Virtual soundcheck

[tom42107]

I am getting ready to do a live xmas production show and would love to use virtual soundcheck as well as deliver master audio tracks to the client. We have owned our Venue D-Show for a while now but I have not interfaced a Pro Tools rig in to it yet. I do have the HD card installed and will be recording 48 tracks at 48/24. I am looking for some advice on the best type of hard drives to use, internal or external, eSATA, firewire 400 or 800, partitioning, sample and bit rate, etc. The show is about 2 hours long and there are five shows over the course of four days. We have a local guy that will be bringing his Pro Tools Mac rig. While I am a D-Show guy, I'm just not a Pro Tools guy and need some advice. Thanks.

Tom

[sully1time]

Originally Posted by tom42107

I am getting ready to do a live xmas production show and would love to use virtual soundcheck as well as deliver master audio tracks to the client. We have owned our Venue D-Show for a while now but I have not interfaced a Pro Tools rig in to it yet. I do have the HD card installed and will be recording 48 tracks at 48/24. I am looking for some advice on the best type of hard drives to use, internal or external, eSATA, firewire 400 or 800, partitioning, sample and bit rate, etc. The show is about 2 hours long and there are five shows over the course of four days. We have a local guy that will be bringing his Pro Tools Mac rig. While I am a D-Show guy, I'm just not a Pro Tools guy and need some advice. Thanks.

Tom

I have been using LaCie Quadra drives for 3 years with no problems, connected via FW800 and have recorded as many as 68 tracks to one drive at a time!!!

[Eulises Canada]

I would definitely recommend either the Lacie FW drive 800 bus or the internal SATA drives. Make sure that for stability in Protools while recording to divide your tracks among multiple HD's. Digi recommends 24 tracks per HD. I made a mistake in the beggining recording 48(-+) tracks to one HD and started getting a lot of errors, then I divided them into mutliple HD's and everything is fine! Now I'm recording 70-80 ch's no problems. Hope that helps!

[tlamb]

Does the guy thats bringing his PT rig have storage? Typically for a track count like that you should be able to allocate between a couple of FW400 or 800 drives. Do not use the system drive for any storage. As far as from your console you will just be assigning direct outs which is easy to do from the patch bay.
T

[tom42107]

Originally Posted by tlamb

Does the guy thats bringing his PT rig have storage? Typically for a track count like that you should be able to allocate between a couple of FW400 or 800 drives. Do not use the system drive for any storage. As far as from your console you will just be assigning direct outs which is easy to do from the patch bay.
T

No, I just bought four LaCie Quadra D2 500gig hard drives, which I guess I will divide up to 24 tracks per hard drive. Thanks.

Tom

[Rob Warren]

Originally Posted by Eulises Canada

I would definitely recommend either the Lacie FW drive 800 bus or the internal SATA drives. Make sure that for stability in Protools while recording to divide your tracks among multiple HD's. Digi recommends 24 tracks per HD. I made a mistake in the beggining recording 48(-+) tracks to one HD and started getting a lot of errors, then I divided them into mutliple HD's and everything is fine! Now I'm recording 70-80 ch's no problems. Hope that helps!

So can we partition the say 500 GB hard drive to 2 250GB drives
and assign 24 trks to 1st partition and 24 trks to 2nd partition
even through technically it's the same hard drive physically?

Or is it better to go ahead and use different drives physically?

thanks,
getting ready to get the profile w/ virtual sound check option
so I will need to know how many drives to buy for at least 48 trks maybe 64trks recording.

Rob Warren

[Rockpolice]

Originally Posted by Rob Warren

So can we partition the say 500 GB hard drive to 2 250GB drives
and assign 24 trks to 1st partition and 24 trks to 2nd partition
even through technically it's the same hard drive physically?

Or is it better to go ahead and use different drives physically?

thanks,
getting ready to get the profile w/ virtual sound check option
so I will need to know how many drives to buy for at least 48 trks maybe 64trks recording.

Rob Warren

I've recorded couple of times about 1 hour shows to 64 tracks on a single SATA-drive without problems.

[Sheldon Radford]

Hi Rob,

So can we partition the say 500 GB hard drive to 2 250GB drives
and assign 24 trks to 1st partition and 24 trks to 2nd partition
even through technically it's the same hard drive physically?

In this case there's still only one read/write mechanism per physical drive, so partitioning a single drive into two smaller drives won't give the same performance as two physically separate drives.

Sheldon

[Gracetech]

I'm currently experiencing pops and clicks in my audio. Is this stemming from my current drive not keeping up? It seems my audio usually doesn't have artifacts until close to the end but occasionally it's started right after the beginning. I'll give dividing the tracks a try but would love to have more insight into the problem.

crt

[Sheldon Radford]

Hi,

Pops and clicks usually indicate a digital clock issue. Please tell us more about the setup - how are the tracks being monitored? Through the console or through another Pro Tools peripheral? If it's the latter then the peripheral needs to be word clock connected to the console in order to establish a common clock.

Sheldon