rendering EA in PT

[LSD-Studio]

just playing around with elastic audio in PT, trying to figure out how to make ea-edited drms sound good etc...

here's the problem....after having moved a hit to the grid, I wanted to render...PT shows the process, and doesn't freeze or anything....BUT:
after rendering the previously perfect hit doesn't sit perfectly on the grid anymore neither does is sit where it used to be before quantizing)
this happens when I just consolidate, as well as when I render by switching EA off etc.
WTF. what's wrong here?

EDIT:
found a workaround..the problem was my minimalistic approach (I had the sensitivity set to zero on all tracks but the snare, cause I wanted to quantize from the snare only....that way the warping applied to all tracks, everything sounded fine, but not after rendering..for that the other tracks needed to have at least some hitpoints ....after I did the warping and editing I just increased the senditivity again on the other tracks and rendered...everythings fine now.
you can tell I'm a nOOb in EA.....or is EA the noob?

 

[Ermz]

I had a ton of little glitches going on when I used EA for drum editing. There would frequently be flamming and phase incoherency that wasn't showing up on the actual tracks. I finally got sick of it and just went back to BD. Took a little longer, but sounded way better and caused less headaches.

 

[C_F_H_13]

Here's a couple of tips for EA that really will help with doing drums.

-Use the polyphonic engine. There's been problems listed by digi with the rhythmic engine. Apparently it was fixed in PT8, but it seems the exact same to me. It'll also give you way less wierd shit on the cymbals.

-I can't explain why, but whenever I use the Quantize feature, I get so many more problems. Do it manually, marker by marker...it'll take way longer but it'll sound way better. Also, make sure when you grab a marker, it's on the track you actually are moving. If you are moving a hi hat, click the hi hat track...it'll work. All the hit markers, are mere samples apart, but it makes the sounds not take a shit on you.

-When printing, what I do is I first select "x-form" in the engine, then before it even starts processing, I go and I turn off EA, and hit commit. Now it'll process it using the X-form engine which is way more accurate.

 

[PostMortem1666]

Wow I just started using EA for quantizing and I am really starting to like it. So far I cannot tell a difference sonically between the non EA tracks and the EA tracks so it sounds pretty transparent to me. I have never tried BD either though. Thanks for those tips CFH13!

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Don't turn the sensitivity down, if you're going to render. it won't work right, especially in PT8

Keep the kick ungrouped. so you can remove the flams (I learned that from you LSD!)

+1 about the polyphonic
I usually do it manually too, if I'm using the quantize function its on 1 bar at a time. I usually have to make sure that the first and last hit of the selection are locked to where they should be and it'll work fine.

For rendering I print to new tracks. I have a system that works really well. Renaming tracks takes a few seconds with AutoHotkey.

-1 on X-Form

 

[C_F_H_13]

Don't turn the sensitivity down, if you're going to render. it won't work right, especially in PT8

Keep the kick ungrouped. so you can remove the flams (I learned that from you LSD!)

+1 about the polyphonic
I usually do it manually too, if I'm using the quantize function its on 1 bar at a time. I usually have to make sure that the first and last hit of the selection are locked to where they should be and it'll work fine.

For rendering I print to new tracks. I have a system that works really well. Renaming tracks takes a few seconds with AutoHotkey.

-1 on X-Form

I'm actually pretty interested in your method. Do you just buss the individual tracks? How do you deal with the buss latency or is it even an issue? NOt a fan of X-Form though?

 

[AudioGeekZine]

I haven't seen any bus latency.

I don't really want to give out the only 'trade secret' I've got. I do this for a living remember.

Yeah, not a fan of x-form. It's incredibly slow, and might sound worse than polyphonic or rhythmic. Switching to it at the last step then committing without listening to the change make very little sense. Even with a quad-core pc it takes ages to analyze. Not worth it.
I do everything in polyphonic, realtime.

X-form and Varispeed don't have accurate waveform views too. Something to think about.

 

[LSD-Studio]

k, here are my results.
the only way to make EA sound decent is to turn the sensitivity to zero on all tracks but snare, then group all tracks, warp/quantize from the snare hitpoints/markers (in sections or a couple of bars), set manual warpmarkers for toms (after snare-based quantisation has been done) and in slow (!!) sections for the kick, hihat, whartever else you want)...usually with faster stuff quantizing to the snare will be enough. make sure to set markers at the beginning and end of ringing cymbals, breaks etc to prevent them from being stretched, EA works only well for short distances!!!

setting sensitivity to zero on all tracks but the snare is crucial !! if you're not doing that chances are you're drums will be more off after the Q than they were in the first place (just ran into that problem as well, drums weree so fucked up I couldn't even BD them anymore cause snares would jump to the wrong gridline etc...that is because:
if two markers are close to each other EA will quantize the one that is closer to the beat/gridline. the problem with fast metaldrums and many hits now is that for example the snare can be a wee bit behind the beat while a marker on another track (HH or any other track) is a tad in front of the beat but a bit closer to the line than the one on the snare...what happens now is that the early marker on the HH-track gets moved back to align with the grid and by that the snarehit, that was late to start with, get moved even further behind the beat.
with faster stuff you WILL run into that problem and after quantizing with EA the drums will in sections be even more off than they were in the first place.

when you're using BD you don't wanna make 100000cuts either but slice at the snare and tom hits etc....so make sure you're doing the same in EA by turning down the sensitivity on the other tracks)

. After you've done all the editing (before rendering) you have to turn the sensitivity up again on the other tracks (or it won't render properly--that's where my mistake was). now you'll have to do the kickdrums seperately (you can get away with that in metal if you're using a hp on the OH).

that way you can get away with working with EA for drums, BD will still beat it though.
It's ok for a quicker (although it's not that much faster) drumquantize, but for important stuff I'd allways go with BD cause EA gives IMO still not results professional enough to put on a commercial release.

 

[Ermz]

Seems like a lot of messing around for some fairly straightforward editing, Lasse. I'd say it'd be less of a hassle to just go with BD every time. Saves you having to wait for EA to 'elasticize' your audio, and then subsequently have to render after...

 

[LSD-Studio]

Seems like a lot of messing around for some fairly straightforward editing, Lasse. I'd say it'd be less of a hassle to just go with BD every time. Saves you having to wait for EA to 'elasticize' your audio, and then subsequently have to render after...

totally right, for professional work BD is still the way to go.

I'm pretty sure EA will evolve and in PT8.something be good enough to do actual drumediting with it, so far it's no (at least not for me)

 

[smy1]

Lasse, since when are you not using Cubase anymore?

 

[LSD-Studio]

always had PT7.4 installed as well.....cubase will be my main DAW until I'll be able to afford PT HD.
I'm still way faster in Cubase, I just wanted to try EA in PT, so I edited drums for the last Project using PT and tried all the different ways....EA lost the competition

 

[AudioGeekZine]

I'm working on a project now where EA doesn't work even slightly. just turning it on is glitch city. its 220BPM skater punk. Cymbals stutter like crazy with any sort of EA active, gets worse when you start moving stuff around. Removing the analysis markers makes the cymbals sound in reverse and other randomness.

I have to do the cheapskate(me) version of collection mode. Except that's killing my computer for some reason.
see video http://audiogeekzine.com/super_slow_chopping.mp4 (warning! 17MB)

this is retarded.
Buying MPT2 isn't going to help this either.


EDIT
nevermind that rant, I just had to delete the database folders from each drive. nice and fast now. worth the effort to cause it sounds great.