Hello to everyone and Happy New Year! If you follow my Sumsound facebook page you’ll know I’ve been upgrading my studio and having a fine time doing that. Some news thats new and approved for the start of 2012…

Apparently Waves are sitting very hard on the fence about supporting the new ProTools AAX DSP format. Online conjecture is rife and many fairly reliable sources are saying that Waves are holding out to see what the uptake is of the new Avid HDX core systems (that replace the ageing TDM technology) before committing to any development. As far as mixing goes, I really dont care if I have a bit of delay in my system, but for folks tracking/recording big sessions with waves plugins this creates a bit of a pickle. Email them if you have strong feelings on the matter!

I wrote a comprehensive review of PT10 for AudioTechnology magazine recently- you can read it online via their site, page 64!

I will be teaching the Avid ProTools short courses at AFTRS this year, we are offering PT101 over 6 x Tuesday nights in Feb and PT110 over 3 x Saturdays in late March early April. Any Sydney readers, please spread the word to any family/friends who are looking to speed up their PT chops.

If you haven’t already grabbed Valhalla FreqEcho you’re slow off the mark – an awesome free plugin for 2012!

On the paid plugin side of things, Abbey Road are half price at the moment – IMHO their Brilliance pack is..well…yknow

Anyone out there using Paul Neyrincks VControl Pro? Stay tuned for some awesome developments on that front this year. Can’t say more at this stage but some very nifty features coming to it soon.

So I just took delivery of a HD Native card yesterday. In talking to mixers overseas the general vibe was a HDNative card on a modern mac would be equal to a HD3 or greater. I was sceptical. I figured that many mixers (myself humbly included) are loathe to mix RTAS in amongst their TDM plugins so I figured they were comparing TDM only usage vs RTAS power and consequently seeing big disparities as they had never used their RTAS power before in any great way. There are delay comp issues going down that path, RTAS plugs have to be inserted before TDM plugs etc, all that.

So I decided to test my theory and get proper data once and for all. So I made a session on my HD3Accel rig called “MakeitCrash.ptx”

Yes, this test was all done on PT10 on Lion on an 8 core nehalem mac pro, 10gbs of Ram with the playback buffer at 512 and core usage at 10 cores, 99%.

So first I loaded up my tracks/voices to max, 192 of them. Then I switched on delay comp to long, 4k samples. Then I switched on all busses in the IO setup, 256 of them. Then I loaded as many auxes and sends and 5.1 outputs as I could before redlining the mixer. Now the 6 chip mixer was maxed out I proceeded onto inserts. I ran up TDM EQ3s on all the auxes in the TDM domain to avoid voice issues on audio tracks with consequent RTAS plugs (no voices left at this stage). That maxed my chips on all 3 TDM Accel cards, and then I went to RTAS on my audio tracks and started to insert RTAS EQ3s on 96 stereo tracks. Barely dented the CPU, so I started adding AAX native Channel strips.

The final session had most of the 96 audio tracks all running 5 instances of either EQ3 or channel strip, 2 sends and about 30 auxes with EQ3s on them as well and everything was redlining, but the session COULD play and was responsive without DAE errors.

Opening and closing the session – OMG, took forever. Opening it the second time I thought the machine had hung, it took about 8 minutes with no visual indication anything was happening.

So that was the TDM rig – I figured opening this session on native would come up with inactive plugs as it would be just using the equivalent RTAS power and would be missing the mixing/insert power of the 3 accel cards…what happened?

Firstly it opened snappy, within 5 seconds. Woah. Secondly everything was active. I pumped up the delay comp to 16K and I hit play….and got an error. So I went to my playback engine and bumped up the playback buffer from 512 to 1024 and cores from 10 to 12. Playback, no errors, all is good, snappy, wow…

How is this possible?!

