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  #31  
Old 09-13-2012, 01:45 AM
BasketCase BasketCase is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Ruston View Post
I thought I went into pretty good detail in my last post...with a westmere mac you can run huge numbers of plug ins (hundreds and hundreds) at the lowest buffer, provided the plug ins are compatible. But as with all versions of PT all bets are off once the bigger VIs get involved. A handful of Kontakt instances and you can expect errors sooner or later. It's part RTAS inefficiency with instruments and partly the fact that the stuff we all want to run is not the most stable code.

J
VI's are running very stable on my system. I have been very selective about which ones I use though. Perhaps its the added advantage of having TDM for audio processing and native power entirely for VI's.

Regarding your observations with 192 tracks and a load of plugins, can I ask a really obvious question? Did you have any audio loaded and did you hit play? The reason I ask is I have come across this on another forum when talking about reaper, where a user using the same computer (i7 860 based) as I do stated that he could achieve insanely high track and plugin counts. Turns out he couldn't... He just hadn't loaded in any audio. Unlike TDM, native plugins use next to no resources when there is no audio being played.
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  #32  
Old 09-13-2012, 02:08 AM
BasketCase BasketCase is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

From my quick observations, it also is dependant on the degree of processing applied in the plugin. IE: An SSL channel doing nothing to the audio won't do much to the CPU load. Crank up the EQ and compressor and it will...
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  #33  
Old 09-13-2012, 03:41 AM
Allan Speers Allan Speers is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Ruston View Post
...with a westmere mac you can run huge numbers of plug ins (hundreds and hundreds) at the lowest buffer, provided the plug ins are compatible. But as with all versions of PT all bets are off once the bigger VIs get involved. A handful of Kontakt instances and you can expect errors sooner or later. It's part RTAS inefficiency with instruments and partly the fact that the stuff we all want to run is not the most stable code.

J
Hey, Jack.

Kontakt is indeed badly coded. (All NI stuff seems to be.) On my Windows rig, running reaper, I went through 2 years of absolute hell until I realized (amazingly) that it was Kontakt causing all my crashes and loss of audio-card communication.

## The solution, in Reaper, was to run Kontakt as a separate process. This solved my woes instantly.
DOES ANYONE KNOW IF PROTOOLS 9 OR 10 LETS YOU RUN A VI OR PLUGIN AS A SEPARATE PROCESS?
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  #34  
Old 09-13-2012, 03:51 AM
Allan Speers Allan Speers is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

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Originally Posted by BasketCase View Post
Hi Brandon!

Thanks for the reply. Is there any chance you could expand on your post? ...for the sake of actually getting some decent replies/information. It seems there are people that say they can't do what a HD4 system can... and then there are some that say (almost evangelically) "My native system kills TDM" then they vanish into thin air...

What was your old system? What were you running? Where were you running into problems?

What is your new system? What interface are you using? What can you now do that you couldn't do before? Are you using LLM?

Have you tried doing it with 32+ channels of I/O?
^ THIS.

Brandon, please if possible DO provide some details. Those of us trying to decide are pretty confused, since you & Jack report one scenario, and other posters say they HAVE to use a 1024 buffer. Some key info is missing, somewhere. (Yes, Jack, you did provide some excellent clarification, (thanks!) but I still need more specifics. this is a horribly difficult decision.)

Because of Jacks report on incompatible plugins & VI's, and the other info on ow PT is optimized for audio, one has to take a deep breath.

Running VI's on my old G5 / TDM rig has never been very workable. More latency than the audio, and midi timing-slop all over the place. plus just not enough dsp for more than ~ 2 VI's at once. Printing to tracks all the time doesn't work for me, if that's still going to be the case with the newest PT and a fast Mac, I may have to finally change software.

I have been hoping that my new, fast Mac will help, with both of the above problems, but I'm starting to lose that hope. I'm actually SERIOUSLY thinking of switching to Reaper, and I've been a Protools user for 20 years!
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  #35  
Old 09-13-2012, 06:57 AM
Brandonx1 Brandonx1 is offline
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Red face Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

Quote:

What was your old system? What were you running? Where were you running into problems?

What is your new system? What interface are you using? What can you now do that you couldn't do before? Are you using LLM?

Have you tried doing it with 32+ channels of I/O?
I mix audio for network tv. I have 2 systems. A) HDX 1 and system B) HDN. I link them using satellite link. Let just speak about the HDN system here. I do not use any VI. My old system was an hd4 accel in a magma chassis. I have not upgraded computers in the switch to HDN. I have surround mix session where I mixing 140 audio tracks into 48 stems. On an hd4 accel 100% of cards dsp is used and all voices. I was unable to record the stems in DP mode or QP mode. The same mix I open on my hdn system now I have tons of headroom left. I think I have 60 free voices (thank god) and it feels like I haven't even come close to hitting the plug in limit. CPU meter is hovering around 35%. This is at 64 sample buffer.

