[toolskid]

Originally Posted by vseanv

Hi, I have searched the forum for a related question and could not find one, but if you know of one please feel free to forward me to it and I apologize for the possible repost.

I am currently looking to upgrade my Daw. At the moment I am convinced Pro Tools HD is for me. Currently working with Cubase 4 This will be a significant upgrade and I want to use my budget to best serve my needs. On top of that I am new to the TDM DSP game and am curious as to the average amount of plugins the TDM system can run and still keep running pretty smoothly?

I know this can be variable based on sample rate, the load different plugins can put on the system and a whole slew of things but I'm looking for a ball park.

On average my sessions consist of around 30-40 audio tracks at 44.1K 24 Bit (But have been known to go into the 60's and 80's) and for the most part end up with some kind of compression, eq or both plugins on each, with a couple different reverb's on some sends. Since Cubase has a freeze track feature this can be done without the computer getting too upset (although it gets kinda annoying to freeze and unfreeze to edit). I also like to run a lot of VST synths EG. EZ drummer, NI Absynth, NI Battery as well as using Reason as a slave on and off depending on the needs of the song. Basically I'm looking to run at least 50-60 TDM plugin instances per average session, and save as much native processing as possible for Native synths and a few native only plugins.

Could that amount of tracks and plugins easily be done with Protools HD 1 TDM before having to dig into native resorces? Or would I need to look at PT HD 2 Or 3??

If possible try putting your most commonly used TDM plugin instance repeated on as many tracks as possible at 44.1K 24BIT and see how many you get before your system starts to complain while running PT HD 1, 2 or 3.


Any help is EXTREMELY appreciated.

Thanks very much :D

Sean

TDM plugins run on DSP chips on PCI cards within the host computer, not using the host's native processing power. The DSP usage of different TDM plugins varies WIDELY. You can track/mix fairly effectively ITB blending RTAS and TDM plugin usage with a quad/eight core intel mac and an HD3accel pcie - and HD2accel pcie will work too but you are going to be using for a lot more RTAS which can make ADC more complicated...