After just finishing my first record entirely in PT, I quickly became aquainted with the limitaions brought about by strictly using plugins for all of my processing.

I would love to hear from the group about effectivly managing your DSP during a mix.

BTW: my system for this record was:

Dual 800, 1.5megs ram
Mix 24++ with an additional farm
PT 5.1.3cs8
all the usual plugins...bla, bla, bla...

lets hear it guys, what can an engineer do...???

Buses, Buses, Buses... They'll save you in many cases. Plug in automation is a great way to go. If I'm stuck on a b.s. rental rig and run out, I'll print the processing to another track (using playlists).

All good advice and on top of this, buss processing is often more desirable to gel things anyway! Also, using plugs that behave and do plug-in sharing (Oxford eq!) instead of keeping whole chips for themselves... On HD this as become a non-issue for me so far!

Mix + bounce trx via bus, mix + bounce trx via bus, etc... That's what I do when I'm working on smaller systems, and it works pretty well. It can be frustrating, but you work with the tools you have in front of you. Otherwise more DSP is a good thing.

I even run out of juice when working on 10 card MIX systems (7 MIX/3 Vintage) from time to time. And when you have that much DSP then you run out of time slots. So, I bounce my most established sounding tracks with the most DSP hungry plugs—usually kick, snare, toms + bass—and move on from there with lots of fresh chips to use. In large mixes I sometimes have to do this a second time with rhythm gtrs or keys with lots of plug-ins.

I have never had to go back and re-bounce tracks, just sometimes add a touch of EQ on a bass, kick, or snare track to tweak it a little.