Basically the HD Native 64 bit engine must be that much more optimised that it absorbed the extra processing power of a HD3Accel!! I was gobsmacked and grinning from ear to ear. Most of the plugins running were AAX channel strips but there were bucketloads of RTAS EQ3 and even a few RTAS TL Space in there from memory. Cant wait to see what usage I get when they are ported to the new and leaner AAX format!! There’s also the possibility that RTAS and AAX running in a TDM environment was just not optimised much at all, regardless, the results were conclusive!

So in switching from my HD3Accel to a HD Native card what have I lost and gained? I’ve lost a few TDM only plugins like Dolby surround tools, Ampfarm, Echofarm, Heat – that’s about it that I use. What have I gained? 4 times the delay comp, an extra 60 audio voices, amazingly snappy session open and close and re-routing and apparently if I switch up to 16 cores at 99%  likely more grunt than I need for your average aussie feature mix! I’ve also gained my now redundant HD rig to use as a stem recorder and thanks to PT10 and Dcommand multi-mode I can access both from my console.

I am very, very, happy right now. Looking forwards to my first big mix and throwing around some Channel strips willy nilly!

The session can be downloaded here if you’re interested in running the test yourself on your own system.

MakeItCrash

Well! I just got back from my honeymoon in North America and there have been some odd developments in the last few weeks!

Obviously the death of the founder of the “Jobs-ian movement” was a big one – many apple store genius’ sitting on the sidewalk crying in SF made for an odd air to the city while my wife and I were there…(j/k)

Then there was the outcry over the upgrade pricing for PT10HD…Avid then did a backflip and are including retrospective upgrades for anyone who buys a USD$599 support contract, effectively knocking 40% off the price of the upgrade and including a support contract at no cost – but before they got there, SHEESH, the outcry! Having been using PT10 for a while now, its a great upgrade, fastest PT version yet and first post-centric release IMHO since PT7.2, well worth the price of admission, but for some of these so-called professionals, bitching and moaning about a grand, harden up. Its a tax deductible business expense and it seems like Avid are moving to a yearly upgrade pattern, although PT9 was only the end of last year. A grand per year to stay “in the club” and get bug fixes and decent features that we, the users, ask for seems like a decent deal to me.

On the back of all that, while I was in CA, Avid unfortunately let go of a bunch of staff, people I know and have worked with and deeply respect. It really felt like strange move and lets hope its not a knee-jerk reaction to their stock prices. Best of luck to those who got laid off, I truly hope you all land on your feet in these hard times.

On the night of my return to Aus, I managed to wrangle a last minute ticket in the Australian Screen Sound Guild award night and caught up with the local audio community – fantastic night, and picked up an award for my premixing on “The Missing Key” as well! It means quite a lot to me having only really just started on this side of the fence as a mixer rather than a PT specialist – knowing the gear and doing the craft are very different things as you all no doubt know, so this was a lovely surprise and boost for me Thanks ASSG!

Lastly, a massive thank you to the mixers who made me welcome at the various dub stages I visited while in North America. Lovely to meet Ceri Thomas (who has a great post centric blog), hang with Danny C and Erik Foreman at Skywalker (yes I got to see Gary Rizzo, Gary Rydstrom and Michael Semanik while there, quite a bit of mixer worship going on that day), then down in LA visiting Gary Gegan at AudioHead (an amazing facility full of history), the inimitable Jonathan Wales of Sonic Magic and the lovely Joe Milner of Puget Sound. Thanks so much to all of you for your time and hopefully we get to meet in person again one day.

PS – any readers in Sydney or Melbourne, the local Avid crew have asked me to help out this coming Tuesday in Melbourne and Friday in Sydney to run the practical demo sessions of PT10 at their local launch events, come along, hope to see you there!

So after several “preview” showings the cat is finally out of the bag: PT10 is here and new HD cards have finally arrived!

So far, indications are that a HDx1 system is way more powerful than a HD3 and a 2 card system is hard to push into the red. The key thing is you now have a true hybrid system as the plugin format has evolved – AAX is here replacing and superseding RTAS and TDM. AAX is one set of code than can freely move between the host processor and the HDx cards depending on what you’re trying to achieve. In addition, the delay comp engine is now beefed up to 16000 or so samples – it even deals with real time pitch changes and denoising now!

