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#1
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CURRENT DSP MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS:
Muscle muscle muscle. That's absolutely not the ideal road. Like is so often the case, the best solution lies out of the box, with brain, not brawn. It doesn't need to be about expensive hardware cards or Eleven or RTAS racks or Receptors, distributed computing nodes, 16 core computers, rewriting VIs to be super efficient, native vs dedicated DSP, blah blah blah. The CPU struggle can be won with improvements in software under-the-hood workflow methodology. Most computers that we use can push at least 60-160 tracks of audio. You spend a bit more for 120 or 160 tracks. Fine, we're good there. AUTOMATIC BACKGROUND RENDERING ("Beyond Freeze Track") Ultimately, the only plug in that needs to be, and therefore should be active, is THE ONE YOU'RE EDITING and those affected by that plug-in. Everything else can, and should be, audio. Unfreezing (reactivating a plugin and removing the rendered audio track) takes a split second. So, as soon as you're finished adjusting a plug-in or instrument track, the computer automatically, invisibly and seamlessly starts background renering the chain of plugins that were just unfrozen due to the adjustment of the primary plugin. A track that is a candidate for freezing simply gets frozen in the background as it is played back normally, and transparently unfrozen as it or its channel processing is changed. (The programmers would have to have very careful quality assurance supervision to make sure this worked smoothly and invisibly to the user of course. With correctly designed automatic background rendering, all plugins would appear to the users as always being active and ready to go, as if they had never been deactivated and rendered.) Put any kind, but successful and efficient, automatic plugin rendering into PT9 and we can all resurrect our old powerless G5s again...audio-only with only a handful of plug ins active and/or rendering. Want to run unlimited massive compressors and reverbs, VIs and samplers all at once, each instrument at 3GB RAM? (totaling 240GB of RAM) Not a problem. We don't need more CPU, efficient plug in coding, distributed computing, RTAS boxes, Receptors, Vienna and all of that old school design. Each of those solutions is design based on force and/or reducing required force. We need intelligent design. This is the path all DAWs need to head...the ONLY path to everlasting DAW freedom possible within modern and foreseeable technological constraints. Sooner or later the battle of the DAWs will be won not in hardware releases, but in the software design brilliance. Avid, you already have the best DAW, now send it to the moon and back, humiliate your competition. Further reading for those interested: Automatic Non-Realime Printing - The correct solution is to turn demanding plugins like reverbs and compressors etc and VIs into audio, automatically, seamlessly, painlessly, quickly and automatically deactivate the plugin and without the huge hassles of printing chaos, making twice as many tracks and naming, deactivating tracks hiding etc etc PITA old school printing. And then back again in a split second when you need to edit the track or plug in settings. We have audio rendering already in PT, it's called Audiosuite, but the seamless workflow is not there with Audiosuite. But this workflow has been made far superior on most other major DAWs and it's called Freeze Track. You turn CPU intensive plugins into simple audio tracks. Your plugin and VI count literally becomes limitless. TDM systems can't touch this. When your CPU is loaded down, you don't buy a Muse Receptor, VEPro, clustered computers, a faster computer or an RTAS rack, you freeze in 15 seconds or less and unfreeze in 1/15 second. We don't need to have a 100 plugins active at once (hello?...MASSIVE DSP waste) we only need the ONE that we're currently editing & those affected by it like reverbs and delays, etc. All the rest should be audio tracks. Make plugin>audio track>plugin rapid, seamless, automatic and easy in THE SOFTWARE. Automatic rendering is the simplest, quickest and best plug-in DSP solution now and in far into the future. So, this battle is already won, you know that...it's just not implemented yet in DAWs.
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Mercy Sound Recording Studios NYC http://www.mercysound.com/ facebook.com/mercysound/ instagram.com/mercysoundstudios/ Next Generation Pro Tools-Realize the only plugins needing to be active are on the track you're currently editing & those affected by it...all others should be quickly, seamlessly and auto background rendered into audio. Now dust off your G5s. |
#2
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We continue to discuss "freeze tracks" - but may I propose that we begin to call it what it really is: RENDERING. And the rendering should be automatic, and seamless to the user. I think your idea and proposal is VERY, VERY SMART and if Avid engineering has not considered this, they should hire you as a consultant. Since I first started messing with Final Cut, I've been posting that there are many really cool workflow concepts in FCP that Digi should "borrow" from for ProTools -- background rendering is just one of many. Hopefully, someone at Avid will read this and do something about it.
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--Jeremy |
#3
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I prefer PT HD over other native platforms but they do seem to drag their heels in keeping up with the functions and options available in the more innovative DAWS. |
#4
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This is a brilliant idea. All that needs to happen under the hood is the offline render, and then each track has 2 playlists, the one with the effects and the one without the effects. The software toggles between them if you're changing the settings. You would need to be able to turn this off and on manually per track depending on your needs. In my case I bus everything to one reverb, if that was setup like this it would be re-rendering every time I tweak anything., much more DSP/CPU usage than just leaving the reverb on all the time.
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- John If a MIDI event triggers a sample of a tree falling and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? |
#5
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when you mix on an control surface, several effects need to be "unfrozen" at once, because you are in effect editing ALL of them. That needs to be addressed.
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Ray Trujillo Freelance Audio Engineer |
#6
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A G4 will have a problem with that maybe, but current i7/nehalem architecture computers can easily handle this. An i7-920 PC with 12GB of RAM can be bought for around $1000 these days. My guess is that if you can afford a control surface, you can afford one of these, or a mac pro(entry level mac pros are basically the same specs, with the exception of using more expensive server components and coming with less RAM.
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- John If a MIDI event triggers a sample of a tree falling and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? |
#7
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appart from the fact that the pro tools mixer is an actual mixer running third party processing in real time is the main asset of an hd rig
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#8
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How would this work on auxes with plugs? Seems like there are many instances of groups of tracks feeding the same aux that would have to be live all the time.
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#9
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and how would it work when using external effects?
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Ken Morgan Midland, TX A Musical Nobody Since 1972 2017 Intel Mac Mini, 32G, PT 2024.6.0 Studio, Presonus Quantum 2626 or 1824C (whichever works) and a bunch of stuff via ADAT |
#10
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Then there's the other issue that Avid is no way in hell going to go down a path that leads to selling less hardware. They're not going to care if other DAW software blows away LE. LE is just a path to getting people to trade up to HD. As long as they can tell people that by using LE they're in the same league as the big boys, then it makes sense for them to sell LE. It still comes down to monopolizing the systems that are used in working studios. And that they've got down. If they start losing that, then maybe you'll see some changes. It's not the software, it's the hardware! |
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