Consensus on Phase Accuracy of Elastic Audio and Multiple Tracks

[PTrust]

So I've read all the posts regarding elastic audio and multi track recording and here's what I found.

I am tring to use EA on a grouped pair of tracks. These are two mics (an SM 57 and a Royer 121) recorded on the same speaker of a cabinet. I am very meticulous regarding their phase relationship.

I've noticed very inconsistent results with EA. At times an marker move in Warp view will cause the two tracks to lose their phase relationship. The EA algorithmn is obviously not moving the two tracks EXACTLY the same amount. Suprisingly hitting undo and doing the edit again sometimes produces different results.

I've tried all the different algorithms, region groups as well as mix/edit grouping. Bouncing the tracks together before EA is not an option since each track gets different processing at mixdown.

I would love to hear other users opinions as well as Tech Supports stance on this matter.

[OddsAre]

yup, you've found what most professionals have found on here... EA messes with phase and is never consistent every time, as you found. In my opinion it is mostly unusable when multiple mics are involved. It does ok with single source, like a direct Bass input. Tech Support will tell you it works fine, many people putting it to use might not hear the phase issues that you have learned to hear. I would not drum edit with EA in a million years, but there are people out there doing it and swearing by it. For now I will trust that the phase issues I hear are not the desired effects I am looking for.

[ajastudios]

1st place=Good Drummer!
2nd place= Beat Detective!

[OddsAre]

Amen! +1

[tamasdragon]

I think it only mess up phase when overused (aka polishing turd). When you use it only to correct some minor mistake, it's perfect.
Tamas Dragon

[MikeTrahearn]

The reason why 7.4 was soooo late in being released was because Digidesign wanted to make sure that the phase was never messed with.
As a test, they took a snare drum, literally mic'd it up with 192 microphones (how, I've not the faintest) but 192 is the max HD disk streaming audio track count, so 192 it was. So with 192 separate recordings of the same thing in phase alignment, they made sure that elastic audio did NOTHING to the phase relatationship - and didn't release 7.4 until they were satisfied. Note, there was release candidate elastic audio plugin update on the digidesign web site. which did fix some minor issues.

Mike

[emorganproductions]

I've noticed this too, it is definitely most evident with dual mic'ed guitar cabs. Shifting wraps on both track grouped causes very obvious and in my case quite terrible sounding results.

Shame, I really thought it would be great for drum editing.

[RussUK]

Originally Posted by ajastudios

1st place=Good Drummer!
2nd place= Beat Detective!

I don't think any pro would suggest that EA is an alternative to a good drummer, no more than Autotune to a good singer. The reality is that these tools should be used as a last, not a first resort.

I'm with Oddsare, on multi mic kits etc. it's unusable and I tend to do it the good old fashioned, group em and manually move them.

EA has moments of genius and madness.

[albee1952]

After watching the DigiTV videos showing how it works(done on multi-channel drums), the demo sounded fine. I have used it on several tunes for 2 overheads and a hat mic with excellent results. Sometimes a severely stretched or shortened piece of audio would sound funky but I attribute that the just pushing the limits of the feature. I guess YMMV but its been good for me so far.

[tamasdragon]

I am not the advertiser of Kenny Goia, but who wants to master elastic audio, buy his dvd. If you learn it through, it won't cause phasiness.
TD