Pro Tools for live recording - long sessions...

[Raven]

Hi,
A friend of mine recorded a 2 hour concert on 16 tracks with a MIX plus on a G4/450. The file takes a looooong time to open, asks for more memory, says that the disk is de-fragmented (when it is not) etc. and generally seems sluggish. Is there any issue with the way Pro Tools handles BIG file sizes and very long sessions.What is the memory allocation recommended. Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks

[DigiTechSupt]

RAM requirements for overviews are about 1% of the space required for the audio (i.e., for every 100MB of disk space used by audio for a given session, you need to allocate 1MB of memory to Pro Tools to hold the overviews).

For your session, a little dimensional analysis would yeild the following:
120min x 5MB x .01 x 16=
96MB memory allocated to Pro Tools.

I would also bump DAE's memory up to 80MB (maybe as much as 100MB if you are running Waves).

-When altering the memory sizes of Pro Tools and/or DAE, never change the Minimum memory size. If you have, you can set it back to the default setting by typing a 0 into the field and press Enter on the numerical keypad.

Brent

[Jeff D.]

Raven,

I've recorded a number of live shows using Digi001. I've recorded using all 18 inputs for 2+ hours with no errors, delays, or lost audio. I record to a single IDE drive in a G4 400.

However, I did have to increase the memory allocations as Brent suggested. It confounded me for awhile until I figured that out...

Good Luck,

Jeff D.