Beat Detective vs. elastic audio

[youbringmesuffering]

if i'm working on a track in PTLE and trying to line up 4 separate drum audio tracks, BD/SD/Room/OH to a rhythmic synth sound that was sequenced in reason. would it be better to allign them with beat detective or elastic audio? I can see the benefits of both but i just can't seem to get everything to sync. Frustrating.

this is NOT an emergency or urgent.

[tamasdragon]

For me usually to correct drum performances, elastic audio is the way to go. I usually do it with an algorithm, and than render it with x-form, which takes some time, but the results are worth the wait.
But, if the performance is very off the grid, beatdetective may give you better result than elastic audio. Because if you use ea at it's extreme, than you will most likely to get many artifacts from it. Although if it is really about correcting, I like ea more than beatdetective. Ea is giving me faster and greater results in that case.
Tamas Dragon

[chrisdee]

The best way is doing it manual with fades. I do use beat detective alot of the time (lazy), but I usually have to go over manually to clean up things that beat detective messes up.

After some bad experiences with EA with PT7.4 (when it was first introduced i think) hogging up CPU resources and giving me poor results I have not been using it much since.

I actually did try it yesterday on a picking guitar track. The CPU hogging seems to have gone, but it changed parts of the track creating a wobbling effect wich I defenetly don't want.
It also creates yet another session folder called rendered files, and I don't like that. To many files and folders to keep track of + session load slower.

[The Dougfather]

Beat detective will maintain phase whereas elastic won't, hence why elastic is not much use for drums and the results are wobbly at best.

Beat detective is great but not simple and requires practice, there are some pretty good tutorials out there. Also, you'll need the MPTK2 to beat detective over multiple tracks, it's a cost agreed but one that IMHO any serious Pro tools user should have. Try working in sections rather trying to take in whole songs, thats where it can easily go wrong.

If you use elastic, duplicate the track and then when you have finished your elastic edits commit them to disk and a new region will be created. The will eliminate the CPU resource issue.

[trondned]

I never had problems with elastic audio not being phase-coherent. I've never tried it to extremes, though. Usually I have the drummer playing to the click, and then I just quantize 50%, and it usually locks in tight. What's important is to group the tracks before you start doing anything. If you just stretch one track at a time you're in a mess

[chrisdee]

Just to add, I always use BD on short regions at time (verse, bridge, chorus), and not on the whole track at once. For me it's much easier to se where BD goes wrong doing it this way. Then I crossfade and consolidate that region (Shift + Alt + 3)