to remove all 3th party plugs just to test them and gradually add them one by one till the problem re-occurs, this can take me days or even weeks to do as I would have to try to replicate the 4 or 5 hours of ADR recording every time I add back a new plugin and wait for PT to slow down or not. I am sure that you are correct and theoretically this would be the smart and fool proof way to find what the problem is, but I am working on 3 feature films at once, and there is no way that I can take more than a couple of hours max to try to find what the problems is.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion, I follow your posts and you cleararly know what you are talking about.

G

I doubt Avid does any QA of third party plugins themselves. The information Avid provides will likely rely on the plugin vendors saying they what their plugs are compatible with.

I know it sucks, if you don't have time to debug this then just keep going. It is always fair to first suspect any plugin you are using in this session that you dont' normally use, but it also could just be an unused plugin throwing a fit. Try trashing prefs anyhow. And of course it may not be a plugin at all, but that's a good thing to suspect. If you do debug plugins don't do anything gradually, do a binary walk with all out, half back in, half those out, etc. until you find the suspect if there is one. You can also jsut Google all your third party plugin names and say "Pro Tools 11" and see if anybody else is reporting memory leaks or slowdowns.