Stems out of synch - delay compensation is on

[jgiannis]

Hi. I have a project with:

Dialogue, FX, Music.

All of my dialogue tracks are bussed to a Dialogue Aux.
All of my FX tracks are bussed to an FX Aux.
All of my music tracks are bussed to a Music Aux.

And all 3 of those Auxes bus into a Sub-Mix Aux. This is where my mix ends.


But then I also have stems. For these, I create 4 new stereo tracks, one for each of the 4 auxes above.

In order to record into these stem tracks, I place a Send onto each of the 4 Auxes above.

The problem is that after they're printed, they're all out of synch relative to one another. I have Delay Compensation turned on (and it's green, so I don't think it's getting overloaded).

Any ideas how I can get these to all print in synch?

Thanks!

[Darryl Ramm]

Have you tried trashing prefs yet?

Have you tried disable all plugins and confirm stuff works with no strangeness and if so then try disabling some plugins until you find the problem.

You can also try reproducing this with the simplest possible session you can to make troubleshooting easier... try cutting down the current session if needed.

Out of sync by exactly how much? You often solve these problems by focusing on what the offsets are. A possible suspect for smaller errors is plugins reporting wrong latencies to latency compensation.

[jgiannis]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Have you tried trashing prefs yet?

Have you tried disable all plugins and confirm stuff works with no strangeness and if so then try disabling some plugins until you find the problem.

You can also try reproducing this with the simplest possible session you can to make troubleshooting easier... try cutting down the current session if needed.

Out of sync by exactly how much? You often solve these problems by focusing on what the offsets are. A possible suspect for smaller errors is plugins reporting wrong latencies to latency compensation.

- nope, I have not trashed prefs yet, as I am in the middle of a tight deadline and cannot risk making matters worse. But I will keep this in mind as soon as I'm over this deadline.

- no, I have not turned off all plugins. Is there a master button that turns off all plugins? This is a really good idea, and I wanna try it, but do I need to do this one-by-one? I've never come across a "master plugin menu."

- the worst offsets were around 2.5 frames.

And thank you for the tips!

[Darryl Ramm]

Hold down shift when opening a session from the file folder disable all plugins. That and a lot more about basic control of plugins is covered in the Pro Tools Reference Guide or even easier just Google for those basic questions. Please do that vs. asking very basic questions here.

Frames? You need to be measuring and thinking about all these latencies in samples. What sample rate are you running at? Just about all plugins have published latency data if you end up wanting to check what is going on... which you can find online.

Can't guess what platform you are running in but Pete Gate's PT Prefs utility on Mac will backup your prefs before you trash them. Similar for the utility on Windows. So no reason not to do that now. Trashing prefs is just about always the standard first step of troubleshooting. Do it before doing anything else.

[The Weed]

And further to Darryl's, as always, excellent advice: When using either Utility for Trashing Prefs, first close PT, backup the Prefs, empty the Trash/Recycle Bin, reboot the computer, restore the Prefs, start PT.

[Darryl Ramm]

^^^ but test Pro Tools with the prefs all trashed, before you restore them. If trashing them all fixes things you may need to play more with what exact files you restore as one may be corrupt. You want to to as quick a possible tests to check things, trashing prefs for just about any problem should be a reflex action.

And similar to always starting with trashing prefs, you always suspect plugins... so quick things that check if they are working OK or not make sense. And the third basic thing is sessions possibly being corrupt... or potentially sets of session if they share a common ancestor session or template. So can be useful to just quickly create an empty session and try to reproduce a problem in that.