Advice needed!

[opethrockz]

Hi guys!

I need your advice on something:

I am currently building up my own recording studio. A lot of care has gone into acoustic treatment, getting good gear etc. I produce my own band at the moment but really look forward to other projects as well.

I am working with Pro Tools 9, running on a 2010 Mac Pro 2.4 8-Core with 6GB of Ram. (got the machine two weeks ago)

It scares the s*** out of me to see Pro Tools "low on memory" all the time in 40+track projects when I want to load intense plugins. I use Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Trilian a lot, as an example.

Now the question:

Since I can't make up my mind on the pros and cons of it, would it be a wise thing to get a HD Core Card (PCI-E) for my system? I could get one for 1900€..

I know PT9 is still 32-bit and don't want to feel like I'm fudged in the a** as soon as I hear "Dear Customers, Avid is happy to announce that Pro Tools 9 has officially gone 64-bit", since I feel that it would render a lot of benefits from HD-Systems unnecessary.

Please, help me out if you can.

Thanks, dudes.

[BillDog793]

Hey, if you're running multiple instances of a CPU intensive plug-in, of course you are going to run into processing issues. This is why the HD cards are essentially PCI cards with multiple processors on them. You could keep bouncing the Trillian/Omnisphere tracks to a blank audio track and then making the plugins inactive, or if you do decide on going the HD route, you should get an Accel Core Card as opposed to the Core Card.

[SOUNDDECISION]

Actually, the issue you are having has nothing to do with running a native system or an HD system. You could have an expansion chassis full of accel cards and you'd still run into this problem. The issue you are seeing is that the maximum amount of ram is being used up when loading up those spectrasonics plugins. The same thing will happen on an HD system. It's not that these VIs are "CPU intensive" but more they are RAM intensive.

The best work around is to use a program called Vienna Ensemble Pro to Host your ram intensive plugins. You can even run the 64 bit version which you can open up Tons of Omnipsheres and then route them to show up inside protools. It's a slight drag to have to deal with all the midi and audio routing, but the amazing thing is it actually works EXTREMELY well !

But again, for this specific memory related issue, an HD rig will do nothing to fix this problem.

[albee1952]

I think for your purposes, I would look into an iMac and run the VI's on that as a slave machine, sync'd via MTC, or SMPTE