Another Elastic Audio Question

[darthjujuu]

Not really necessary for its own thread, but I'm having a rough time searching for a clear answer here.

Since we've covered elastic audio causing artifacts and phase inconsistencies on grouped multi-track drums, my new approach is tab to transient / snip / quantize / edit smoothing on key transients that i know will quantize properly, and then going back and doing touchups (fills, minor things) with EA. this way i can make a quick run through with "the old fashioned way" and still get the EA precision with MINIMAL artifacts (not none, but 10 times out of 10 i can't hear any) because the stretches are so brief/small and i'm only using it on specific areas.

yah yah... i know doing it 100% stretch free is the "correct" way of doing things, but as goes with anything in the realm of audio engineering, it sounds fine to me, and i'm using my best judgment, so let's leave that discussion elsewhere.

my QUESTION is, if i place two warp markers and only work between them, am I certain nothing outside of those is being processed/effected and the phase is safe? if i plop two markers on either end of a fill and quantize between those markers, it still takes forEVER for x-form to render and it makes me worry that warp markers aren't definitive safety guards and x-form is sniffing around where i don't want it to.

i've read that x-form will affect JUST outside of a warp marker to make things smooth, and as long as it's just a few ms i'm ok with that... i guess... i just want to know how this works. do i need to snip regions to be 100% safe?

ALSO - i do my EDITING with rhythmic on close mics and polyphonic on ambient mics, then when i'm done i switch them all to x-form. is this the ideal route? or perhaps a combo of rhythmic and x-form?? render times are obviously a minor inconvenience if it means a slightly better result. thanks in advance, PT wizzards.

 

[abt]

I'm pretty sure that when you render any elastic audio, x-form or otherwise it processes the entire region not just the area the you made changes to. This would account for the speed. I'm not sure if this processing actually changes the areas out side the warp markers that you don't touch.

 

[No More Beers]

why don´t you copy what you want to edit with elastic audio , edit that part and throw back in the original track?
the analysis is faster and the render too

 

[darthjujuu]

the render speed and analysis do not bother me at all. i'm only concerned about sound

 

[joeymusicguy]

yeah it sounds like your not editing a "real copy"

a real copy would be that section only contained in the region.

im not sure how protools works at this point, but im sure if you make a cut in the region, that its still somewhat treated as the region it was cut from

 

[darthjujuu]

i'm not even separating any regions, or trying to make copies, the way elastic audio works is you put warp markers at either end of the piece you're editing and the idea is that if you don't touch anything outside those warp markers, nothing outside of them will be moved. say you have a fill you want to quantize, and you put a marker on the first transient AND the transient BEFORE that, and then ditto for a marker on the least transient AND the transient after that. this ensures only your fill can be moved, as we set those outer boundary markers that as long as i don't touch them (or select them for a quantize) will not be moved, and (in theory) neither will anything outside of them.

i never gave it any thought until i started using the x-form algorithm, which is intense and needs to be pre-rendered, and i noticed just judging by the render times (and how it fades an entire track when you enable it) that it seems to be processing everything, regardless of what's been edited. this isn't NECESSARILY bad, i think i read somewhere that x-form can stretch shit outside your "boundary" warp markers in order to smooth things out across them, and i'm basically wanting to ensure that i'm not doing anything super no-no that'll tink the phase of an entire track out of place if i don't dice up the regions i'm editing, or go even more crazy like making copies, etc.

 

[ruckus328]

EA will render through your entire track whether parts are warped or not. Look at it from this perspective: If you bounced a final mix and reallized afterwards one snare hit was off, and went in and fixed that one snare hit, you'd have to re-bounce the whole song from start to finish right?, not just that snare hit. EA works the same way, rendering from start to finish, but areas that are not warped will be unchanged sound-wise.

What kind of a machine do you have? It generally takes me 30 minutes or so to render an entire drum performance with x-form.

I think the reason you are experienceing extremely long render times is because you are warping your original tracks. This is where I used to go wrong. Never warp your original tracks (x-form will render every track on every playlist, making the render times muuuuuch longer). I learned this firsthand after trying to figure out why it was taking 8 hours to render 10 tracks. It wasn't rendering 10 tracks, it was rendering 200 tracks because I had 20 playlists. Although it won't actually do anything to those other tracks since you haven't done any warping, it will still analyze each playlist and "render" each playlist, although the rendered audio will be identical since nothing was warped.

This is how I was taught to do it and I've never had any issues with phasing or artifacts using x-form although warping is always minimal b/c my drums are always done to a click. If you are warping all of your drums in context to one another, you shouldn't have any issues with phasing unless the warping is drastic:

Make a duplicate of each track you want to warp. Give them a different name, I call my snare track something like "x-form snare", etc. Now you have only one playlist for each track you're warping and you're not affecting your original source should you need to go back for whatever reason. Make all tracks inactive except for your "x-form" tracks. Choose either polyphonic or rhythmic, Generally I just use rhythmic for all drums, it doesn't really matter if you'll be using x-form in the end anyways. EA doesn't seem to like fade regions and I've had issues here and there with this so if possible try to do all of your fades and consolidate before warping. Now do all of your warping. If you find any areas that you decide are too messed up to use and are going to cut and paste from another area, don't do this now. Make a note of where the problem areas are and address them after you've rendered and consolidated. When you're content with all of the edits you've made, then select all of the tracks and choose "x-form" in the warp types.

Now go have a smoke and check back in a half hour or so.

If you're happy with everything, copy your x-form tracks to a new playlist and consolidate them. If you don't copy them to a new playlist and just consolidate the original warped tracks, you'll lose the ability to go back and make tweaks and "un-warp" things if you need to. Make your original drum tracks active and copy each consolidated x-form track to a new playlist on the original tracks. Now make your x-form tracks inactive and hide them. Now you still have the ablity to go back and make warp changes if you need to, however you don't have to worry about x-form being active and bogging down your machine.

I know this might be a different way of going about things, however through trial and error I've really found that this is the most organized, least destructive, and safest way to do EA. It also gives you the least amount of strain on your system and gives you the fastest render times possible.

Hope this helps.

 

[darthjujuu]

thanks a huge ton, ruckus. this was sortof how I was doing it, give or take a few new tips. but this:

but areas that are not warped will be unchanged sound-wise.

was the bit of info i really needed. thanks dewd