cpu usage

[surely]

hi, this weekend my pro tools will be running heavily again...
but there seems to be a problem

even when I do only a small trim or something, the session won`t play afterwarts in some of my sessions... Pro tools gives me a message about my cpu usage and that I should remove some RTAS plugins...

the strange thing is... I`m only using very few plugins, and I`ve used much more without any problems in the past!

My guess is that I did something stupid.
In the audio section on the right I`ve chosen "select unused regions exept whole files" and removed them from my session (not from my computer)

could that be the reasen for my problems???

(nothings wrong with my laptop....)

hope someone can help me this evening... don`t want to mess things up with the band in the studio tomorrow!!!

[Third Eye Studios]

I’m not sure if this is your problem, but the d-verb plug-in alone can cause the CPU to spike to full due to denormalization problems. If you are using that plug-in put a dither plug-in before the reverb to solve the problem.

[surely]

what does the dither plugin do???

[QuikDraw]

what does the dither plugin do???

The dither plugin adds a small amount of noise to the signal. This small amount of noise is enough to prevent the CPU from going into "normalize mode."

What happens is when a CPU tries to process very small numbers it switches into a "normalize mode" to try and process the very small numbers with a great deal of precision. In other words, the CPU works extra hard to process these small numbers accurately. Pentium 4 processors seem to switch into this mode more easily than AMD or PIII processors. Anyway, D-Verb seems to have a problem with this on some systems (typically P4 systems) when the signal going into the D-Verb gets to a very low level. Putting the dither ahead of the D-Verb adds just enough noise to prevent the CPU from entering the normalize mode, thus preventing the CPU from using too many processor cycles.

It's not an ideal solution, but since Digidesign refuses to fix D-Verb, it's a workaround that many have found acceptable in the mean time.

Mike

[surely]

wich plugins areusing the most of my cpu??? are teh 4 band eq and the compressor also very hard for my cpu?? and what about the damn, I forget the name, the guitar amplifier, I guess it is by bombfactory.... (already packed my stuff, cant look it up now)

[Room24Prod]

When using the dither plug-in, what settings should you use? 24-bit, which is the sample rate of my session, or 16-bit?

[Third Eye Studios]

Also, if you have the VST-RTAS wrapper, you can use a free plug-in from digital fish phones called Normalizer . It works just as good as the dither for the denorm problem and you can adjust the amount of noise added (go figure).

If I use dither I just use the 24 bit setting.