Elastic Audio Rendering is Not Accurate

[midnightrambler]

So is this a new problem? I've not seen it before and I've had my fair share of elastic gripes over the years.

Also : I wouldn't expect the real-time processing and rendered processing version of the same data to null completely, but I would expect them to be as close as dammit.

[Spanzor]

Originally Posted by midnightrambler

So is this a new problem? I've not seen it before and I've had my fair share of elastic gripes over the years.

Also : I wouldn't expect the real-time processing and rendered processing version of the same data to null completely, but I would expect them to be as close as dammit.

It's not new, but it may have gotten worse. I guess I'm just at a point where I'm tired of paying to keep my system up to date when all I'm really getting is new AIR plugins and greedy sales tactics, yet this type of thing still can't seem to get fixed.

Where's jeam25 ??

[Spanzor]

What's up jeam25?

Almost been 3 years since posting this...

[ralphonz]

Hi all, so this is a massive issue.

I've spent weeks making edits to an album before mixing, only to find that what I was hearing is not what I get.

It basically seems to boil down to the fact that there is HUGE (in my book) difference between real-time and rendered processing.

Committing, bouncing or rendering tracks with real-time EA gives totally random results. Committing (bouncing or rendering) tracks with EA switched to rendered processing gives a consistent output though.

In real-time, what you hear will change depending on where you play the session from. You can test this by recording your warped track to a new track via a bus. Invert the phase on the new track and it will only null with the real time processing when the session is played from the exact point that you recorded from.

Now let's look at the difference between real-time and rendered processing. Duplicate your warped track and set one to real time EA and the other to rendered processing. Now inspect the difference in the wave forms. You can see that some transients are in drastically different places with timing differences between about 4 and 20ms most of the time, sometimes even worse - this is the real issue.

This is illustrated in my attached screenshot -the top bass track is the rendered processing and the bottom one the real-time processing.

Null tests prove that this is not a visual issue but is actually an audio processing issue.

Whenever you work in real time mode you cannot trust what you're seeing or hearing as it vary's a hell of a lot from the actual rendered result. This is worse when dealing with very transient material.

This does not occur if using the Rhythmic algorithm, but occurs with every other one.

I agree this is simply not good enough for something I pay £200+ a year for given how long it seems that this issue has been around. For now, the only solution seems to be to never use real-time processing for warping.

[drjayway]

I figured I'd chime in here since I'm in the middle of dealing with the same garbage.

The big problem here is the transients shifting. Just used elastique pro to tighten up a bunch of tracks. Sounds fantastic until you render, commit, bounce, or freeze then all the transients shift around and suddenly you notice things don't sound quite as tight as you had them. Sometimes sounding really off. You can't even just bounce the song as you'll have the same issue. This is a real shame as elastique pro sounds so good compared to any other algorithm in pro tools.

I've tried a number of different systems and setups and always got the same result. Today I was able to try Studio One as it uses a few different elastique pro algorithms. I unfortunately got the same results when I tried to render it using any of the available algorithms. Transients just move around at random.

So it seems to me the rendering issue might have more to do with elastique pro than pro tools. If this is the case I don't know how they can get away with leasing the program to all these different DAWs when it doesn't quite work. Since the other algorithms in pro tools just barely work it seems as though the concept of elastic audio is just a bust at the moment for anything critical.