Workflow/PT sluggish when dealing with large files of (conformed) audio

[arvid.lind]

Hi!

I´m mixing a studiohow in 5.1. It´s recorded live on tape and contains 10-15 tracks of dialogue, a on the spot 5.1 mix, music and audience also in various Surround formats. In essence a very large session, about 35 Gb of audio for 1 hour show.

It´s all done in 24/48, and I´ve conformed the audiofiles via Titan.

To get to the point, My PT gets very sluggish when scrubbing the audio with the scrubb tool, and using the clip gain short cut very rapidly as I usually do, is impossible. Spinning beach ball.

Since There is no usual only 2 frames of handles on the audio, but insted alot of really big files. I guess this behaviour comes from the large amounts of tracks.

Consolidating the clips, removing unused audio and save a copy could be an option, but then I´d lose my chances of making crossfades, and fix bad cuts.

Perhaps converting everything to 16/48 for the next episode?

Grateful for any opinions!


arvid in stockholm

[C]

Are you using the extended disk cache that CPTK allows you? If so how big is your cache? If not does enabling it help?

With 10GB of RAM you should be able to get to at least 6GB of disk cache which would allow nearly a sixth of your timeline to be cached, which should help with your immediate editing needs.

[arvid.lind]

I´v the cache size set to 5 GB. Have tried different settings without luck. Don´t recognize this behaviour from other big sessions. And it´s only the scrub and clip gain that is affected. Everything else is normal.

[arvid.lind]

I thought that by starting a new empty session, importing the old session and choosing consolidate audio with 5000 ms of handles would do the trick, but this only got the size down 5-6 gigs, appearantly not enough.

Anyone else´s got any ideas, or maybe I´ve just hit the ceiling of my dear old Mac Pro?

[Craig F]

.wav or .mfx files?

[Brent_Sydney]

You're using a canopus? What video file do you have in the session and how does it behave if you take the vid offline?
Is video on a separate hdd to audio?
Are you sharing your fw port with anything else?
Have you stolen too much ram for ram cache and not left enough for video performance?
He many processors do you have free outside of pt to do the video work?

[arvid.lind]

Originally Posted by Craig F

.wav or .mfx files?

I recieved MXF files from the production OB-bus, recorded on a couple of evs´s,
inported them inte PT and spotted them into the timeline manually, then used Titans flash cutter and edl´s to get them inte sync with the editors AAF. Phew.

Short answer: 24/48 wav.

[arvid.lind]

Originally Posted by Brent_Sydney

You're using a canopus? What video file do you have in the session and how does it behave if you take the vid offline?

Canopus playing Quicktime DV out of the FW400 on the back, digi003 out of the front FW400. Have not tried to take it offline. Will try. But this setup has served me for years.

Originally Posted by Brent_Sydney

Is video on a separate hdd to audio?

Audio and video on serparate internaldrives. System is on a SDD drive.

Originally Posted by Brent_Sydney

Are you sharing your fw port with anything else?

Canopus is not sharing anything on the FW port. No difference if put the video off line or skipping the canopus.

Originally Posted by Brent_Sydney

Have you stolen too much ram for ram cache and not left enough for video performance?
He many processors do you have free outside of pt to do the video work?

RAM 5 or 6 GB out of 10.
Have stayed on 7 processors since I bought the machine in 2008...

But will try different setting, but so far nothing improves by doing so.

And every other normal 5-10 GB PT session works flawlessly.

[arvid.lind]

Maybe I should try splitting the audiofiles into separate drives? Have got 4 of them. Sorry, 3... and 1 system drive

The audio drive that the project is on is made into 2 partitions, one of them is to serve as system backup.

[arvid.lind]

I got the "PT is low on physical RAM" message yesterday, the amount of ram that PT can see in my Playback Engine settings is 7 GB, thats maximum. yesterday PT only saw 5, when the "PT is low on physical RAM" message occured.

have tested my RAM and it passed. So no faulty RAM if you believe memtest.