send fx vs Stems

[Jesse Peterson]

This is a Q for the hollywood gang.

Do you do a separate stem for your fx returns or do they get printed with whatever is being sent to them?

If the later how do you manage that? How many verbs are you typically automating and how do you route them?

What if two guys are arguing while sword fighting in a cave lol? Would you do two separate verbs with similar settings or send to the same one?

I sure every situation has different needs but I'm curious what your starting points are.

thanks

[JoeMilner]

Hi Jesse,
Verbs and other FX need to stay on the stem they "belong" to, so the DX verb goes on the DX stem, FX verb on the FX stem, etc. Set up separate verbs for each "food group", even if they're set identically. This will also allow you to print your stems in one pass.
Hope that helped
best,
Joe

[ggegan]

I work similarly to how Joe does.

If I'm doing a one Pro Tools system ICON mix by myself, then I'll have 1 or 2 Revibe returns for each stem to a maximum of 10. I find that with more than 10 instances of Revibe per system, I start having issues with inexplicable digital feedback loops. With a 2 or 3 system ICON, I'll use many more.

If I'm just mixing FX, I usually have the same number because I'll use more Revibe returns for each stem (FX, BGs, Foley) and I'll have specific presets for each: i.e. for FX I might have a small room, large room, exterior slap and a long design verb.

If I think it is warranted, I may also have anywhere from 6 to 10 Altiverb returns as well, although sometimes I don't bother. Even though I have Altiverb TDM, I'll run these as RTAS because otherwise adding that many long TDM Altiverbs will crash my system, even though I have an HD6. If I had known this when I bought Altiverb, I could have saved some money and just gotten the RTAS version.

[Jesse Peterson]

Thanks to both of you guys

[cebolao]

Originally Posted by ggegan

If I had known this when I bought Altiverb, I could have saved some money and just gotten the RTAS version.

how could you use an RTAS reveb in PTHD? as far as i know, when inserted on AUX track, RTAS plugin adds huge latency. so it's kind of "obligatory predelay".

or am i missing something?

[ggegan]

Originally Posted by cebolao

how could you use an RTAS reveb in PTHD? as far as i know, when inserted on AUX track, RTAS plugin adds huge latency. so it's kind of "obligatory predelay".

or am i missing something?

If you keep the buffer at 256, which I always do, I believe the latency is something like 8 or 9 msec, or slightly less than a quarter film frame, which to me is only very slightly noticable on reverb decays shorter than 400 msec and totally unnoticable for longer reverb decays greater than say 750-1000 msec. Unless you are doing an AB test listening specifically for predelay differences between TDM and RTAS, you won't notice it. However, that amount of latency can be dealt with using the short ADC setting. If you use a buffer of 512, I think that pushes you into the long ADC setting, and higher buffers mean that Altiverb's latency is outside of ADC range, and to me is unusable.