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Computer power-Brain Power?
Well, it’s time to get serious about EQ’ing and mixing our project. Preliminary forays into the work and Audition and my setup are starting to worry me a bit. Here’s a couple of them:
When I zoom in on the time line and hit play the timeline indicator does not appear at the place it should although the timeline sound is playing. It does show up a second or so later and merrily runs along like there’s no problem. This tardy report of course does nothing to help me figure exactly where the sound is. This happens at different zoom levels but not when zoomed back. Hard to make tight cuts from way back though.
So how much computer is needed to make this program hum along smoothly? I’m using v1.5, a P4 2.8 with a Gig of Ram and nothing else running and still the performance seems … well not so great. Last night I had a 4 min show in a session. Dialog, one snd effect, two music cuts. Each voice music and effect on separate lines and a video on the top line. About midway down the show with a little parametric EQ and noise removal sort of standard filters on the voice tracks, the system started balking and stuttering forcing me to stop drag out the book and check all the settings and such, reboot, recheck and so forth. Finally the only thing that let me finish was to lock all the tracks not in use.
I get it on a big show or a music mix with 20-30 line running at once and like that but my little show? Any ideas that could help me get my expectations lined up with what I can reasonably expect the setup to do? Maybe settings better than the book suggests or clues about how well it’s supposed to run with video in the session. I’m obvisouly green gills on the program and somewhat on the technique. I’ve played with the buffers and such to the best of my understanding from reading the book and scrounging around on line for best set up clues, and none of that so far seems to help.
In life past I have spent many … oh so many hours in the mix room but didn’t know just how blessed I was to have a good sound engineer running the show. Ahh … the good ole days. But I regress.I’m eager to find some formula to get this puppy running smoothly, no choice really as I have 30 or so more of these 4 to 13 minute chapters to do right away. Any great ideas out there (or just really good ones, or suggestions that might help)?
Thanks
Bpete -
7 Replies
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Bpete,
Which version are you using? One thing that I see is that if you have each track in the session side set up with a mixer the program does have some lags starting … Your system sounds like it will do just fine … Suggestion, once you have all the tracks equed to your liking you can always do a sub mix and mute the other tracks … Willie
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Hey Willie
(I’m using v1.5, a P4 2.8 with a Gig of Ram )
Thanks for the suggestion. Are you saying that it’s not unusual to loose the indicator? Even with what seems to me a light weight load on the timeline? You set your start point, you can see the indicator, you hit play, the sound plays the start point stays in place … but no moving indicator. Finally a third way across the screen the indicator appears, right in sync with what’s playing. It’s repeatable not a fluky. Always when zoomed in, sometimes when out much wider, makes it very hard to find a good edit spot. The more stuff in the session, seemingly the worse the problem.
This can’t be right, can it? Thus my question about computer power, Audition settings and such. Is there a good set of settings that generally work well? The only thing I found on a net search were for a setup from about four years ago that a guy put out there that were for a much inferior computer.
How about video in the timeline, is that working well for everyone, or does it not seem to affect the performance for others?
Thanks,
Bpete -
I’ve never had a problem quite like this although I have had the cursor error you discribed a couple of times, but it was mostly due to having a mixer set up on several tracks, then again it was on a much slower system then you have also … Having the video track in there does slow things as well that’s why I edit video in pre pro, export just the audio, work on it in Audition without the video track, do a mixdown, then import that into pre pro and replace the original audio track with the corrected audio … It sounds like it’s a lot more work, but it’s really not … Now if you are dealing with multiple tracks this may not work out for you … My normal audio session can be in excess of 20 tracks and I rarely have a problem and never as you have discribed … If I do start seeing some issues I will do a submix and then mute the channels I have mixdown into the submix … This will usually take care of the issues in most cases … I wish I had a better answer for you, sorry …….. WILLIE
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Thanks for the response …
I’ll give the blind mixing a try and see how I do with it. I just have a hard time judging the sound without checking it against the picture. and mixing it down and saving it back and then importing it into Premiere to see if it was tweaked just right, and over again if not, to get it right with picture, seemed like the long road. I was counting on the program’s sales pitch of video in the timeline too much I guess.
The disappearing cursor, just a program quirk then? Any work around? Sure isn’t much good when it does that as you really can’t do much decision making if you can’t see where it is, or you have to guess about where you think that sound was.
How about some settings? I really would like to know what/where the best settings are. Everyone has to set them, right? So what are you guys doing settings wise? I’m just going by what little the book said. Best settings-plz-plz-plz
Thanks
Bpete -
For the most part other than buffers I use the default settings … Because I have 1300+ gigs of hard drive space I use 1 gig for each buffer … I also have my temp files set to drives other than my C … Once you do audio for a bit you will know what to listen for and you won’t have to do much back and forthing … If you need to make changes to the mixdown that you have in Pre Pro, all you have to do is open it up in Audition from where you have the waved stored at, (there is no need to export it from Pre Pro) make your change, save it and the file that is in Pre Pro will be changed … I hope this helps ……… WILLIE
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Ah-ha … there you go, Premiere Pro. That would work well if I were using Pro. But alas I’m an anachronism with a Canopus Storm2 and Premiere v6.5, cause Storm doesn’t play well with any of the Pro versions. I purchased Pro, but since even back then half this project was already a CAnopus proj.
See it always helps to talk to you Willie, maybe I can set up P-Pro and import the composite AVIs to do the sound work. Hmm, now I wonder if that’s gonna conflict with the Canopus/Prem v 6.5 stuff … oops subject for another post somewhere.
Thanks,
Bpete -
E-mail me at loganonestudio@aol.com I may be able to help you … WILLIE
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