To me, 10 feels like the first “post-centric” release since 7.2. You get the euphonic based channel strip, new field recorder workflows, disk cache for massive sessions and the ability to export “selected tracks as a new PT session”. Track count goes up again with sessions able to have up to 768 voice able tracks using a 3 card HDx system, making conforming reels/spools much easier. Disk Cache is also a massive boon – I was tempted to buy an SSD drive and see what gains it made, but this makes it redundant for most tasks. Admittedly it doesn’t help with samplers or video files AFAIK (yet) but for general audio performance its made PT feel amazingly sleek and light on the CPU.

Multi-mode on command gives me two rigs on my surface – who said ICON would get no love after the Euphonix acquisition!!

Revive and Impact will no doubt be released in the AAX format soon which will mean we can run them on non-HD systems! Cant wait to see that. We’ll have to wait to see if HEAT also gets ported.

I would post more detailed information right now, but I’m currently on my honeymoon! That said, I’m catching up with old mates at Avid Audio HQ in San Fran in a few days and will be sure to post any new info that comes to hand from that. Hope everyone is having a good October, loving my travels around North America atm!

OK – final video for this series on mouseless editing. This video goes into nudging regions, region start and end times and generally puts what we’ve looked at over the last 3 videos together into a bit of a workflow.

 Hope you’ve enjoyed these videos and find them useful – the info is provided freely, all I ask is that you pass it on, let others know about these tips and tricks!

This video starts with the basics for keyboard driven editing and wraps with the more advanced shortcuts for auditioning a region/your selection.

Here’s part two on “power editing” (cant you just hear the delays and octave drop on that?)

EDIT: at 4mins I say that jumping to and selecting the next region is “Command + tab” but its Control+Tab (Im hitting control tab and that shows in the video, my mouth is simply telling fibs so ignore it)

Next part on editing and fades and nudging modifiers

So this is a series of videos I’ve been meaning to do for a while on how to get away from the mouse when editing. It’s a bit lengthy so I’ve broken into 3 videos but the topics they cover work together to bring the best from a mouse-less workflow. (btw Apologies for a bit of noise in the audio, how embarrassing!)

 Next video: tabbing modifiers and the importance of preroll and postroll shortcuts…

Another video from IBC, this one slightly less iphone…

“The first thing is for ProTools to play nicely with any network attached storage”…

As some may know, Avid hosted a big event in LA a few weeks back on the back of the FCPX release to re-iterate to professionals that they care, are listening, are developing with them in mind etc

Interestingly quite a bit from this event has appeared online and two nuggets made my ears prick up. The next big release, MC6, is 64 bit, has a new UI and a new audio tool. MC seems to be getting more PT like in its audio capabilities – and its going to be a 64 bit app…7.1 surround support for video editors…sighs…This may not be a good idea…(!) And where’s our 64bit audio app!!

For those who missed the release releases, MC5 opens QTs using AMA without needing to rerender to MXF, it also supports RTAS plugins, will export plugin settings via AAF and will also export the avid equivalent of markers from the video suite to PT9. All good steps towards better interop.

Back on the MC6 news, there was also talk of more 3rd party support, they already opened to AJA and Matrox with 5.5, with 6 there is talk of Decklink support – YAY! That means my video satellite rig can use the same card whether I’m using PT host based to play QT movies or MC to play MXF media – I also wonder since media composer now supports QT playback natively if I should just use it from the get go for all video satellite tasks if it gets decklink support. One benefit that springs to mind is the ability to drag and drop the timecode effect onto a QT file to quickly get a burn in without the need to render it, as from memory the timecode effect is RT. Could be a better world again. Hopefully all the rumours are founded on some fact. Stay tuned.

Check out those surround panners?…