Upgrading to HD Native from LE

[gtomassetti]

Hi, all:

I do mostly live classical chamber music and recital recording, and I am interested in upgrading to HD Native with an Omni interface when the cards are available at Sweetwater. I have a couple of questions about the upgrade:

1) My 003R will probably be removed from my workstation rack and take up permanent residence in the Gator case I use when I go out and record. Thus, there probably won't be a need to keep LE on my Mac Pro. But out of curiosity, can LE and HD exist in the same computer, or should I uninstall LE completely?

2) I know that PT will ship will all sorts of plugins, but how about my 3rd party ones? Would those need to be reinstalled, or will PT HD know where to look to find them?

Thanks for any input,

Gary

[nst7]

I can answer the 3rd question. Any 3rd party plugs, or extra Digi plugs (like Factory ones, etc.) will not be affected, and will show up fine. It won't be any different than installing a new version of Protools (like going from 7.3 to 8, etc.).

[maxon]

1/ no
2/ yes

[gtomassetti]

Thanks for the info.

I knew that when you upgrade LE, it overwrites the earlier version (unlike, say, Finale, where you can have as many different versions on the machine as you want). I just wasn't sure if HD would overwrite LE or if it's a completely different application.

[promixr]

Originally Posted by gtomassetti

Hi, all:

I do mostly live classical chamber music and recital recording, and I am interested in upgrading to HD Native with an Omni interface when the cards are available at Sweetwater. I have a couple of questions about the upgrade:

1) My 003R will probably be removed from my workstation rack and take up permanent residence in the Gator case I use when I go out and record. Thus, there probably won't be a need to keep LE on my Mac Pro. But out of curiosity, can LE and HD exist in the same computer, or should I uninstall LE completely?

2) I know that PT will ship will all sorts of plugins, but how about my 3rd party ones? Would those need to be reinstalled, or will PT HD know where to look to find them?

Thanks for any input,

Gary

Can you email me off list about this?
[email protected]

[NobodyImportant]

Technically you could do it, you would need a second partition and have LE on one and HD on the other.

[LukeHoward]

Originally Posted by NobodyImportant

Technically you could do it, you would need a second partition and have LE on one and HD on the other.

You can try this:

http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/self...p?DocId=345171

It doesn't mention if it works for 8.x though. Worth a try (install LE, move the app out of the way, install HD, move the app back).

[gtomassetti]

As I mentioned in the original post, if everything goes according to plan, I would put my 003R in my Gator case and go out and record into LE using my MacBook Pro. Currently, I bring my gear back home, copy the session folder from my Glyph to one of my hard drives, put the 003 back into the rack, and edit on my Mac Pro.

If I upgrade to HD Native, it doesn't seem like it would be necessary to keep LE on the Mac Pro. I trust I'd be able to open up sessions from LE and work on and save them in HD.

And truthfully, these days, I actually have more free space on my iPod than I do on my hard drive: 148.87 vs. 70.99 GB! It would probably be best to uninstall LE just to save a couple of gigs of space.

[BradLyons]

Gary,

AS you just answered yourself there really is no reason to keep LE on the same computer as your HD hardware. For the plugins that are installed PTHD will view them as RTAS plugins, however going the other way around.... if you have an HD system with TDM plugins and connect an LE box, you'll only see them as RTAS. Going from LE to HD is a significant improvement in more ways than one..... of course the latency-free monitoring and auto delay compensation within all of the plugins are huge, but things like a better mix-bus and the ability to create virtually unlimited buses are huge.

Now since you're talking about HD NATIVE.... well that's a different story as this is NOT a TDM system nor does it have the capability that a TDM system does in that capacity. Why are you interested in HD Native as opposed to HD TDM? By the way, what part of Connecticut are you in? I used to live in New London.

[gtomassetti]

Brad:

I'm interested in HD Native over true HD mainly for the cost basis. As much as I would love to have an HD2 or 3 system, if I'm being truthful with myself, those systems are a little too expensive — and quite a bit of overkill — for the kind of work I do. Even though I found reasonably priced new-in-box HD2 cards on eBay, the cost of those plus one of the HD hardware boxes would be close to $10k.

Conversely, the HD Native card plus the Omni interface is being offered at Sweetwater for just under $6k, and for a little project studio like mine, I can see spending that.

I know that TDM offers much more DSP power than RTAS, but in truth, despite the number of plugins I own, I really don't use that much processing, as I mainly work in classical music. And I've found that judiciously applied processing has never yet overwhelmed my computer, whether in PT, Logic, Peak Pro, or WaveBurner. (Having an outboard FW Liquid Mix and a PCIe Duende helps, too.)

So, if I would be doing big types of sessions where I'd really need a great deal of processing power, true HD would definitely make sense. It seems to me that HD Native offers a reasonable middle ground.

If I ever won the lottery, though…

I live in Southington, about a half-hour southwest of Hartford. New London, eh? Caruso Music, by any chance? I was never a customer there, as it was kind of a long drive, but I know it by reputation. In fact, I'm an adjunct professor at the Hartt School of the University of Hartford, teaching Finale and notation to comp students (even the ones who use Sibelius), and one of my current students teaches guitar there. I used to do all of my shopping at LaSalle Music back in the early 90's, when I was really in to multi-tracking with my Fostex R-8.

Best,

Gary