Bounce to Clips

I am very sorry to ask this question where it has probably been talked about a lot.  I looked at the last 120 days of posts in this section and also read through parts of the reference material.  

For complete clarity on this subject:
Each time I bounce a clip, does that change the wave form in any way?  
I record vocals and use EQ for monitoring (post EQ and compression).  I then may use V-Vocal to correct some pitch.  When I am done for that day, I bounce to clip.  I do not think the EQ gets bounced.  Is that correct?  
Can I bounce all day long without any degradation to the original wave form?

Thanks for your help.

Rimshot

Thanks Karl.  I needed your answer because it seemed that my lead vocal high end was getting boosted after working on it day by day.  I thought that maybe I was bouncing the post EQ signal and then the continuing to add the same post EQ for monitoring.  This then would be doubling the EQ.  With what you have said, that would not have been possible.  

Thanks again.

Jim 

"Can I bounce all day long without any degradation to the original wave form?"

Yes!

Note: there are many kinds of bounces in Sonar, i.e.,: Clip, Fx-bin (VSTs), Synths, tracks, and exportings.

In some, the pre-fader EQs/Filters and Fx-bin plugins ... they bounce right along with them. 

(I am forced to bounce a lot of the UAD VST's to tracks for example).

In others, during the necessity of freezing synths, degradation may occur based on the 3rd party 'antics'.  EWQL synths, for example, when bounced ... may truncate a reverb tail or other vital phrase.

Off topic:

All in all however, eventual freezing and bouncing seems excellent practice, for many producers.  Older producers understand this.  As the song matures, both the synth rack and the Fx-bin becomes more and more tidy and cleared ... so more fx's and envelopes can be applied. 

But I probably erroneously leave Superior Drummer 'unbounced' ... trusting the multi-tracks comps and fx's to bounce faithfully for the pre-master.  And as many of us discover, there may be degradations in the kick and snare peaks with this drum machine.

That would be up to you, you get to choose what is included in the "Bounce to Track" option box, along with where the bounce goes etc. That comes up automatically after selecting the option.

Dean, this would only happen if you have a clip with a pan inserted on the clip itself, would it not? (including having it enabled, but panned centre) If you just have a mono clip, no clip volume or pan or any other automation (clip automation, not track automation, which isn't bounced), then it shouldn't apply any pan law? I have never noticed a drop but I'm not sure if I'm set to 0dB centre or if it's a -3 or -6. I just leave it set to the default, whatever that is. In either effect, if you did have a clip with pan enabled, then you'd be hearing the pan law in action anyway, and it will change the original clip, but it will still SOUND the same. But if you had no sort of panning in the clip enabled AT ALL, then I wouldn't have expected it to apply pan law as the clip itself has none, that pan law you do hear is being applied post clip. Mmm, I don't know..

At least that's what makes sense to me.


As far as bouncing, you can change the option to bounce to 16, 24, 32 or 64 bit. If your default is not the same bit depth or it is less, then you're going to have a loss. Typically we record in 24 bit. Typically bounce is set to 32 bit. If you have made no processing on the clip, it's just going to add an extra 8 bits of zeroes to your clip. If you have the bounce default set to 16, it's going to truncate. If you have it at 24, I guess it shouldn't theoretically change. I don't understand in depth enough, but it may be possible that 1,000,000 bounces will slowly show an increase in random noise at the noise floor level which eventually becomes audible - but in reality, you're never going to hit that point. I guess it depends on the quality of the bounce engine and if it puts any sort of random noise in at the noise floor level. I'd need someone more tech savy to confirm this one..

Now, v-vocal. If you only perform correction on one little section, simply running it through v-vocal WILL cause a change in ALL audio. This is MY opinion, and not based of facts, but based on my ears. Simply enabling v-vocal, I can hear a loss in quality. Thus bouncing is going to write this down. Bitflipper made a big post once about avoiding this audible artefacts by significantly eliminating room noise and headphone bleed. A perfectly dry signal will supposedly get inaudible artefacts. I am yet to experience this, but am also yet to produce an ideal recording for proper testing. If I can't get around this, I'm going to have to by melodyne!

Interesting. I'll have to check my pan law and do some experiments to test this out. I've never really worried about them because I only work in SONAR (ie not using different DAWs with where you'll want to be using the same pan law) and don't really automate my pans very often.

FYI, for anyone reading this and wants a refresher on pan laws - http://www.harmonycentral.com/docs/DOC-1106

Does this mean then, whenever you bounce a centred clip, you'll get a -3dB cut. Then if you bounce that again, you'll get another -3dB. Then again and again till silence? That would be annoying. I certainly don't see that if I bounce a clip multiple times. Maybe I'm just 0dB centre with the 3dB boost on 100% L and R?

Well, I'm on 0dB centre sin/cos taper. Hence I have never noticed this. Guess I'll just leave it there! But a good bit of info to be aware of.

Mmm, not had that deleting issue before exactly, but have had similar weird things before where everything just gets randomly scrambled... Have not seen it since X1d though. What are you on? I also agree that it's no rogue plugs. I have been doing a bit of comping of late on X1d, and it's all been smooth. I can't remember exactly though what used to trigger the scrambles.. I'm pretty sure it was still with X1, but maybe X1c? Dunno.. Also had big issues with re-opening saved projects with long instances of audiosnap where the file is essentially corrupt and I have to do almost EVERYTHING again. That was all in X1c. Not done much audiosnap in X1d yet so fingers crossed they fixed it... Otherwise it's bouncing down every single audiosnap per session! Or maybe splitting into lots of smaller clips. That was one of a very limited number of bugs that really bothered me. Most I just suck it up and move around it.