Why didn't I just use more native plug ins on the hd 4 accel mix you ask? I do for all disk tracks but I was limited buy the hugeness of a surround mix. The mixer dsp was probably 2 1/2 cards with adc. I ran out of voices as well. Those are the real limiting factors with hd systems, not CPU. Btw I could not my run my hd accel system at 256 sample buffer. That is the lowest it would go.

Hope this helps.
Best,
Brandon
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  #36  
Old 09-13-2012, 09:25 AM
Ru_C Ru_C is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

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Originally Posted by Brandonx1 View Post
Why such a low hardware buffer? 64 samples is quick enough to track with. Also 64 sample buffer can track with 2x the size session as an hd5 system.
Hey Brandon, thanks for the reply. I've only experienced Protools Natively with Firewire interfaces (Digi 003, Presonus Firestation & Focusrite Saffire 26 i/o) & a 64 sample buffer with all three of these is pretty nasty compared to my TDM rig.

If I was just making a Demo for myself, & drinking a bottle of Red I could probably fool myself it was Ok, but I wouldn't want to inflict in on really good musicians who need to play 'in the pocket'.

'Direct monitoring' or 'LLM' is not an option for me, as I need multiple Cue sends from within Protools.

Are you saying that a 64 sample buffer with an HDnative rig feels very different from this?

Thanks
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  #37  
Old 09-13-2012, 09:56 AM
nst7 nst7 is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

Are you saying 64 is too much latency? I have heard some people say it is but I've wondered if something else was wrong in their system. Because I have used 64 with a 003, an Eleven Rack, and more recently a Komplete Audio 6 (the latter 2 being USB based). In all situations 64 was perfect and sounded like real time/no latency to me, whether singing or using amp sims, etc. in fact I never bothered with 32 because I didn't hear any difference from 64.

This was all on a 2007 Core 2 Duo Imac. Of course with larger track counts I would need to bounce down, print VI's, etc., but that was because of the computer resources.

Now I'm on HD Native with a 2010 Mac Pro Quad 2.8 and the Omni. 64 still works great and is even a little faster because of the faster converters in the Omni (the new HD interfaces are a more efficient design and literally convert faster). And with a more powerful computer now, I can do much more before I need to bounce/print/bypass, etc.

So I'm curious what issues you had with 64 in the past.
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  #38  
Old 09-13-2012, 10:31 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is online now
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

I love these half conversations where there is just not quite enough information to compare even the most basic things.

e.g. when talking buffer sizes - its meaningless unless we all also state the sample rate.

Darryl
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  #39  
Old 09-13-2012, 11:52 AM
Jack Ruston UK Jack Ruston UK is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

It's not that people's contributions are worthless but PLEASE can we try to keep this related only to the HDN system rather than PT9 or 10 (native). It's just so difficult to make any concrete comparison if we start including other systems which are simply not capable of the same performance. We have half the people in the thread talking about native rather than HDN systems, which handle some IO on the card. It is different.

RE the instruments....Yes Kontakt is a bit of killer. I do use it all the time but it's not stable. The digi instruments are very stable. But of course most of us want to use Kontakt!

Re the comment about some users requiring 1024...Of course it's machine dependant but I think the issue here is probably plug ins. So few people who are having problems REALLY go through their plug in folder and clear out the stuff which is not supported. I didn't. It took Avid support to go through my list and point out things they knew caused problems. SO does HDX cure this? The answer is I don't know. I do know that some people have had a lot of stability issues with HDX and I wonder if it might be the same issue...RTAS stuff that's not supported. It's very hard to tell because a lot of us are running new versions of PT that we weren't running with HD TDM.

It's a really hard decision because the answers aren't 100% clear yet. If you want proven performance I think I'd add cards to your TDM system, because that's the one we all know works predictably at this point. And the cards are cheap. I'm happy with my HDN and I wouldn't change it, but it's still quite new in terms the number of users. Hard to give you good advice.

J
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  #40  
Old 09-13-2012, 02:35 PM
Allan Speers Allan Speers is offline
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Default Re: Protools native vs Accel - total DSP comparison?

Brandon,

Thanks for the details reply. VERY helpful.


Jack, can you possibly list some of the plugins and VI's that were causing you trouble? This is still really hanging me up!

-thanks.
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