Plug - Ins

[jamesTkirk]

I'm hoping somebody may be able to shed some light on this....I have a 20 track mix on a Blue & White G3/300 with 128 Megs of RAM. I am using ONLY 6 plug-ins..as soon as I try to add an additional plug-in..I get a CPU error, saying to turn some plug-ins off in order to free up CPU power. If I try to add the seventh and contiue playback..it plays for a second or two and error out again with the same message...Any Ideas?????

[Chris Coleman]

yeah I've got an answer...don't use that many plug ins! Just kidding. There are many alternatives: First off, the KIND of plug-ins you use is very important. D-Verbs will chew up your processing power in a second, while 1-band EQ's can be sprinkled everywhere. You really shouldn't be using more than one or two D-Verbs a session anyhow. If you are, re-evaluate the necessity or bus them differently (or, perhaps, correctly?). In addition, try to take advantage of hardware inserts (if you've got outboard gear). Also, don't forget about the Audio Suite plugins! If you're set on a mix and you know that you want a certain reverb here and a compressor there etc., then utilize the A.S. plug-ins to make it final, rather than chew up precious real-time processing power. OR you could bounce your real-time effects to disk: since you're only using 20 tracks and have 4 available voices, bounce a couple reverbs/delays to those and free up the processing power for the mixing. That way, you still have control over the wet/dry mix of the effects without having to worry about processing errors. There are literally tons of ways to remedy this, just be creative and think through the signal flow. Almost everything, if not everything, I mentioned above is covered in the Pro Tools manual. If you haven't read that, read it. That goes for everyone, there will be a test (every single time you use Pro Tools, in fact!). : )

[This message has been edited by Chris Coleman (edited February 08, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Chris Coleman (edited February 09, 2000).]

[lwilliam]

Uh, can I get a copy of that test?

------------------
LW