Pro Tools HDX useless?!?!?! major RAM usage problems 32bit

[dustin_m]

Our current system is:
12 core Mac Pro
24 GB of RAM
OS 10.7.4
PT 10.3.0 HDX 3
3x 192
1x HD I/O
Sync I/O
OCX external clock


With the loss of TDM and the fact that most plugin manufactures have yet to make AAX DSP versions means we are relying heavily on AAX Native. This means when mixing and loading up a big session we are constantly bumping up against the 4GB RAM limit of 32 bit applications. We've been utilizing the 3rd party app VEP (Vienna Ensemble Pro) to not completely stop our sessions. However it seems being this close to the 4 GB ram limit Pro Tools starts having other odd problems. Here are a few things we have been experiencing:


Zoom crash- do a bit of editing and fades, then zoom into a region. Just as the waveform display should change, spinning color wheel followed by crash.

Tracks not playing- working away then suddenly where did that BG vocal go?? look at the track all signs point that it should be playing. Make track inactive, reactivate, track plays fine again. Sometimes stereo tracks seem to only play out one side, deactivate / reactivate and all is fine again.

Bad mute automation causing regions to mute where they shouldn't be muted- after a " cut time " operation (where some mute automation was cut causing about an 1/8 note of a quick mute) regions before the mute sometimes don't play or play quietly. After deleting or moving break points of the mute at the cut time area all plays well!

Delay compensation slop- after working for a while on a session near the memory wall, with delay compensation at maximum, the timing of some of the tracks seems off by a bit. Something that's really hard to put your finger on but after a reboot the groove of the track works again!!



I'm not sure all of these are related to low RAM. I would love to hear from other Pro Tools 10 users who are working in sessions that are pushing the RAM limit. Sessions where you occasionally get the " Pro Tools is Critically Low on Memory and could not save the session. " error.

I believe there are a few things Avid could do to help this situation.

One, it would be nice to at least know where you stand with ram usage. Add a meter that gives some feedback before we get into the danger zone.

Two, FREEZE TRACK. I know certain things like hardware inserts make this more difficult to implement but on tracks like that if there was a pop up dialog that said "unable to freeze track - hardware insert" or something we would still be able to freeze other tracks in the session. Currently our only alternative is printing the tracks that have a lot of plugins on them. However, printing these tracks gets much more complicated when working in professional mix session. Plugin keying, pan / send automation, grouping, vca masters and others make printing the tracks much more of a chore. Also freeze track would eliminate the need for VEP ( Vienna Ensemble Pro )

Obviously fully 64 bit support would be ideal but I understand that would be a ways off and will take more support from 3rd party plugin manufactures.

Same could be said for AAX DSP plugins

We're in the middle of a major mix session and HDX has completely crippled us. The switch to HDX is costing us tens of thousands of dollars in down time and may result in our record being delayed. Pro Tools doesn't really feel very "pro" anymore.


The most info I've seen on this topic has been here: http://protools.ideascale.com/a/dtd/...ror/31640-3779